07. Via Scudier – The local shops
In the past, trades were passed from father to son for generations — it was tradition. Working life began at an early age.
When I started working in the carpentry shop, I was eleven years old and in fifth grade. Back then, we used local woods: walnut, olive, pine, and larch. People who needed, for example, a pickaxe or a pruning tool came with their own piece of wood to be cut, planed, and shaped into a handle.
When I was ten, I went to school in the morning and worked in the afternoon picking olives by hand — the ones that had fallen to the ground. At that time, we waited for the wind to knock them down. I put them in a basket, and the landlady gave me a few coins. At twelve, I went to Montenero to collect firewood for the baker — I had to carry logs for the oven. It was heavy work.
Tumà was the fisherman. He came from Bordighera Alta with his little cart to sell fish. The road wasn’t paved, but he came barefoot, wearing his usual corduroy trousers rolled up like the fishermen. He always wore the same ones. Tumà began shouting as he entered the village: “Fish! Bogue! Anchovies!” All the cats knew him — they came down to the piazza and waited on the step. He put the fish in a basket and, followed by cats, came up to us. We bought fish with a plate in hand, because there was no packaging.
The butcher came to Vallebona on the Saturday bus. To keep the meat fresh, he brought big slabs of ice and broke them up. We children stood around to grab the ice shards, washed them at the fountain, and licked them like popsicles. It was fun.
If you needed the midwife, you’d go fetch her by bicycle from Borghetto.
Vallebona once had three carpenters, a blacksmith to shoe the mules, seamstresses, four cobblers, and seven olive mills — in the village and along the stream. Everyone worked. Today, there isn’t even one olive mill left. There were two bakeries, and the smell of fresh bread filled the streets.
Then came the shops: the dairy, five grocers, two butchers, a haberdashery, a newsstand that sold a bit of everything. They opened at six in the morning and closed around eight or nine at night — even on Sundays.
Back then, there were no refrigerators, so shops didn’t sell cured meats or cheese. The stores were points of reference for the community — places to meet, to chat, to find out what was happening. News traveled through the shops.
On Sundays, if we had money, we’d go to “La Rosa Napoletana” (now “U Carugiu”) to buy ice cream.
We brought our own bags to the shop. There were just three kinds of pasta: spaghetti, farfalle, and avemaria. I remember the blue-and-white checkered cloth bundles tied in a knot with pasta inside. Goods were kept in sacks — sugar, flour, wheat, bran, chestnut flour — and scooped out with a wooden ladle.
Paper came later. I was fascinated watching Chiara wrap packages, the way her fingers curled the paper with such skill. On the top shelf of her shop were jars full of candy: mints, licorice boats, valda. One jar had big-looking chocolates that were actually hollow inside, wrapped in shiny red paper — so beautiful. With ten soldi she gave us a packet of mints or an effervescent cedrata that fizzed in your mouth as it melted slowly.
That’s how it was back then.
