From Rome with love

My mother, Regina, was born in Friuli, in the north east of Italy, a Region that had mountains as a crown and the sea as a grey scarf tied around its sandy neck. She lived in an old pink villa - that had a big green garden and a big green gate open to fields and vineyards - together with her mother, my grandma -  Stella, a star, as I am Ester, same name in babylonese.. - and with an old lady that cooked and cleaned and that was called like the first woman on earth: Eve. My mother hated house and all as much as she adored her father, who was an officer and a gentleman and had died in a prison up in some little village in Germany. He had died, as an italian prisoner from Albania, when she was only sixteen and since then little Regina, who was tall and dark and shy, had decided that she would leave for good the pink house, her mother and old Eve...

Her dreams came true on a summer's day when she spotted my father on the sandy beach that bore the poetic name of Lignano Goldsand (sabbiadoro). She was there with an aunt of hers who had a basket of kids; also my father was guest in an aunt's house, but she had no kids at all. She saw him and he saw her and they fell in love. September danced in the line with its bags of  rain and  clouds. My father back to Rome, my mother to the pink house. The months flew on Pegasus back. My father sent my mother a thin postcard. She did not even reply. I do not know if her silence spoke to him or if love had done it all, I only know that, one day, he knocked on the door of the pink house and that was that...
Many years after, my mother showed me his postcard. On one side the white meringue that tickles the skyes on top of Borromini's Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, on the other only this sentence: "Be happy". The  love song of a lawyer...