Gelsomina Anna Di Landro

Maiori, 1944

She was born on the eleventh of September 1944, in Maiori, on the water. The Allies had come up the coast a year earlier, almost exactly there — the landings at Salerno were fifteen kilometres south and the beach at Maiori was one of the ones they used. She was born into the year the war left, in a town that had just watched it pass through.

Her father was Antonio Di Landro, born in 1912. Her mother was Amalia Apicella, born in 1920 in Tramonti, in the hills above the town. That is the whole of what is recorded of them, two dates and two names, which is the reason this page exists.

Everyone called her Anna. Nobody in the family, as far as I can tell, ever called her Gelsomina. It is on her documents and it is on this leaf, and it was not her name.

The house, and the marriage

She married Antonio Vaccaro, born a year before her and four kilometres away, in Tramonti. He was a schoolteacher. They had two children: my mother, Carmela, and my uncle Luigi.

What she did with her own days is not written down anywhere, and nobody has yet been asked. Whether she worked, whether she wanted to, what she was good at, what she gave up — all of it is currently a blank on a page, and all of it is still inside two or three people who are alive.

What I actually know

Here is the honest accounting, and it is short.

I know she was born in Maiori. I know her parents' names and their years. I know she married a teacher and had two children, one of whom is my mother. I know she was called Anna. I know she died in November 2023, and I know that I had eighteen years with her.

Eighteen years is not a small number. It is most of my life. And against those eighteen years I can set down perhaps sixty words of her — which is not a failure of memory, it is a failure to ask, and the two are easy to confuse until it is too late to tell them apart.

This is the part I would delete if this were a monument. It stays because this is a record.

What is missing, precisely

Not "everything". The blanks are specific, and specific blanks can be filled.

Her trade, if she had one. The house in Maiori — which street, which floor, who else was in it. What she cooked and on what day. How she spoke: dialect or Italian, and with whom did it change. One sentence she always said, in her exact words, not the sense of it. What she thought of my mother becoming a teacher like her father. What she made of me. Whether she was ever photographed properly, and where that photograph is now.

November 2023

She died in November 2023. The nineteenth, on two independent counts — a message of condolence that day, and a first-anniversary mass a year later — and it has never been checked against a document. That is the first correction this page is waiting for, and it is a strange thing to have to write: I do not know, with certainty, the day my grandmother died.

She is the most recent of my four grandparents to go, which makes her the one there is still time to write down properly. It also makes her the one I have written down least. Both of those are true and only one of them is fixable.