An Italian childhood - Maria Martinelli

‘I was born in 1938 on a small self-sufficient farm on the outskirts of Ascoli Piceno, a city on the north coast of the Adriatic Sea. I am the 10^th child of a family of 12, seven brothers, four sisters and myself.’

So begins Maria Martinelli’s life story.[1]

The Fern Street house

Every weekend, from the age of two in 1938 until he was about 24, Brian Archer stayed at his grandmother’s two storey weatherboard house in Fern Street, Islington.

Not far from the house was the railway line.

Every time a train passed through, the building shook from the vibrations.

Mac's Fruit Shop

‘He knew every piece of fruit in the shop. If anyone touched anything, he could tell!’

So says Julie Lomax, whose father Norman (Gaetano) Santamaria ran Mac’s Fruit Shop at 138 Beaumont Street, Hamilton, spanning the years of World War II, from 1939 to 1946.

I wondered how someone from the Aeolian islands in Italy’s far south, with the name Santamaria, happened to call his shop by the very English-sounding ‘Mac’s.’