BOLZANO. “Pleasure Palmarin”. “My pleasure! I’m also a Palmarin.”
This is the greeting during the exchange of presentations at the Corte Carezzabella farmhouse in San Martino di Venezze (Rovigo).
The Palmarin families from different cities met to meet and get to know each other, arriving one by one in the courtyard square whose name derives from the toponym “Carezà bela” “beautiful carriage road”, the one that still crosses the entire property today.
Many hugs from relatives who had not seen each other for many years. A pleasant and intense celebration for those who left as children eighty years ago, together with their parents, to look for work elsewhere: Padua, Rovigo, Milan, Verona, Bolzano, Venice and Regina (Canada).
Almost all of them found themselves here, together with their children and grandchildren, after years of working in the offices and factories of the north, or even as freelancers.
A celebration of young and old who embraced each other in a courtyard, near the orchard which is still part of the place where their ancestors, who were still boys, had worked at least 100 years earlier. Some left for the reclamation of the Agro Pontino and never returned, some emigrated to another continent and were employed in Canadian factories when the job prospects of the Polesine area were not attractive, others were employed in offices and banks, others remained nearby and many were hired by large factories in the north, first and foremost “Lancia” and “Acciaierie” in Bolzano.
A gathering therefore of related and unrelated Palmarin people, united by their surname and a great desire to be together. A space dedicated to everyone, to retrace the stages of their life, in which especially the elderly spoke; the story of one’s childhood, the school, the war, the bombings, the houses in the semi-rural neighborhood of Bolzano where ten people could sleep in a small space, the factory, the foundry, the ovens always on, the dust, the unbearable heat and the “get by” with what you had.
Beppino’s story is emblematic: at 90 years of age he remembered dates and names in a particular way, moving that of others, and in their place of the children who arrived here, and who brought their memories, the memories of those who are no longer here , and who sought to build an honest future in new and initially unknown cities.
It also happened that apparently unique memories found themselves unconsciously overlapped and connected to someone else’s events, only to then discover in some cases, a parental bond that was really there and even close. And also the memory of the “gondoliers de casada” who carried on a Venetian tradition with this surname, because it is also said that the origin of that surname starts from that city. Emotions and laughter then also filled the day of those who had chosen to arrive here, enlivened by the excellent cuisine of the Lucchin brothers and by the availability of Chiara, the owner of the farmhouse, who illustrated that place still rich in history. All ended with the commitment of a next meeting, linked despite everything to this land, and in the name of the surname.