Last day my daughter told me she needed to bring to school an item related to our family story.
They are studying History and ancestry.
Being this one of my favorite subjects i wanted her to start in a great way.
So i gave her the only thing i have been able to bring with me from Italy (that is old enough to be in a museum) and its strictly connected to her family.
After a detailed explanation of the item and after reminding her (for th time) how old it was and how precious, i finally let her have it.
She had the look like 'Geez, mom, its not like is the Ten Comandaments"...She has a future as comedian....i had to laugh...
Fact is the Thing is a 1890 French-Italian dictionary who belonged to my mother's father.
Its a relatively small book with a red leather cover, now worn out and broke in several points.
Inside you can see his signature and several handwritten notes.
My grandfather died when my mother was still young.
I have only one picture of him. And this dictionary.
He was a tall, handome man, with black hair and black eyes.
In that picture he is portraited, side by side, with my mother (still a toddler) against the lake of Villa Borghese in Roma.
He was coming from a noble family and was a banker.
After his sudden death for a heart attack, still at a very young age, my grandmother was left with their big, elegant apartment facing Via Veneto close to the office where she started to work, inside the American Embassy.
So many possessions of my family got lost during the time...the apartment, two islands, a cork plantation and a country villa....just to name the biggest.....
So its not wonder i take this small, worn out book so dear to me.
It speaks of my family past.
But I have other dear possessions.... surely older.....pieces of a mosaic inside of a Roman temple, an Etruscan original small vase (that my father bought on the black market many years ago, illegally).
I have a ring that i wear on my right thumb (made of silver and diamond) that my grandmother molded from an earring originally belonged to her mother.
A very small piece of a Pompeii villa wall, one coin from the Austro-Hungarian Empire time, a rock from the Colosseum (that my daughter couldn't resist putting in her pocket last July and didnt show me if not days after), a rock slate plate from the Petrified Forest and some other things i dont recall now.
Which one is your older and dearest possession?
