Travel this Saturday to Portacomaro to celebrate the birthday of one of them. there will be roast bagna cauda and chocolate pudding.
Pope Francis will spend this weekend in Asti, in the northern Italian region of Piedmont, to meet with his second cousins and celebrate the 90th birthday of his cousin Carla Rabezzana on an unprecedented family trip to the land of his grandparents.
In the small town of Portacomaro, in the province of Asti and where she has lived since 2015, after being widowed, Carla Rabezzana prepare for days the arrival of on first “George”as they call Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis, who will arrive this Saturday to celebrate his 90th birthday, which was on November 8.
The pontiff is the son of Mario Bergoglio, first cousin of his mother Inés, and this family meal will also be joined by five other cousins and their families who will travel from Turin, Vaglierano and Tiglioleall cities in Piedmont.
“For a long time I wanted to spend a few hours with my relatives in my family’s places. Before I was a father, I often went to the Asti area, it was a custom: when he arrived in Rome as provincial of the Jesuits of Argentina, or as archbishop to participate in a synod”, Francis explained in an interview this Friday in the Turin newspaper “La Stampa”.
And he adds: “Every time I went to Piedmont to see my father’s cousins. With the older cousin, Carla, we often talk on the phone. Tomorrow (Saturday) we will meet together with five other cousins, and this fills me with joy“.
“Bagna cauda”
Francisco waits for his cousin to prepare the famous “bagna cauda”, one of his favorite dishes from Piedmont, a kind of garlic and anchovy sauce which is eaten with vegetables.
“For Saturday lunch, the other cousins and I will prepare some roast meat and lots of vegetables, he eats them a lot, especially now, and then the bonet, the cocoa-based pudding typical of Piedmontese cuisine. we will eat the birthday cake on Sunday, at lunch with the bishop, after mass,” Carla revealed to the Vatican media.
Explain that with the father often speaks “in Piedmontesebecause he is very attached to this land, which he considers his own, not just his parents’, and he understands the dialect very well, since his grandparents only spoke dialect”.
“I’ll ask him about his knee”
“I’ll hug him first, because We haven’t seen each other for three years, since the end of 2019, before the pandemic, when I went with my family to the Vatican. And then we’ll chat, as we do at least once a month by phone, like relatives who love each other. I’ll ask about her knee, which hurts now. He tells me this when we talk on the phone,” adds Rabezzana.
On Saturday, Francisco will spend the whole afternoon with his relatives in a meeting totally privatewhile the following day, November 20, when the feast of Christ the King is celebrated, he will preside at the mass in the cathedral of Asti to “embrace the local community from which their parents left to emigrate to Argentina”, they explain from the diocese.
In June 2015, he had been on an official visit to Turin and was also able to hug his family on that occasion.
The family tree
But since his election in 2013, the Asti city council has insistently asked the Pope to return to the land of his grandparents with invitations as original as a bottle of Grignolinothe local wine, with a special label: “Ast don’t look at your bras duert” (Asti awaits you with open arms).
According to the pontiff’s family tree reconstructed by the Asti City Council, the great-great-grandfather Giuseppe Bergoglio was born in 1816 in the village of Schierano, while the great-great-grandmother Gioacchino Maria, Antonio’s daughter, was born in 1819 in Cocconato d’Asti.
His grandfather, Giovanni Bergoglio (1884) emigrated to Turin in 1906 and married Rosa Vassallo, a native of Piana Crixia (Liguria), while the father of the pontiff, Mario Bergoglio, was born in Turin in 1908, the family returned to Asti, where he opened a grocery store before emigrating to Argentina.
The father and mother of the pope, Regina Sivori, from Savona (Liguria), and the grandparents of the future pontiff left for Buenos Aires on February 1, 1929.
EFE