01. Piazza Della Libertà – The folk dance
Collecting memories is important because eventually we, the elderly, will pass away. I would like to tell my grandchildren that their great-grandparents always held each other’s hands and I carry this powerful image with me. When you are old you think about your roots. Roots are the poetry of life.
“I wonder if my grandmothers ever went down to the sea? Maybe they never saw the sea.” There was once a time when people would go to Bordighera to take a sand bath because they suffered from arthrosis. Everyone dug a hole in the beach and got inside, then covered themselves in hot sand to sweat and that was the cure.
On Sunday afternoon, we used to go dancing liscio (ballroom dancing) at Bruno da Fransé’s under a grapevine pergola. At five o’clock his wife would say: “Now stop, that I have to iron”, because there was only one power socket where we plugged in the record player to dance. The boys from Bordighera would arrive, it was all word of mouth. The girls from Vallebona were famous because they were excellent dancers and the young men would come and ask them to dance. I remember drinking egg Marsala, I didn’t like it but I drank it anyway. At the dancefloor in the square they didn’t serve alcohol but only soft drinks. At Fransé’s I met my husband, he came from Bordighera and the first time he made his friend ask me for a dance because he was shy. I was 16 and he was 19.
St. Peter’s Day was a big celebration for the village: the dancefloor with the orchestra occupied the whole Liberty Square. For the occasion everyone returned, even those who had gone to work in France. They set up the wooden dance floor with the tent. Soft drinks would arrive by bus inside wooden baskets full of ice bars and we children were always around them. We fought to get the drink caps to play with. We stole pieces of ice to eat like ice creams and they seemed delicious to us. We girls walked quickly through the alleys with heels so high that I don’t know how we did it. At the dancefloor, our mothers stayed vigilant even when we were 16 years old, they always kept an eye on us.
In Vallebona there were two seamstresses who made dresses for the dance. The godet was used a lot, it was a French model made entirely of pleats. For us the celebration began months beforehand, when we started thinking about the dress we would wear, the fabric to buy and it was a real living experience. Time went by more slowly as we waited for the dance with great excitement.
When we were kids, right after lunch we would run to the square to play fistball, we had fistball competitions and once we won the first prize in Camporosso. I was a professional cyclist, at 16 years old I did bike races. I won my first race from Ventimiglia to Castelvittorio in 1946. Then, I moved up to a higher category and became an amateur. Back then we raced with tubulars hanging from our shoulders and when we got a flat tire, we had to stop and change the tubular all by ourselves without assistance. One time I had a flat tire, I changed it and I finished fourth. De Filippi arrived first, then he went on to win the Giro d’Italia.
I was very sorry but I had to stop competing because at that time it wasn’t financially possible to train daily, you had to work every day and dreams and passions ended. It used to be like that. My life would have been different but unfortunately my family couldn’t afford my training. But I was good at cycling and I loved the challenge. I was also good at soccer, I played for the Sanremese (team in Sanremo), but they only reimbursed me for the train tickets, they didn’t pay me anything else and I couldn’t afford to continue. My father needed me to work in the fields.
