Chapter 10 My Brothers - Shared Roots, Different Paths
My brothers Remo, Mario, Carmine, and Maurizio form one of the longest threads running through my life. We came from the same family, carried the same Italian roots, and grew up in Belgium, yet each of us found his own path. As in every family, we were not always alike in character or conviction. Yet beneath everything remained the knowledge that we belonged together.
Remo was eight years older than I was, and Mario four years older. In my early years, they were not only brothers to me, but also examples of a world I still had to learn about. Later came Carmine, born in 1950, and Maurizio, born in 1955. And so our family continued to grow around my father and mother, each person with his own place at the table and in the story.
I remember Mario as a warm and generous man, someone with a good heart. His death once again left an empty place in our family. When we gather today, he is not visibly present, but his name and his character live on in our conversations.
Over the years, you learn that brotherly love does not mean always sharing the same opinion or constantly being together. It also lies in knowing that you share a common origin, in memories no one else fully understands, and in the certainty that part of your youth is preserved in the other person.
When we return to Loreto Aprutino, past and present meet. The family homes, the streets, and the faces take us back to those who came before us. At such a moment, I see not only the men we have become, but also the boys who once began their lives within the same family.
That is why these photographs have a place in this book. Not to claim that everything was always easy, but to preserve what proved stronger than time and distance: the bond between brothers and the gratitude that we were allowed to travel part of the road together.
We carried the same family name and the same earliest memories, but we did not become copies of one another. Remo, Mario, Carmine, Maurizio, and I each chose our own path. In a large family, camaraderie and clashes exist side by side. We could tease one another, disagree, and then stand side by side again without many words. Blood ties do not automatically make a relationship simple; they do give it a history that can never be recreated elsewhere.
In my memory, Mario remains an exceptionally warm and generous man. His death brought another silence into our family. When we later stood together in Loreto Aprutino, the happiness was real, but never entirely innocent: in every photograph, you also know who can no longer come and stand beside you. Yet for this book I did not choose a solemn group photograph in black suits. I want to preserve my brothers as I most like to see them: outdoors, in our birthplace, close to the ground where our family began.