What Rosa found on the seashore ……….

 Rosa is from Naples and was never far from the sea.

And even now on short visits to the seaside she will go looking for shellfish to eat and add to her collection of shells.

Location; Formby

Picture; What Rosa found, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Pepper day at Rosa’s place in Varese

Now yesterday was Peppers day, and Rosa excelled herself.

My favourite is her pepper salad, which she cooks with olive oil, some garlic and not a lot else.

I have tried cooking the way she does, and I have done the conventional, “wake’em under the grill until the skins go black, leave them to cool, peel them and serve in oil”, but they are never the same.

But then, Rosa comes from Naples and has been making them for nearly 70 years.

And yesterday she also stuffed some peppers, doing some with meat and some rice, and the rest as they say was pepper a day.

Location; Varese

Picture; Peppers day, 2021, from the collection of Rosa Balzano

Simone Balzano .......... 1938-2020

Today we said goodbye to our dearest Simone, husband, father, grandad and great grandad.

I say goodbye but in these strange times, a formal ceremony was out of the question.

He will be cremated tomorrow without any family being present.

These are the ongoing regulations in Italy following a death.

Such are the times we live in.

I only got to know Simone and his wife Rosa around the year 2000, shortly after I met and settled down with their daughter Tina.

Our first meeting was at the seaside when Tina, her son Luca,  and me, and my sons spent a fortnight in Rivabella, just down the coast from Rimini.

Within a few short days, we had met Simone, his wife Rosa and three of their children plus their families, and from then on most Easter’s and summers were spent in Italy either in the family home or an Italian resort.

And from the moment we met them we became part of their family.

So, we all grieve the sad loss of Simone who became an adopted father to me, grandparent to my children  and a great grandad to our little Arlo.

All of us will have our own special memories.

One of mine was the first time he introduced me to limoncello, on our first holiday, when we slipped out of the hotel on a pretext, and ever afterwards round about the same time where ever we were, he would give me a conspiratorial smile and we were away like two naughty school boys.

Like everyone in the family I will miss him dearly.





Location; Varese

Pictures; from the collection of the Balzano family

Stories from Naples, Cambridge and Varese ......

Now there is something exciting when a close member of the family decides she is going to write about her life.

Naples, 2017

And all the more so when she was born in 1940 in Naples, arrived in Britain as an economic migrant twenty years later, and then returned to Italy, bringing up a family of five in the northern city of Varese.

Rosa grew up during the tough years of the last world war and the immediate post war period when Naples was still a city where “poverty busied itself”.

Like many Italians she migrated to where the work was, but while for most that meant the great industrial cities of the north, like Milan and Turin, she travelled to Britain and worked in a series of jobs.

And she left Italy just days after she had got married, only to be reunited with her new husband later in the year when he too arrived in Britain.

I am particularly interested in how two young Italians took to Britain and to the city of Cambridge just as the “swinging “60s” burst forth, and their experiences as economic migrants, when the country was perhaps more tolerant of those who came to work here.

Varese, 2016

They stayed for nearly a decade, worked hard, bought a house, paid their taxes and got involved in the community.

But that episode was a short one, and I want to know also, about the years in the north after they returned, when Italy continued to build its “economic miracle”, and delve deeper into her life in Naples.

Both Rosa and Simone came from families who had lived in the city for generations so along the way there will be much to learn about the place.

Rosa's Easter pies, 2014

I have no experience of trawling Italian documents but I am up for it which will be a fascinating learning curve for me and I hope help Rosa.

So that is it for now.

Tina has bought Rosa one of those big diaries from a shop in Le Corti in the centre of Varese, and in time I might be able to put the story on the blog.

Leaving me with just that obvious observation, that everyone has a story to tell.

Location Italy & Britain

Pictures; Naples in 2017 from the collection of Saul Simpson and Emilka Cholewicka and Varese, 2014-16 from the collection of Andrew Simpson