With this episode, I set aside grand historical events to speak of family matters: the stories that shaped us, the threads that precede and pass through us.
It is a tale about silenced histories, denied names, half-acknowledged children, unspoken loves, and wounds that continue to ask for a voice.
It is inspired by the so-called family constellations, reinterpreted, however, through my own methodological lens.
Its protagonists are the Lares, the domestic spirits of the Latin tradition, who represent what we carry in our unconscious: the inheritances we did not choose, the previous lives we have (perhaps) inhabited.
The episode unfolds in Monferrato, where the landscape knows more than I do about my family’s past. And in the quiet of a country house, at last, my ancestors begin to speak, reminding me that no identity is born alone.
The methodological approach I use here also underlies my family roots counseling service, a path through which I guide those who wish to read their own story as an open text: an interweaving of voices, symbols, and memories waiting only to be reinterpreted and brought back onto the stage.
Previous episode: Episode 14: The Court of Wonders
The train slowly pulls away from the port of Genoa, cutting through the darkness with its flickering lights.
The tracks slide beneath us like metal veins, and the sea, retreating behind our backs, reflects a glimmer that feels like the last echo of the kaleidoscope of the Court of Miracles.
I sit by the window, my coat folded over my knees.
Casanova has removed his hat, as if in respect for the domestic mystery we are about to confront.
Caterina, wife of Ferdinando de’ Medici, holds a Tarot card in her hand — XIV, Temperance — and lets it sway lightly between her fingers, with the delicacy of someone who already knows its secret.
“There are two cups in this arcana,” she says. “One for the mother, one for the sister. The father is merely the force of gravity that makes the liquid flow from one to the other.”
Casanova lifts an eyebrow, amused. “In the end, family is an experiment too. Only no one ever writes down the protocol.”
The train slips into a tunnel. For a moment we are swallowed by darkness, and all that remains is the sound of the wheels on the joints: a distant heartbeat of iron.
When we emerge, the hills of Monferrato lie sleeping under a fog that looks like milk. Caterina sets the card on the little table and murmurs:
“It is in this light that you can distinguish the so-called legitimate children from the others. Those who are acknowledged carry the name; the others carry the weight of its absence, like a shadow on the heart.”
I look at her.
“And you, Caterina? Which cup did you receive?”
She smiles, enigmatic as a statue with a living heart.
“Both. But not at the same temperature.”
The train climbs inland, passing fields already damp with mist. In the carriage, the lights dim; the rhythmic sound of the wheels accompanies us like a discreet drum.
Caterina still holds the Temperance card, but now she looks at it the way one looks at a medical report.
“I was never a mother,” she begins. “And yet a child pursued me all my life. Not mine — someone else’s.”
Casanova, with a surprisingly gentle gesture, takes a flask from his pocket and pours her a finger of brandy. It is his way of showing compassion.
“His name was Giacinto,” Caterina continues. “The son of Camilla Faà di Bruno, a young countess from Monferrato. My husband Ferdinando married her in secret, whether for play or for passion. He gave her a child and then denied her.”
Her voice tightens, just slightly, like a seam pulled too hard.
“I came after, like peace after a sacking — tasked with legitimizing the duchy and sterilizing the past.”
She pauses, watching the flame reflected in her glass.
“Camilla was locked in a convent. She wrote sixteen pages — only sixteen — the first autobiographical words ever written by an Italian woman. Imagine: to speak of her own life, she had to become a nun. I, on the other hand, became a wife so I would not have to speak of mine.”
“And the child?” I ask.
“Sent to Mantua. Giacinto di Gonzaga, son of nothing. They gave him an abbey to tame him. The plague took him — or poison, depending on whose chronicle you read. Ferdinando never wished to legitimize him. He said it was out of respect for me. In truth, it was fear of himself.”
A tense silence follows. Outside, a solitary tree passes in the dark like a sentry.
“You know, Margherita,” Caterina resumes in a low voice, “when I learned about your hidden sister — the daughter your father never allowed you to meet, and whom you saw only at his funeral… I thought that perhaps we are all mothers and sisters of abandoned children. Every story that goes unacknowledged comes looking for us, desperately seeking a midwife.”
Casanova, with a melancholy smile, adds: “And every father’s lie makes us siblings, with or without the same surname.”
I look at the card on the table. The angel of Temperance is still pouring water, and for an instant the two cups — one gold, one clay — seem like the two faces of my family: one exposed to the light, the other held in silence.
The train stops at Acqui Terme with a long sigh, like an animal that has finally found sleep.
The air smells of wet iron and damp leaves: autumn has laid a curtain of fog and gentle silence over Monferrato.
Caterina and Casanova step down first.
She is wrapped in a grey wool shawl, he wears a cloak far too light for the season. They exchange a knowing glance — the kind of look shared by people who need no words to choose a direction.
“Let’s go to the stream,” he says. “They say the water of the Erro speaks better when there’s no moon.”
“And that it tells the truth,” Caterina adds, adjusting a pin in her hair.
I pretend not to understand. I watch them disappear into the night, their shadows merging into one, their footsteps weaving together like ancient threads.
I start walking toward my little country house, hidden among rows of vines and small groves of chestnut and hazelnut trees.
The key grates in the lock like an ancient voice that still recognizes me. Inside, the smell is that of old wood and suspended stories.
I open my packed dinner — an apple, a piece of cheese, a sandwich that tastes of trains — and turn on the television.
Stalag 17 is on: men trapped in a prison camp, watching each other, betraying each other, saving each other in turn. I watch them as if they were speaking about me.
Outside, the wind barely stirs the vines, and from far away — perhaps from the stream — comes an echo of laughter. I pull the blanket over my shoulders.
The Temperance card is on the table, next to the empty glass.
And at the exact moment when William Holden begins his escape, I think that we too — the living and the dead, the acknowledged and the abandoned, the Isaacs and the Ishmaels — are all searching, each in our own way, for an escape route out of our personal prison camp.
At the end of the film, the compound explodes in snow and smoke, and I remain still, half-eaten apple in hand. The screen goes dark with a hiss, and a silence falls in the room that is not mine alone.
At first I hear them as a rustle, a shift in the air — then I understand it’s them.
My Lares.
The custodians of time and blood, who live among beams and dishes, and who have never abandoned me, not even when I left without saying goodbye.
There is Guido, my grandfather, elegant even in war: translator for the Germans and informant for the partisans. He was the one who saved the train station of Cantalupo, deceiving both sides and fate itself.
He holds a newspaper as always, pipe in his mouth, and wears the smile of a diplomat that tastes of whisky and well-kept secrets.
Next to him stands Grandma Margherita, petite, blonde, and diabolical in her enduring charm.
She was the true architect of her husband’s career, taming generals with the mere force of her gaze. She avenged his affairs with the grace of a French actress — flirtations never consummated, but meticulously advertised.
She smiles at me conspiratorially: “Darling, dignity is worn like a perfume. Never too much, but enough to linger in the air.”
Then comes Giuseppe, my other grandfather — the one of the fatal dice. He gambled my grandmother Grazia… and won.
Or perhaps she let herself be lost, to win in some other way.
He ended up working as a train conductor, though he dreamed of chemistry and alchemies. I think he still dreams of them: you can tell by the way he stares into the shadows of the fireplace, searching for formulas of love and freedom.
She, meanwhile, found in the parish the only escape from domestic confinement.
Behind Grandma Margherita stand her parents, Giovanni and Pina, holding hands: they still quarrel, but laughing, because — as Jacques Brel sang — it takes true talent to grow old without becoming adults.
He holds a deck of cards in one hand and a wrench in the other; she wears on her face that eternally stern look, capable of piercing window glass and finding traces of tomorrow inside yesterday.
It is from the two of them that my mother inherited her unmistakable ironic seriousness, the kind that never lets go and secretly laughs at everything and everyone.
Last comes Mina, Guido’s mother — an immortal peasant woman whom fate deprived of two husbands and a son, but never of faith, carrying her in good health past the age of ninety-five.
When her young daughter-in-law once shouted, “What are you praying for, to that God who took a husband and a son from you?”, she answered like someone who knows the secret of life: “But I am still here!”
Then there is a more distant figure, almost a glow in the hallway: great-great-grandmother Margherita, the one from the asylum of San Giacomo. She died in a bed in Alessandria, in the same hospital where, almost a century later, I was vaccinated against yellow fever.
She smiles at me with a calm that is a blessing: “You will make it, my heir. They took my voice — you will use yours for all of us.”
I sit for a long time, surrounded by their whispers. Outside, the wind moves through the vines, and it seems to me that every leaf is a name.
Then I lift my glass and say softly, as one does in a family:
“Welcome back, my dear ones. This house is always yours.”
The silence thickens, like a sheet of glass separating the living from their guardians.
The Lares remain, discreet: Grandma Grazia stokes the fire, Grandpa Guido adjusts the stopped clock, Grandma Margherita rests a hand on his shoulder, and the great-great-grandmother who bears my name smiles in profile, already preparing to fade away.
It feels as though they are all waiting for something — a signal from the world of the breathing.
And indeed, from the laptop, a small metallic sound rings out — pling.
A blue light cuts through the dimness. It’s an email from the European Union.
Time holds its breath.
I let mine go.
“Tomorrow,” I whisper. “Not now. They’re here. And I need to rest.”
The Lares nod, almost imperceptibly. The laptop darkens again, like a lake whose ripples have stilled.
I lie down on the couch. Grandma Margherita sits beside me, strokes my hair with a gesture I have known all my life, and begins to sing softly:
“It is a skein of silk,
more precious than anything else…”
I don’t remember how it continues.
Because I fall asleep before she can finish.
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