Bagnolo Piemonte,

27.12.15, 11.00h

Mario Picotto, is my father,
he was born on the 20th of September 1938.
He lives with the rest of the family in a small village in Piemonte, in the Cuneo province.
His family has roots there since 1580.

As a boy he attends a technical school, and, under the suggestion of a teacher, he continues his studies oriented in the direction of his future profession.
He works as Geometer in his village, beside two other big professional concurrents at the time; working honestly and at his best, he manages to find his clients.

His big ambition is to have a house for him self...made by himself.

Searching, he finds a piece of land some hundreds of meters from the village center, an area considered at the time as suburban, he manages to buy it and some years later, he obtains the permission to construct on it: he works as manpower during the day with the builders, bringing them the materials and helping them, and, at the end of the day and during the night, he works at his office job.

He has some debts in the beginning, but he manages slowly to save money, get over the debts and secure, for his older years, a house no one could send him away from…
He has a strong relationship with it, and he loves the sunlight that illuminates, during all the day, a different part of the house.
A kitchen, a living room and a terrace, two bathrooms and a big corridor to connect to the night part with the 3 bedrooms and a small room to put things in order.
Mario designs his house, and from travel in Sicily he takes the memory of some mediterranean architecturales shapes, trying to adapt them to the surroundings, from Provence he gets the inspiration for the shape of the windows (our territory was part of Provence) giving the building a personal touch.

Mario thinks that furniture and decoration, books and paintings make the warmth of the space and create the feeling of home. Over the years he manages to find objects and furniture that are abandoned or badly treated, that reconditioned became beautiful and precious in his eyes.

I ask my father how important is security for his life…

Security for him is the most important thing.
As a child he saw people begging and he always thought he should try to organize his life in order to never find himself in this situation.

As a child, his first house, called the house of Albertenghi, was on the village square: Mario was very young when German Soldiers came to send him and his family away and burn their house; he remembers this episode and still gets emotional thinking how the soldiers forbade him to take his puppets, sending him away with a gun.

The family ends up with nothing and lives during some years in a house in the countryside where Mario spends part of his youth having as friend a black and white dog (the dog one day is lost). They live there until they manage to return to the village, going to live in an old building, where they would stay until the death of Mario’s father.
At 20 Mario opens his studio and he buys his first Fiat 600 second hand, in order to manage to go to other offices and work more independently.

Once married he rents, on the village “main road”, a flat where he lives with his wife and the first child (building, at the same time, his own house).

Mario remembers this first family flat as pretty, with a small garden, but also noisy, especially on Sunday mornings when it was possible to know, still in bed, if it would be a sunny or a bad weather day, listening to the amount of cars passing in the street under their window.

In the house where they moved next, the one he built, they have a garden too.

My father loves nature, especially during the spring season, when flowers start to blossom; he would like still to work in his garden but due to his physical condition he can not do too much; he loves fruit plants to eat food that is not poisoned, and he considers the garden as part of his house, trying to take care of it with flowers blossoming in all the seasons of the year.
I ask him why he had cut down some of the plants he had (something that I remember awith sadness): he explains he did it because of security and because of the view of the mountain they were obstructing, (the mountain where walked as a child, and where he worked as an adult).
At the same time he says plants give a lot of work, and becoming old it is important to try to reduce the work one has on his shoulders.

Mario’s wife has a green-house that Mario built, and where, beside the constant effort of the work required, she likes to work.

I ask Mario which kind of sound he hears and he considers part of his house: he refers to the singing of the birds, especially when in good weather it is possible to wake up with open windows, the alarms of the neighbors, installed to secure the houses, but ringing often by accident, the heating “Tun Tun” in the walls of the house, when the system has started to heat again, the sound of television and especially the Music: something for him sublime.

I ask him about his relation with the street and the village life, and Mario refers to the fact he does not like to go to bars as he does not drink or smoke;

as a young boy he went to the village bars sometimes at night, as during the day he had to work;

In his village there is not so much other street life beside the market day on Wednesday, and on Sunday the Missa.

In the past, people from the mountains, from the countryside and from the village gathered together in the square on Sunday…to meet and to arrange business…now he explains there are fewer people joining there together…maybe now having cars they can move and chose other destinations for their free day!

…to listen is to imagine…

Grazie papà per questa bella chiacchierata…e per raccontarmi pezzetti di una vita durante la quale ancora non ero presente.

Good Listening!