OUR FAMILY IN ITALY

This is me with my sister zia Anna, my mother/nonna and your cousins Giorgio and Lorenzo.

I’ve had a very good time with my family from Milan today, we remembered together summer vacations we did in many beautiful places in the Mediterranean, places we saw and learned about plus some strange people we encountered in our travels to go to those vacations spots.



Remembering those times made us feel much younger with the same enthusiasm we always still now have about life and novelties.

The father of my cousins Alba and Vittorio was the CEO of the car company Alfa Romeo and was always a very strict teacher of math for his children/my cousins and his brother Gianfranco, my dad and your nonno.

Alba now owns a store of Arabic objects and arts and Vittorio is an university professor of psychology in Rome and came to Santa Barbara from Milan when I first had the accident.

Since he is a very important university professor he knows well many neurologists and I therefore asked him to find out about certain therapies that I’m hoping can make my life easier and with less pain.

My biggest pain however isn’t one that can be treated by medications, it’s about not being with you both and not teaching you all our history and culture that goes back several hundreds of years.

This has now become my main life goal, I want you to feel to be completely part of the Lingiardi family and build relationships across the world just like I did.

This is the kind of culture and connections that can make your life enjoyable and easier to live and this is my promise to you.

MY HIGH SCHOOL CLASS

As I’m in Verona (where I grew up) many of my High School classmates heard of me being here and organized a dinner out all together.

To my pleased amazement I didn’t at all feel to be disabled, we laughed and talked for hours about our “adventures” while getting mature and older.

I can’t even begin to give names and nicknames of my friends because impossible to translate in English but to use and remember their creation really made us all laugh very hard for hours.

The one thing that shocked me most is to see my former lass-mates talk and act just like they were doing 30 years ago.

I felt completely to be still a teenager very excited about the future with all its possibilities.

In short it’s been extremely clear to me that I left many good memories in my classmates and that even if life can be unfair at times, what really always matters is the positive attitude to things to come and the personal ability to change all we can or want.

This is the picture of the 5th year class, section B some of us are married, some with kids and others have lost either their own parents or even brothers or sisters already.

Most importantly everyone still has the same teenage appreciation of fun and experiencing such stability, with their support and encouragement took decades away from my soul.

MY VENETIAN FAMILY

This is my own family in Italy. I haven’t seen them in about 10 years, therefore it’s grown, many nephews and other very young children who are related to me through my cousins or other parts of my family.
It’s been a very happy meeting event with both old and new faces all happy to see me again, after having feared never to see me again.
Most of my joy is to see so many members of my extended family who are going to bring forward my culture, history and taste for various arts and cultures.
It’s my intention to reinforce and create relationships between all these new members of my family with my own children who being American know and see or study very little of what makes them special people of this new millennium.
In this picture I’m surrounded by my parents and closest cousins, who I put under the label of “venetian”, since they all both live very close to Venice and descend from the same grandparents who lived in Venice.
I remember growing up with them all and spending summer vacation in the same locations, besides going to the same kinds of high schools, even if we all took different degrees ad jobs.
This was my day of memories of all types, mostly good though because they are about pranks done together while teenagers.
The great advantage of all my nephews who live in Italy is that when they study history at school they can see and touch for real what the ancient cultures and people left for the future generations to experience, in fact I can still remember well my teacher of Latin and Italian literatures pointing out places and/or buildings in town not very far from us to exemplify the concepts of what he was teaching to us.
This is the unique legacy that I can give to my treasures, who can see, learn and experience the unique country that founded the whole Western culture, or our current way to see and understand the life in our world today.
Soon I’m going to have my treasures meet and spend time with their cousins here, so they will feel and understand the importance of their family ties, that are Italian just like their father who loves them so much that needs to share the wealth of culture I brought with me.