An offer I couldn't refuse

Over Easter, Amanda and her mother went to Sicily to track down their Italian ancestors.

They took me along to be the driver, as Italians seem to have a fairly free-and-easy attitude to road rules.

This, for example, is a not-untypical way to park in Sicily.

We flew into Palermo, drove diagonally down across the island to Catania, and then made trips north around the volcano Mount Etna to Messina.

Naturally, we played The Godfather CD (the Il Padrino) soundtrack almost to death. Do you remember Kristina playing The Godfather love theme on the violin at our wedding? Sicilian, innit?

As the driver, I was glad to have a small car, because some of those roads are tight.

Miraculously, thanks to Amanda's great idea of tracing her Italian-American ancestor's brother, my clever wife managed to get us to the tiny village in northern Sicilia where both boys were born, and one of them died.
This is the beautiful cemetery where so many of their family are buried.

And this is her speaking in broken Italian to the little cemetery groundsman. They are going through the records of all those buried there in the key years, trying to find leads which might lead us to living relatives.

And here is one of those living relatives, who we managed to meet on the final day, hours before we had to fly back to Standstill airport.

84 years old, a retired politician from the village, he took us round the same cemetery, showing us the graves of their direct ancestors, as opposed to the extended family we'd already found, who just share the same name.

None of this would have been possible if Amanda had not spent the weeks before the trip learning Italian, so that she and her mother would have the best shot of tracing relatives and ancestors with the minimal documents they had.

This, of course, was immediately after the herculean work she'd put into acquiring the qualifications needed for us to keep our place in London.

The longer we're married, the more admiration and respect I have for my wife.