Unanswered genealogy questions – the secret garden in Italy

If you could go back in time and meet any of your ancestors, what are the unanswered questions you’d want to know more about?

Unanswered questions

I have several burning questions for which answers are no longer available:

• Did my mother’s parents have a stillborn child before she was born, as hinted at by a sketchy family tree my mother drew up late in life?
• What was the cause of the falling out between my great-grandfather and grandfather Charles, leading to the latter being disinherited in 1937?
• And when did Charles walk out of his second marriage and disappear, abandoning my father to his stepfamily?

Yet my #1 unanswered question isn’t central to the family narrative and is merely an odd sidenote. Learning the answer solves nothing, changes nothing—answers nothing other than my own curiosity.

It’s about what I still think of, half a century later, as the secret garden in Italy.

The secret garden

In 1968 my family moved to Switzerland, when my father took up a position as a European sales rep for a Swiss building products firm, Granosit. Although they were based in Bern, my parents opted to relocate to the Italian-speaking, southernmost canton of the Swiss Federation, Ticino.

We built a house on a hill overlooking Lake Lugano, part of the cluster of lakes in northern Italy—Como, Maggiore, Varese, Garda. We used to drive around the lakes at weekends, criss-crossing the Swiss/Italian customs posts where my Jersey passport caused consternation. We learned to tuck it behind my parents’ English passports; a quick glance at one of those and the Carabinieri would wave us through.

Shorefront houses on the Italian Lakes have long been popular with local aristocrats and the European jet-set. We weren’t part of either group—yet, I have an unerasable sense—to call it a memory is an overstatement—that once, probably in the early 1970s, my mother and I visited one of those mansions, long gardens sloping down to the lake.

For some reason, again unaccountably, I sense it was Lake Como.

Rooms

I have no idea why this might have been. It was probably explained at the time, and quite dull—a friend visiting a friend, perhaps—and, as a child, of no interest. What has stayed with me is the sense of moving through the garden’s various ‘rooms’—unique spaces screened off by walls, fences, hedges—each with their own hint of mystery.

It was around this time I first saw porn. Along with some other formative experiences, it happened outdoors. Liminal places like rambling gardens have always had a whiff of transgression about them. At this remove in time I cannot say for certain what it was about the garden that haunted me.

At some point, the secret garden in Italy faded from memory. In the last decade or so, as I processed my family’s inherited trauma, it returned as a sense hovering on the edge of memory. By the time I remembered it, my mother had passed away.

The secret garden lives on in my love of gardens with rooms, squirming tunnels, hidden spaces. And every time I encounter one, I’m taken back to that day in the early 1970s on the shores of Lake Como, and the item at the top of my unanswered questions list.

What’s yours?

Next steps

For further resources on generational trauma, both free and paid, please click on this image.

Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash