The Peretti Family Myth

I first learned about Nada Peretti from my grandmother.

My grandmother always heard what she wanted to hear, and only ever spoke of things she was ready to acknowledge. In our family, that is the way. She never intended for me to take an interest in her aunt, but it was her writing that led me straight to Nada, and to Nada’s naughty book.

While on a visit to a relative’s house not too far from Morrovalle, the town where my grandmother's family is from, my dad’s sisters and I were quietly going through a box of old photos tucked away in the attic. I’ll never forget the moment when in that box we found, among other things, a sepia headshot of a young Nada, looking as haughty and proud as her writing makes her sound. She’s wearing a poofy updo, a dress with a frilly collar, and ribbons in her hair. The headshot is embedded in a thin cardboard frame upon which you can find her signature, an illegible embossed stamp, the photographer’s signature and the place where the photo was taken - Via Telesio, Cosenza. Calabria.

Nada Peretti, Cosenza, Circa 1904

“What was she doing there??” I thought.

Seeing her likeness for the first time felt a little short of surreal. She looked nothing like the stereotypical “Peretti” family members, with their deep-set green eyes and lighter hair. My aunts and I gave each other furtive looks as we snapped pictures of a picture with our phones, afraid one of our Italian cousins would come in and discover we were stealing evidence of our most verboten ancestors.

Nada’s biggest sin, it seemed, was writing some sort of scandalous book that my grandmother pretended to know nothing about. At first I didn’t even know what it was called. All I knew was that the books were, according to my grandmother, “not sanctioned by the Holy See.”

Like many Italian women of her generation, my Nonna was quite devout. And apparently, so was her father Enea. She would often describe the rift that had run through the Peretti family from several generations back. Her grandfather, Ugo, was an atheist who had reportedly died “blaspheming.” But somehow, her father Enea ended up at a religious boarding school during his childhood years, which cemented the religious belief system that he would then transmit down to all six of his kids.

Apparently, the other faction in the family included my great-grandfather’s sister Nada. Their father Ugo had left home as a young man to join up with Garibaldi’s army - the volunteer army that fought for Italian unification in the mid-1800s. And one of the key elements of Garibaldi’s philosophy was his opposition to the Church. That’s the cloth that my great-great-aunt Nada was cut from.

My grandmother often proudly told the story of how, on Nada’s deathbed, her brother took her in and cared for her, both physically and spiritually. After working his magic for a few months, he managed to convince her to renounce her atheism and come back to the Church, which she did, willingly, before she passed away at the young age of fifty-one. But not before asking her brother to burn her most famous book.

Or so we were all told. But that didn’t sit well with me. And that’s when the digging started.