Upstairs, a language is dying. Nonna is in bed—al lett—and we are in the living room, waiting for the swelling in her legs—i gamb’—to go down. Mum and I rushed here from the other side of London when Nonna called us, worried. She is 93, a matriarch, and the youngest of eleven siblings. She is also the only one of them still alive, living over 1,300 kilometers away from her birthplace.Article continues after advertisement
Modern medicine, and my mother’s dutiful care, keeps her with us in a terraced house in north London near Holloway Road, a time warp from the 1950s with an avocado-green bathroom and a linoleum floor in the kitchen that I used to slip on if I ran too fast in my socks. I spent what feels like half my childhood there. My nonno, who died ten years before I was born, laid down the terrazzo out front, a mosaic of quartz-like pinks and grays that stands out against the dull pavement of their neighbors. Their house was my Italy, with tomatoes persevering on vines in the back garden and ragù always on the stove. But the tomatoes have not grown there for years now, and the last time Nonna ate ragù I had cooked it, spending hours on a batch like hers—frying the soffritto, spicing the beef with cloves—that was brought in a foil tray to her bedside.
