My father, Flaminio Fabi, was born in Montegranaro on 16 January 1906 and my mother, Gentilina Contenti, was herself born in Montegranaro on 9 May 1909. My parents were married in 1929, the year of the great snow and the Great Depression. Both were farmers, but my father was a share cropper and remained so until 1956, the year of his death. My mother also farmed but there was a significant difference: while she had a small family-owned farm, my father cultivated land that was not his own – he had a master, a certain Sor Mario Botti of Monte San Giusto. We bought this gentleman’s land in 2000 to build the factory where we are now.
Just think how the world goes round; at the time of my father’s death, who would have imagined that fifty-four years later we would buy the land of Sor Mario Botti? No one, surely – it was absolutely unthinkable. This tells me that in life you must never give up; you must keep working and believing in what you do….
I remember, at a very tender age, that we would eat whatever the earth produced: “polenta” or “polentone” (maize porridge) in the morning, bean or chickpea soup at lunch and wild herbs cooked with a bit of lard for supper; but most importantly, before eating this meagre supper, we never missed saying the Rosary. Still today I remember the time when my father Flaminio seemed to go on praying forever, and because I was so hungry that night, I protested. Dad, who was on his knees, got up and gave me a sound thrashing. I was about six years old.
I’ve never forgotten that night, because neither my mother nor my big brothers or grandmother dared to stand up for me; maybe it didn’t occur to my dad that I was just a child who was hungry….
In the 1950s we used oxen to till the land; my father would guide the plough and it was an enormous effort to keep it stuck in the arid soil for hours and hours every day. He would start ploughing towards three o’clock in the morning and stopped after seven hours. At ten years old I would get up at that time with my brother Enrico, my sister Viola and my mother. Like all ten-year-olds who get woken early, I complained and my mother would say: “Sweetheart, you weren’t born from a lady, but from the belly of a poor woman, so you have to get up and go and help your dad.” Such was life.
