The Rabbiosi Family
José Antonio 'Tony' Rabbiosi (21 July 1904 - 25 March 1988) &
Onorina 'Nora' Zugnoni Rabbiosi (3 April 1908 - 14 July 1999)

Jose and Onorina. Photo taken 1928.

Pictures from the Family Album

The following essays were written and submitted by Mrs. Helen Amelia Rabbiosi Dahman of Madera.

Helen Dahman (4 March 1941- ) (taken 2007)

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story,
and writes another . . . James M. Barrie

My father, José Antonio Rabbiosi, was born a twin in Fray Bentos, Uruguay, on July 21, 1904. In writing about him, my research took a surprising turn that brought to life a vivid history of the grandparents I never knew, and which has filled a place in my heart I never even knew was there. In remembering those who came before, because of hardship in Italy at the time, my father’s parents, Giuseppe Rabbiosi and Beatrice Zugnoni, had gone to South America to earn a living, where my paternal

Giuseppe and Beatrice Zugnoni Rabbiosi. Photo courtesy of Mrs. Helen Dahman.

grandfather worked in the meat processing industry. There was one pivotal word that initiated my research: occasionally my father would mention the word saladero and indicated it was the one recollection he had of his father commenting about work associated with the beef industry in Uruguay. I hold two theories, supported by documentation, as to what would have attracted the young couple to South America. First, one Amadeo Zugnoni, probably Beatrice’s brother, was living and working there and might have encouraged them to make such a significant decision. Or, as was the case with many Italians, the companies, many of which were owned by the British at the time, indentured the newcomers by paying their passage to a foreign country, in my grandparents’ case South America, and then collecting the price of the trip through a labor agreement. Documentation from Fray Bentos, Uruguay, indicates that Giuseppe and Beatrice traveled to South America, approximately in the late 1890s. The meaning of the word saladero was unknown to my father. Although we may never know, I have strong reason to believe that Giuseppe could have worked as a jornalero (day worker; worker receiving monthly wages) as (or in) a saladero for Liebig Extract of Meat Company at Fray Bentos. The documents1 are written in Spanish and the words jornalero and Liebigs are very clear on some of the documents that attest to Giuseppe and Beatrice living in Fray Bentos, and where Giuseppe was “. . .de profesión jornalero y vecino del Saladero Liebigs. . ..”

The works and yards of Liebig Extract of Meat Company at Fray Bentos ranked among the largest industrial complexes in South America and helped usher in the Industrial Revolution there. The plant attracted many European immigrants and, in its heyday, had 5,000 employees. Workers came from almost 60 countries to work there. Meat-salting enterprises were the main stimulus for the industrialization of livestock products in order to supply the European armies, thus initiating diversification in the sector.2

All of Giuseppe and Beatrice’s children were born in South America, except for my uncle, Alfredo Rabbiosi, who was born in Mellarolo, Italia. On April 18, 1898, their first child, Ursula Angela, was born. Beatrice was 23 and Giuseppe was 30. Their firstborn was named after Giuseppe’s mother, Ursula Zugnoni, and Beatrice’s mother, Angela Zugnoni. On February 11, 1900, their second child, Juan Alfonso, was born. My uncle Alfonso’s first name might have been after one Juan Rabbiosi who witnessed the birth certificate. On October 20, 1902, their third child, Simon Galiano, was born. My uncle Simon was named after Giuseppe’s father, Simon Rabbiosi. On July 21, 1904, Beatrice gave birth to twins, Conrado Luis and José Antonio. José Antonio, my father, was named after Beatrice’s father, Antonio Zugnoni. Unfortunately, Conrado died in early childhood.
Between 1904 and 1906, when my father was approximately two years old, his parents returned to their ancestral home in Mellarolo, Italia, where they lived for the rest of their lives and raised their family. They would never again be able to visit Conrado’s gravesite in Fray Bentos. Beatrice gave birth to one more child, Alfredo, on November 18, 1906, in Mellarolo, Italia. Beatrice was 30 and Giuseppe was 37. It has been said that Beatrice was very well dressed upon their return to the village. It was also said that later in life she suffered mightily from arthritis.

My hope is to be real and true to the best of my ability to trace the shadows of my father’s life, particularly of the first 16 or 17 years of his life, those years before he came to California, in an attempt to enlarge what we know. Aside from knowing that he attended the village school and achieved a third-grade education, I do not know anything he did in those ensuing 14 years as a boy, besides chores, as was the practice at the time. What kind of world did my father grow up in? I have only snippets, for he hardly ever spoke about his life before he came to America, he had not been much for telling stories about the past. My father and my uncle Alfredo made random comments, such as:
My father, who said that early one morning, on their way to governare (to look after) the cows, my father and one of his brothers (probably Alfonso) saw la stella cometa (a comet) in the sky. (The appearance of Haley’s Comet in 1986 occasioned that comment.) It could have been a regular comet they saw that morning when they were youngsters, because when Haley's Comet and the Daylight Comet appeared in 1910-1911, although it is possible, my father would have been only six or seven years old.

My uncle Alfredo, who said that at home in Mellarolo, when they were children, and their mother (Beatrice) called upstairs to awaken them, that they would stomp their feet on the floor to make noise to deceive her into thinking they were getting ready to come downstairs. Furbi !

In 1920, when my father was 16 years old, he came to America. Beginning in 1920, he worked for the next four to seven years in the logging camp at Calpine, California, felling timber with hand saws. He worked seven days a week, and he was paid per month plus room and board. The sequence may not be exact; however, in 1924, he may possibly have gone back to Italia to visit his family. Through the haze of time, and which would have been on one of his return trips to Italia, my father and his friend, Vicenzo, moved by hand the stones to construct the baita in Val Giotto that they built, and which I have visited on two occasions. My father was called to serve in the Army for two years. In the course of a few trips to Italia during the ensuing years, and as an Italian citizen, my father was drafted in Mussolini’s Army before World War II broke out. His military service consisted of being a barber in Torino (Turin), located in the barracks of Via Palestro, next to the Porta Susa railway station. On May 19, 1928, he married Onorina Zugnoni, and my sister Olga was born on March 8, 1929.

In 1930, my father came to Chowchilla, California, having been called by his brother Simon to come back to America and work for him and milk cows on his leased dairy farm in Chowchilla. In 1938, he went back to Italia to get my mother and my sister Olga to bring them to Chowchilla, California, where they would settle for the rest of their lives. At about 1940, the two brothers formed a partnership and purchased the 140 acres of land they were leasing.

Rabbiosi Dairy near Chowchilla. Taken in the 1950s.

As a child, I remember riding on the hay wagon alongside my father. On top of the loose alfalfa hay, while holding the reigns of the wagon drawn by his work horses, he would sing the High Mass. At one time he had contemplated the priesthood.
Such are some of my very early memories of my father, along with his and my uncle Alfredo’s reminiscences. Recalling what my grandfather and father did in their days fills me with gratitude to their memory. Those tenants of my heart…
To elaborate, following are some relevant excerpts from another essay I wrote about my father, a man who casts a long shadow in my memory. What I observed of him through the years shaped my philosophy on how to conduct one’s life. Apart from those observations was an asset in disguise—would that I had an oracle to foresee the value of his antiquated Italian dialect that would serve me so well years later.

As I said earlier, at age sixteen, my father made his first trip to the United States, the fabled land of opportunity. Following the guidance of Italian friends who were already here, he went to California’s Sierra Valley where he worked for a saw mill felling timber. The beautiful valley actually resembled home in northern Italia. It was ideal work for my father who was almost six feet tall, large-boned, and lean. I also remember his stories of how the Italians tried to make themselves understood. One time in the logging camp, some of the men wanted to buy a kettle, but didn’t know its English name. My father tried to Anglicize its Italian word, marmitta (pot). He said, “mar-mit” while shaping the air with hand gestures to indicate a pot and imaginary stirring or ladling. This exchange went back and forth until the item he needed was finally understood by the shopkeeper. He went on to learn all about logging and the name of every type of pine tree that grew in the Sierra Valley. His love of the mountains never left him; and his vivid stories and descriptions instilled this appreciation in me as well. However, his destino (destiny) was not to remain in the logging camp.

In the course of a few trips to Italia during the ensuing years, my father built a house in Mellarolo which he planned to return to after he had made his fortune in America. He eventually sold it to a relative, after he lost his savings of over two thousand American dollars in an Italian bank when it went broke. Disillusioned at losing his life savings and foreseeing the direction of fascism (which he opposed), he thought basta (enough)! He decided that the better life for his family would be in America and made his next-to-last trip to Italy, in 1938, to get my mother and my older sister who was eight at the time.
By 1938, my father had settled on the rented dairy farm (which he would later own) in Chowchilla with my mother and my sister. He rarely talked about Italia, though he corresponded with his brothers frequently. I suspect hard work and a steely discipline was a panacea for his memories of those he left behind. After World War II, I remember that he would send packages to his brothers whose families were practically starving and in tattered clothing in war-torn Italia. The packages included coffee and sugar to augment their meager diet of polenta and chestnuts, along with warm clothing. The contents to be sent were carefully wrapped in canvas sack material, tightly hand stitched around the edges of the material resulting in a fairly round shape (somewhat like a baseball), and meticulously addressed with India ink. It could take months for the package to reach its destination as it traveled by land and sea. Every single package sent arrived safely! My father also sent money during times of particular hardship, knowing that his relatives were too proud to ask. While I had nothing to do with it, many years later on subsequent trips to Italia, while my uncles were alive, they never failed to express their gratitude for my father’s help in their time of desperate need. That legacy seems to have been instilled and carried on with some of their children, my cousins, even though some of us were not yet born, and even though this happened during our parents’ generation. My uncles would recount my father’s help particularly during those post-war years, and they never failed to mention his foresight in making the decision to take his family to America.

My father could have been the poster child for the sentiment expressed in the observation, common at that time, that “they were Americans before they got off the boat.” He exuded patriotism, and for a man who had only a third-grade education, he steeped himself in everything American, and learned to speak and read English while studying for his citizenship. At home and among other Italians, my family spoke a dialect of Italian, which was my mother tongue. I am told that I learned to speak English in the first grade. As a child in the mid-1940s, I remember sitting on a pew in the hallway of the Madera County Superior Court when my father, mother, and sister received their United States citizenship. I suspect that children were not allowed in the courtroom. They learned to speak English gradually—resulting in varying levels of “broken English”—but which I describe to this day as charming accents.

The respect my father commanded, combined with his generosity and trust, was well known during the years I was growing up. My favorite example is related to several neighboring farmers who could not manage their unruly teen-aged sons. Through the years, many a neighbor boy would work dependably before and after school and on weekends for my father, whether it was feeding corn silage to the livestock (a fetid chore), loading baled alfalfa hay, or eagerly doing whatever work was asked of him. My father would loan these boys money to purchase cars when their fathers could not, and he was always repaid, loved, and deeply respected. My father accrued many puzzled and profusely thankful neighbors by redeeming their sons. We girls worked alongside those boys. Those revered memories of long ago days are always the topic at a reunion for a wedding or a funeral.
Through the years, my father became a successful dairyman and farmer. He would tell about the early years when he milked by hand his herd of forty Holstein cows for four years without a day off. This hard work instilled a discipline that carried over into other aspects of my father’s life. His ceasing to smoke cigarettes is an excellent illustration. He always had a cigarette hanging from his lips, whether it was glowing or not. Besides smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes, he rolled his own with sheer cigarette paper which came in an orange booklet and which he formed into an arc between his fingers and filled with tinned Prince Albert tobacco. He moistened the long edge of the paper to seal it into the form of a cigarette. Having observed this process for years as a child, in my mind’s eye I can see the tobacco escaping from the ends of those hand-rolled cigarettes as vividly as if it were only yesterday. A Seventh-day Adventist neighbor invited my father to go with him to a “Stop Smoking” presentation. Afterward my father came home a changed man. The graphic slides of the effects of nicotine on human lungs made such a dramatic impression on him that he stopped smoking from that evening forward—an abrupt end to a decades-old habit. Finito!
Personally happy and financially secure, my father would return to Italia for the final time, in 1968, some thirty years since his previous visit, but only for a short time. On his last trip to Italia, he took my sister and me. Suddenly, the people sprang to life! At last I could match them to their letters! They seemed as exotic and yet familiar as their letters. The letters were written on onionskin paper and the envelopes were edged with the distinctive air mail fretting and elaborate postage stamps. It would be the first of many trips for me because I not only fell in love with the country, but formed a strong bond with my uncles, aunts, many cousins, and other friends. My dialect, which I had taken for granted until that trip, became appreciated and valuable. While it was immensely helpful, it was a novelty to Italians who were surprised and perplexed to hear a seventy-year-old archaic dialect—one that did not evolve after my parents left Italia—emanating from someone who looked like me, an Americana! Once I overcame my self-consciousness and began speaking freely, I became accustomed to the special treatment conferred on me by the locals. My morning cappuccino arrived automatically. Yogurt was generously provided in re-usable glass containers which I admired; I was given and brought home eleven of them! When my tour bus would have a rest stop, I soon became the translator at the coffee bar. Sadly, my unique dialect, along with the other regional dialects in Italia, is dying out and today the true Italian language, the dialect of Rome, is prevailing. Pazienza.

In time, with only a third-grade education, my father had learned to speak and read English and became a wise man. He tried to instill in me the importance of education, which I disregarded until later in life when it became my crusade. However, his strong work ethic rubbed off; I have practiced it all of my life. I have tried to live up to his high standards and emulate his exuberant personality as a lasting memorial to him. While I resemble him, only he had that firm stance—feet slightly apart, hands on hips, direct gaze—seen consistently in photographs of him throughout his life. My current realization of this goal is to be the first person in my generation to earn a university degree, ergo my second career in retirement. Ecco (there)! Poignantly, it was not our fate for my father to live long enough to see this accomplishment and to read my stories. I was not prepared for him to become the great absentee so abruptly. In 1988, at age eighty-four, my father died instantly as the result of a shocking tractor accident on our dairy farm. Born in Uruguay and raised in Italia, my father epitomized ambition, courage, foresight, and discipline when he emigrated to the United States of America. Appreciating and emulating those qualities I, as his descendant, will “tira avanti la baracca” (keep the ship afloat)!

Notes

1 Birth Certificates

2 This type of meat processing, however, was dependent on cheap cattle. As the price of cattle increased, the meat-extract industry declined, along with the saladeros, which prepared salted and sun-dried meat. Cuba and Brazil were the main purchasers of salted meat; Europe, of meat extract; and the United States and Europe, of leather and wool. See Industrial Revolution Museum Fray Bentos .

My Father
A Notable Person in My Life

José taken in the 1970s.

I am a dairyman’s daughter, the child of a man who casts a long shadow in my memory. What I observed of him through the years shaped my philosophy on how to conduct one’s life. Apart from those observations was an asset in disguise—would that I had an oracle to foresee the value of his antiquated Italian dialect that would serve me so well years later. However, I should like to start by telling about my father before he became a dairyman, before I was born.
My father was born a twin in Fray Bentos, Uruguay, in 1904. Because of hardship in Italy at the time, his parents had gone to South America to earn a living. My paternal grandfather worked in the meat processing industry there. When my father was two years old, his parents returned to their home in Mellarolo, Italy, where they lived for the rest of their lives and raised five children. Of the five children, my father must have been the most driven.
At age sixteen, my father made his first trip to the United States, the fabled land of opportunity. Following the guidance of Italian friends who were already here, he went to California’s Sierra Valley where he worked for a saw mill felling timber. The beautiful valley actually resembled home in northern Italy. It was ideal work for my father who was almost six feet tall, large-boned, and lean. I also remember his stories of how the Italians tried to make themselves understood. One time in the logging camp, some of the men wanted to buy a kettle, but didn’t know its English name. My father tried to Anglicize its Italian word, marmitta (pot). He said, “mar-mit” while shaping the air with hand gestures to indicate a pot and imaginary stirring or ladling. This exchange went back and forth until the item he needed was finally understood by the shopkeeper. He went on to learn all about logging and the name of every type of pine tree that grew in the Sierra Valley. His love of the mountains never left him; and his vivid stories and descriptions instilled this appreciation in me as well. However, his destino (destiny) was not to remain in the logging camp.
In the course of a few trips to Italy during the ensuing years, and as an Italian citizen, my father was drafted in Mussolini’s Army before World War II broke out. His military service consisted of being a barber in Turin. Later, he courted and married my mother, and they had a daughter. He built a house in Mellarolo which he planned to return to after he had made his fortune in America. He eventually sold it to a relative, after he lost his savings of over two thousand American dollars in an Italian bank when it went broke. Disillusioned at losing his life savings and foreseeing the direction of fascism (which he opposed), he thought basta (enough)! He decided that the better life for his family would be in America and made his next-to-last trip to Italy in 1938 to get my mother and my older sister who was eight at the time.
By 1938 my father had settled on the rented dairy farm (which he would later own) in Chowchilla with my mother and sister. He rarely talked about Italy, though he corresponded with his brothers frequently. I suspect hard work and a steely discipline was a panacea for his memories of those he left behind. After World War II, I remember that he would send packages to his brothers whose families were practically starving and in tattered clothing in war-torn Italy. The packages included coffee and sugar to augment their meager diet of polenta and chestnuts, along with warm clothing. The contents to be sent were carefully wrapped in canvas sack material, tightly hand stitched around the edges of the material resulting in a fairly round shape (somewhat like a baseball), and meticulously addressed with India ink. It could take months for the package to reach its destination as it traveled by land and sea. Every single package sent arrived safely! My father also sent money during times of particular hardship, knowing that his relatives were too proud to ask. While I had nothing to do with it, many years later on subsequent trips to Italy, while my uncles were alive, they never failed to express their gratitude for my father’s help in their time of desperate need. That legacy seems to have been instilled and carried on with some of their children, my cousins, even though some of us were not yet born, and even though this happened during our parents’ generation. My uncles would recount my father’s help particularly during those post-war years, and they never failed to mention his foresight in making the decision to take his family to America.
My father could have been the poster child for the sentiment expressed in the observation, common at that time, that “they were Americans before they got off the boat.” He exuded patriotism, and for a man who had only a third-grade education, he steeped himself in everything American, and learned to speak and read English while studying for his citizenship. At home and among other Italians, my family spoke a dialect of Italian, which was my mother tongue. Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue tangentially suggested the subject of my essay. In Mother Tongue, Tan writes, “. . . I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother . . . .” It galvanized me toward what I hope will generate other stories about my parents for my family and descendants. I am told that I learned to speak English in the first grade. As a child in the mid-1940s, I remember sitting on a pew in the hallway of the Madera County Superior Court when my father, mother, and sister received their United States citizenship. I suspect that children were not allowed in the courtroom. They learned to speak English gradually—resulting in varying levels of “broken English”—but which I describe to this day as charming accents.
The respect my father commanded, combined with his generosity and trust, was well known during the years I was growing up. My favorite example is related to several neighboring farmers who could not manage their unruly teen-aged sons. Through the years, many a neighbor boy would work dependably before and after school and on weekends for my father, whether it was feeding corn silage to the livestock (a fetid chore), loading baled alfalfa hay, or eagerly doing whatever work was asked of him. My father would loan these boys money to purchase cars when their fathers could not, and he was always repaid, loved, and deeply respected. My father accrued many puzzled and profusely thankful neighbors by redeeming their sons. We girls worked alongside those boys. Those revered memories of long ago days are always the topic at a reunion for a wedding or a funeral.
Through the years, my father became a successful dairyman and farmer. He would tell about the early years when he milked by hand his herd of forty Holstein cows for four years without a day off. This hard work instilled a discipline that carried over into other aspects of my father’s life. His ceasing to smoke cigarettes is an excellent illustration. He always had a cigarette hanging from his lips, whether it was glowing or not. Besides smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes, he rolled his own with sheer cigarette paper which came in an orange booklet and which he formed into an arc between his fingers and filled with tinned Prince Albert tobacco. He moistened the long edge of the paper to seal it into the form of a cigarette. Having observed this process for years as a child, in my mind’s eye I can see the tobacco escaping from the ends of those hand-rolled cigarettes as vividly as if it were only yesterday. A Seventh-day Adventist neighbor invited my father to go with him to a “Stop Smoking” presentation. Afterward my father came home a changed man. The graphic slides of the effects of nicotine on human lungs made such a dramatic impression on him that he stopped smoking from that evening forward—an abrupt end to a decades-old habit. Finito!
Personally happy and financially secure, my father would return to Italy for the final time in 1968, some thirty years since his previous visit, but only for a short time. On his last trip to Italy, he took my sister and me. Suddenly, the people sprang to life! At last I could match them to their letters! They seemed as exotic and yet familiar as their letters. The letters were written on onionskin paper and the envelopes were edged with the distinctive air mail fretting and elaborate postage stamps. It would be the first of many trips for me because I not only fell in love with the country, but formed a strong bond with my uncles, aunts, many cousins, and other friends. My dialect, which I had taken for granted until that trip, became appreciated and valuable. While it was immensely helpful, it was a novelty to Italians who were surprised and perplexed to hear a seventy-year-old archaic dialect—one that did not evolve after my parents left Italy—emanating from someone who looked like me, an Americana! Once I overcame my self-consciousness and began speaking freely, I became accustomed to the special treatment conferred on me by the locals. My morning cappuccino arrived automatically. Yogurt was generously provided in re-usable glass containers which I admired; I was given and brought home eleven of them! When my tour bus would have a rest stop, I soon became the translator at the coffee bar. Sadly, my unique dialect, along with the other regional dialects in Italy, is dying out and today the true Italian language, the dialect of Rome, is prevailing. Pazienza.
In time, with only a third-grade education, my father had learned to speak and read English and became a wise man. He tried to instill in me the importance of education, which I disregarded until later in life when it became my crusade. However, his strong work ethic rubbed off; I have practiced it all of my life. I have tried to live up to his high standards and emulate his exuberant personality as a lasting memorial to him. While I resemble him, only he had that firm stance—feet slightly apart, hands on hips, direct gaze—seen consistently in photographs of him throughout his life. My current realization of this goal is to be the first person in my generation to earn a university degree, ergo my second career in retirement. Ecco (there)! Poignantly, it was not our fate for my father to live long enough to see this accomplishment and to read my stories. I was not prepared for him to become the great absentee so abruptly. In 1988, at age eighty-four, my father died instantly as the result of a shocking tractor accident on our dairy farm. Born in Uruguay and raised in Italy, my father epitomized ambition, courage, foresight, and discipline when he emigrated to the United States of America. Appreciating and emulating those qualities I, as his descendant, will “tira avanti la baracca” (keep the ship afloat)!

Works Cited
Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue.” Fields of Reading: Motives for Writing. Comley, Nancy R., David Hamilton, Carl H. Klaus, Robert Scholes, and Nancy Sommers. Eighth Edition, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 84.

Onorina Zugnoni

Onorina. Photo taken in the 1970s.

Onorina. Photo taken in the 1990s.

My mother, Onorina Zugnoni, was born on 3 April 1908, in Mellarolo, Italia, population approximately 150. She lived for 91 years: her first 30 years in Mellarolo, and her next 61 years in Chowchilla, California. To provide an accurate record, my quest has been to recreate and depict my mother’s early history of life in Italia based on my recollections in conjunction with invaluable assistance from relatives and friends in Italia, of her accounts of that period in her life. While existence was meager in my mother’s family as well as in all the other families, her family had more than most and she managed to complete a third-grade education in the village school; work followed. She helped with the family, worked in the small fields (prati), and learned to weave and make rugs and fabrics. Everything was done by hand.
My mother spoke of her work in the loom (telaio). There were wood hand looms in almost every home in the village, as well as in most of the villages in la Valgerola. The looms were always located next to the kitchen or in the shed (stalla), and they were the primary job carried out by the women to help support the family. The women wove soft cotton only for bed sheets for the wealthiest families beyond the village, whereas they wove cotton and very rough hemp for sheets and towels for the families of Mellarolo and the village’s outskirts.1 It is said that …”the sheets were so rough that in bed they used them to scratch their flea (pulci) bites that disturbed them!!!”… The women made heavy covers with the warp threads (in weaving, the threads running lengthwise in the loom) in cotton or hemp while the weft ([trama], in weaving, the threads woven back and forth across the fixed threads of the warp) was made of sheeps’ wool. They made rugs, as well. To create the sheets, the covers, and the rugs, the women and children of Mellarolo would go to Morbegno, which was a two-hour walk one way by foot down to the valley carrying a conical wicker basket with two straps for carrying goods (gerla [gerlo, in dialect])2 on their backs to be able to obtain the raw material to weave, followed by a two-hour walk back up to Mellarolo. Once weaved the material was delivered to Morbegno where they were paid for it by the meter. On those long days my mother indulged herself in a dish of risotto at her favorite restaurant, Ristorante Trieste. Decades later, I made what felt like a pilgrimage to Ristorante Trieste for the risotto about which my mother so nostalgically spoke. A few families did not have looms. For survival they would hunt and gather the wild mushrooms and the blueberries that were abundant at the time (but not so today) to sell in order to earn money for bread. During the winter season there were those who held spools, and assisted in any other way possible in the looms to earn a few soldi.
As another means of survival, the chestnuts were gathered and dried in the attics on wood floors. They were turned frequently throughout the drying process. The chestnuts fed either or both the families (where they might supplement the daily polenta), or their pigs (maiale) (to fatten them up).
While my father’s family was from Mellarolo, in the name of ambition and prosperity he went by himself to California at the age of 16, although he occasionally returned to Mellarolo when he grew homesick. Ultimately, his intention was to go back to Italia. On one of his trips home, in a double wedding ceremony, my mother and my father, José Antonio Rabbiosi, and his brother Alfredo Rabbiosi and Silvia Zugnoni, were married on 19 maggio 1928. The newly wedded couples went to Caravaggio, which is a religious pilgrimage site located in the Province of Bergamo, and approximately eighty miles from Mellarolo, for their two-day wedding trip.
My parents’ first child, my sister Olga Maria, was born a year later on 8 marzo 1929. Shortly afterward my father left for California. My mother and my sister stayed in Mellarolo. While her parents took care of Olga, my mother was employed in the home of the Fanchi family who were shopkeepers in Morbegno. As owners of a paint supply store (negozio), the Fanchis enjoyed a higher station in life than that of my mother’s family in Mellarolo. She was treated very well by the Fanchi family, and she was included at the family’s table. My mother often spoke about how particular Signor Fanchi, who did much of the cooking, was about food. Observing and experiencing life in the discerning Fanchi household probably influenced my mother in developing what would become her scrupulous ways related to housekeeping and food preparation. For instance, on laundry day she went early in the morning to the communal place (trough) (lavatoio, casca [albi, in dialect]) to be the first person there to be sure that she had clean water to wash her laundry. To my knowledge she developed her love of cooking later on in America after 1938. My father tried to send for my mother and the baby, but they did not want to travel that long a distance alone. My mother’s biggest fear was that she did not know the language.
By 1938 my father had decided that the better life for his family would be in America, and he returned to Italia to get my mother and Olga. Moving to a foreign place for the sake of her marriage my mother left everything familiar, in effect turning her back on her parents, by settling in America. My mother was my maternal grandparents’ only surviving child of seven sons and a daughter who had died as a result of either war or disease, and Olga was their only grandchild. The trunks were packed. His in-laws had offered my father all their land holdings (numerous small fields [prati]) hoping that he would change his mind and stay in Italia. Instead, he left them the house he had built years earlier when he had thought he would be able to support his family in Italia after working for a few years in America. They must have felt forsaken by this colossal upheaval. It is impossible to fathom, no matter how often they explained it to me, how difficult it was for my mother and Olga to leave the only existence they knew. The family of three left from Napoli on the ocean liner, SS Rex (Italian Line), bound for New York, the Port of Entry, arriving on 26 gennaio 1938. My mother and my sister, in recounting their trip, emphasized their seasickness during the crossing, and the seemingly endless train ride from New York to California that followed. The contrast from being surrounded by the lush, mountainous, spectacular landscape all around Mellarolo, to the vast, flat, untempered brightness of the arid San Joaquin Valley was shocking. Their destination, as well as their destiny, was to be on the l40-acre dairy farm that my father bought in partnership with his brother, Simone Galiano Rabbiosi, in 1937. My mother resumed her life as a married woman, and with the contents of only two trunks constituting their possessions, my mother single-handedly set up household and began her first true housekeeping responsibilities. From a heretofore sheltered life to the hardship of a completely dissimilar lifeway in another land with hardly anything familiar except for some Italian families that lived nearby, she could not have expected how grim it would be even in her bleakest hours of homesickness during those early years. I, Helen Amelia, was born on 4 marzo 1941.

Rabbiosi Family (1945) Onorina, Angela, Olga, Helen, José.

Soon after the dairy-farm operation expanded, my mother was required to prepare three meals per day for the hired men. It was not uncommon in those very early years for the homemaker to cook on a coal oil stove (although I remember only butane), in sweltering heat while holding a baby or small child. The meals were prepared from the provisions the men folk brought back from their monthly trip to Madera to the Italian Cooperativa. My mother kept chickens, and they butchered calves and pigs using every possible part, including the intestines (for sausage casing), and the blood, to eat (when congealed and cooked, it resembled liver). My mother never mentioned being complimented on her cooking by the hired men, but she often said that they expressed complaints. She canned fruit when it was in season. She washed her laundry with a wringer washing machine as well as by hand with a washboard. My mother looked forward to Olga coming home from school so that she could hand me over to her. My mother gave birth to a third daughter, Angela (NMN), on 12 Novembre 1945.
While it might seem like an isolated existence, with the exception of the Italian families that lived in the surrounding area, there was support for the Italian immigrants in the way of an Italian newspaper, L’Italia, published in San Francisco, which my parents received. Italian businessmen arrived in person: Mr. Molinari arrived yearly to renew the newspaper subscription; Eugene Gonella arrived seeking a donation for his one-hour Sunday morning radio broadcast in Italian from Los Banos; Pete Pistoresi came to sell my father a pickup truck or an automobile; and Cesare Maraccini came to sell insurance. Mr. Maraccini enjoyed dove and pheasant hunting at the ranch, and for decades he never missed a Christmas morning visit with a large box of Whitman’s Sampler chocolates in hand. On Fridays the fishmonger (il pescivendolo) would arrive in his white truck and open wide the back doors for my mother to select the fish, displayed on a bed of crushed ice, which she would cook and serve on Friday, the meatless day, for our Roman Catholic family. Another highlight was when the forest green Watkins truck drove into the yard and the driver would open and prop up both sides of the truck in anticipation that my parents might need something among the apothecary or wide range of other products.
As time passed, the dairy-farming operation succeeded, and my mother adapted and transformed into a lovely American woman who spoke with a charming accent; she would always smile, and she had the ingrained old country sweetness. Hard-working and strong in her Catholic faith, she was beloved and respected by all who knew her. She had a talent for cooking and baking a staggering variety of dishes. To sit down to her table for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, was an anticipated occasion by the many who did so through the years, whether they be relatives or friends. Besides the delicious food, during the periods when two relatives desperately needed it, they found solace, as well. My mother stood about 5 feet 4 inches tall and at times tended toward chubbiness, a testament to her enjoyment of good food. At home, she always wore a short-sleeved cotton duster-style housedress, a half apron, house slippers, and usually she had rosy cheeks from cooking.
By the 1960s, with fewer burdens and consequently free to go for a visit, she had long since abandoned what desire she might have had to visit Italia, partly because she was afraid to fly, but also because her parents had died by that time. She had corresponded in her calligraphic handwriting with her mother, Olimpia, and her friend, Prassede Piganzoli (the postmistress in Rasura where Mellarolo’s mail was routed), and other relatives, until their respective deaths. While none of our relatives in Italia have visited us to date, other Italian friends have, and my mother who was by nature reserved outside the family, initiated endless exchanges with our visitors concerning everyone, everything, and every place (I returned like a pilgrim to those places and videotaped them for her) related to Mellarolo, having remembered everything in remarkable detail. At home we often spoke dialect. My mother knew a variety of proverbs, and she regularly delivered the appropriate proverb for the specific instance. Her grandson, Jonathan (my older son) took great pleasure in this; as a pastime he learned many of them, and he delivers them flawlessly. Many years ago we undertook a project to write down the collection of her proverbs every time she expressed one; presently the compilation awaits completion of the translation, some proverbs being in italiano and some being in dialect.
My mother was suddenly widowed in 1988, after my father’s tragically fatal tractor accident. She never learned to drive. A devoted mother and grandmother, we three daughters, her four grandsons, and three great grandchildren (two boys and a girl) were what encompassed her world throughout her life until she died on 14 luglio 1999. She was able to do all the things she loved until just fourteen days prior to her death, forever to remain one of the great absentees in our lives.

1 The information about the looms and village life during that period was transcribed from a telephone conversation with my friend Sig.ra Maria Rabbiosi Cattaneo on 5 gennaio 2009. She was born in Mellarolo, Italia. Maria is 84 years old and lives in Zogno, Province of Bergamo. Maria lived during my mother’s generation, and she remembers my mother perfectly.

The standard size of the wood loom was 80 cm. in width and the sheets and blankets would have needed to be hand stitched together at the selvedge (cimosa) from top to bottom to obtain the desired width. It accounts for the visible misalignment of the bands of color on the blankets. This information came from a telephone conversation with my cousin, Donatella (Enrica) Rabbiosi, on 7 Febbraio 2009. It is apparent on the sheets and blanket in my possession.

2
Gerla (gerlu) interlaced

While my relatives and friends in Italia continue to persevere on my behalf, it has been difficult to find any information on the history of Mellarolo. Meanwhile in the nearby village of Sacco there is a recently restored treasure (what we Americans would refer to as a historical landmark) which dates back to the 15th century. By the 15th century dating of this treasure, it offers a suggestion of Mellarolo’s origin, combined with the information from the Rabbiosi family crest.

My cousin, Donatella (Enrica) Rabbiosi, sent me a book entitled, The Wild Man of Sacco in the Gerola Valley, by Natale Perego. He is a researcher in the field of social and ethnographic history.

“The Wild Man – a creature halfway between savagery, humanity and the godlike, who according to beliefs and legends lives in solitude in the valleys and the mountains – is one of the most curious and fascinating figures of the popular Alpine culture.
In Sacco in the Gerola Valley, inside a painted chamber frescoed in the second half of the 15th century with both religious and profane subjects, we find his most intriguing representation. He is a wild man who speaks and threatens, but at the same time invites us to approach him, to get to know his story and that of the Gerola Valley, of which he has become a symbol.”

Source Material:

The List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival records the SS Conte Biancamano, having departed from Genova on 21 March1930, arrived in New York City on 31 March 1930. On board were José Antonio Rabbiosi, aged 25, and Juan Alfonso Rabbiosi, aged 30. Both were described as unmarried miners from Fray Bentos, Uruguay, whose last permanent address was Millarolo, Italy.

The List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival records the SS Rex, having departed from Genoa on 18 January 1938, arrived in New York City on 26 January 1938. On board were José Antonio Rabbiosi, aged 33, and Onorina Zugnoni Rabbiosi, aged 30. He is described as a laborer, and she a housewife. Onorina is said to have been born in Cosio, Italy. Accompanying them was their daughter, Olga, aged 8, a student, born in Cosio, Italy.

1 Vittoria Rabbiosi (20 Mar 1912-14 Dec 1991) died in Madera.
The List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival records the SS Conte de Savoia, having departed from Genoa, arrived in New York City on 27 April 1939. Vittoria was a 27 years old housewife in the company of her two sons, Aldo (6)2 and Emilio (2)3, both born in Chowchilla. Vittoria was born in Mellarolo, but had lived in Uruguay.

At the age of 35, she made another trip to Italy, arriving in New York on 3 December 1947, having sailed from Genoa on board the MS Sobieski. She was in the company of her husband, Simon Galiano Rabbiosi, aged 45, and her three sons, Aldo, Alessandro and Robert.4 All residents in Chowchilla.


2 Aldo Giuseppe [Joseph] Rabbiosi (24 April 1933-14 December 1991), born in Merced County, resident of Chowchilla, died in Madera County. Married at age 31 on 20 June 1964 to Marilyn J. Marlow, aged 26 in Merced County.

3 Alessandro Emilio Rabbiosi ( 3 August 1936-5 July 2000) born in Madera County, died in Fresno.

4 Robert Rabbiosi (27 September 1942- ), born in Merced County.