You Can Go Home Again, Kind Of, Sort Of...

Lately, I've had the very interesting experience of spending some time in my hometown, after more than 25 years away.

When it comes to hometowns, I'm luckier than most. I was born and raised in San Diego, California. It's the sort of place where people come to vacation. Growing up, it seemed pretty normal to me. It took me years to realize that the rest of the United States wasn't like California.

The city has changed quite a lot in recent years. It's a lot more interesting, overall—more liberal, more cultural, more cosmopolitan. When I was a kid, San Diego seemed to be in a massive civic denial that it was on the border of another country--basically the attitude was, "Let's pretend we're Iowa, except with better weather by an ocean!" I have the sense that, overall, there's more acceptance and embrace of this being in part a Mexican city, inextricably bound to Tijuana across the border and to Mexico as a whole.  It's possible this is me being a utopian optimist, but I hope I'm right.

I've been exploring the neighborhood where I lived when I was in high school, where my parents still live. It's...interesting. As you head south, it's a pretty spread out, designed more for cars than for people, with a broad street paralleling the freeway called Morena Blvd.

A lot of nuts and bolts sort of businesses, building supply stores, paint, tile, woodwork.  I took a walk, and took a few photos.. This was the first place that caught my eye, in a "really, WTF is this?" kind of way:

"Not in association with Local 325"

These are the kinds of businesses you find along the way: 

But there are some interesting things going on in some of these formerly industrial spaces...

Not sure what was going on here, but it looked interesting

This was totally cool

There were a number of "hard-core," "Old-school" gyms, including a Russian kettle-ball academy:

And, I guess it wouldn't be America if there weren't one of these:

One of the most interesting things that's happened in San Diego is that the city has become a center of craft brewing in the United States. Like, one of the top three cities in the country. Throw a baseball, hit a microbrewery, including some larger scale operations like Stone Brewing, Ballast Point, Coronado Brewing Company and Green Flash that have become nationally known and that have won a bunch of awards. There happen to be two brewery/tasting rooms in this neighborhood, just a short walk from each other: Ballast Point's Home Brewing Center, and Coronado Brewing's Company's brewery and tasting room.

Oh, man. If you like good beer at all, this is pretty much heaven. San Diego brewers do a lot of interesting, off-beat and downright delicious beers. One consequence of this is that you have to work pretty hard to go to a San Diego restaurant or venue that does not have delicious, fresh, local beer available.

Also in the neighborhood -- awesome bar specializing in Ballast Point brews

Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres, is a veritable craft beer Mecca:

Also, you can get Filippi's by the slice. Baseball, Filippi's, great craft beer...Heaven! 

It's amazing how many people here take beer very seriously. At the baseball game, I had a couple discussions about Sculpin IPA (available on draft!). People are into this. 

And what's interesting is that as the craft beer scene has grown and developed, the whole localvore/food scene has as well. I mean, there's an honest-to-gawd gastropub on Morena Blvd: 

Yummy! 

Which really makes a lot of sense to me. You see people making all this wonderful craft beer, and it's not very much of a step to start appreciating food more as well, maybe even to get local with with it. Maybe think more about the quality of what you're eating, and where it comes from, how it's produced. What that all means. Maybe you start questioning whether it's such a good idea to eat mass-produced meat dosed with antibiotics and chemicals, pesticide-ladened vegetables, processed food full of sugar and GMOs. And how that has the potential to lead to all kinds of really interesting movements with political ramifications. 

In other words, good beer will save the world!

Lisa -- Sunday...

Greece's Sun and Moon God Twins: Apollo and Artemis

I had dinner the other night at one of my favorite places on Mykonos, a bamboo-capped, white stone shack perched at the bottom of a waning crescent moon beach close-by the old town.  It’s called Niko’s Place but everyone knows it as Joanna’s (to distinguish it from the better known and also delightful Niko’s Taverna just off the old port).  It’s nestled in a cove on what once was the island’s most famous beach, Megali Ammos, before new roads made dozens of other beaches readily accessible. 

For me, there’s no more beautiful spot for sunset than Joanna’s.  The sea shimmers in combinations of gun-metal blue, silver, and gold against a backdrop of vermilion skies and shadowy forms of distant islands.  But for a lone white church with a blood red roof on the tiny island of Baou at the entrance to the bay, nothing in view suggests that the hand of man played a part in any of this––unless of course you look sharply to the left or right.  But no one comes here to do that.  This is a place for remembering simpler times and watching a glowing orange ball fade below the horizon.

On a clear day (as most are) you can see Tinos to the right, Syros dead ahead, and a bit of Rhenia (or big Delos, as the locals call it) off to the left.  Delos is out there too, around a bend to the left and less than a mile away.  I wrote about Delos in my very first Murder is Everywhere post.

It’s hard not to think of Delos as you watch the sunset.  After all, Delos is where Apollo, god of the sun, and his twin-sister, Artemis, the original divine personification of the moon were born to their mother, Leto, out of her assignation with Zeus.  Delos wasn’t Leto’s first choice for a delivery room, because back then it was little more than a rock bouncing around the Aegean Sea.  But she had little choice because Zeus’ wife (and sister—more about that here), Hera, had the world fearing her jealous wrath, and only tiny Delos saw nothing to lose in making a “You take care of me, I’ll take care of you bargain” with Zeus.

Birth of Artemis and Apollo to Leto

From the moment of Apollo’s birth, when golden light flooded down upon Delos, the island prospered, so much so that it rose to emerge as one of antiquity’s bastions of commerce and religiosity.

But Apollo didn’t stick around his birthplace very long.  Jealous Hera drove Leto away from her children forcing Apollo to grow up quickly—in a matter of hours to be precise (on a diet of nectar and ambrosia)—and begin a pilgrimage that launched his myth, one of the oldest of all Greek myths and one of the few of entirely Greek creation (as opposed to foreign influences).

Although Apollo’s exploits gave rise to his being known by many different names and titles—Karneios, Hyakinthios, Pythios, Thargelios, Nomios, Delphinios, Ismenios, Hebdomeios, Lykios, Musagetes, etcetera—they all in one way or another derived from his link to the eternal operation of the sun and all that the ancients attributed to it.

In much the same way Apollo’s sister, Artemis, found that the qualities attributed to the moon—bringing fertility to the earth through cool, dew filled nights and casting light into the dark night offering protection to flocks and hunters—had her identified with those traits (fertility, hunting) and called by names and titles linked to those perceived powers of the moon: Agrotora, Kalliste, Diktynna, Britomartis, Eleuthro, Orthia, Limnaia, Potamia, Munychia, Brauronia, Amarynthia, etcetera.

Adonis and Artemis

As a duet, Apollo and Artemis might be best known for a bloody, Bonnie and Clyde-style episode brought on by an affront to their mother (and them) by the daughter of a king who boasted that her own children were “more beautiful” than Leto’s.  Talk about perturbing the wrong folk.  Artemis and Apollo promptly punished the prideful mother (Niobe) by slaying all of her children, Artemis by arrows the daughters, and Adonis by arrows the sons.  In her anguish the mother turned to stone.

On the off chance I’ve written something that a buddy of those Delosian twins might find offensive, please don’t come looking for me.  You’ll want to talk to Alexander S. Murray who wrote Who’s Who in Mythology.  It’s his book that’s responsible for driving this post…so help me gods.

Jeff—Saturday

Fact and Fiction. The Crime Writers' Responsibility?

I recall being at a forensics event where my good pal the crime writer Alex Gray was speaking.  It was a few days after the spree killing in Cumbria where Derrick Bird had killed 12 people. Bird had shot his twin brother eleven times then drove to the office of the family solicitor and killed him also.  Derrick was a taxi driver himself when he opened fire on four other taxi drivers, killing the only one he actually knew. The police considered them targeted shootings, but Bird then went on a random spree killing another nine people.

Alex

Bird was a granddad, described as a popular and quiet man.  There have been many reasons speculated, a family feud over  money, he had just been  rejected by a Thai girl he had met on holiday and three of the dead had worked at the  Sellafield power plant where Bird had been  accused of stealing wood, found guilty and received a twelve month suspended sentence.

                                       

                                                       Derrick Bird

Against that background, Alex had to stand up and promote crime fiction to the police and forensic staff who deal with these tragedies day in and day out. It was a tough call.

She started her speech by saying that she wasn't that proud to be a crime writer on that particular day. I understood what she meant but it's not something that has ever troubled me in particular.  Real people commit real crimes. We write stories that amuse people waiting in airports and in dentists' waiting rooms. We set puzzles for people to solve. The two things are miles apart.

But thinking about it, I realise that I do have some reservations about a crime writing friend of mine who openly admits that all her fiction is based on fact. She cuts stories out of newspapers, changes the name, sexes them up a bit and hey presto there's a new novel. So much that the real people involved are recognisable in the fiction. I also remember listening to a TV scriptwriter who said that she bought stories from victims of crime to use in her TV series.  Big ones to base the series on and smaller stories to act as background.  (I think she called the little ones stringers). I then watched the TV show, the story was based on the murder of a four year old child who had been killed and put in a drain pipe. I knew it was based on a true story - and I couldn't watch it.

 I can watch true documentary of crime as long as they are well made, but not drama based on fact...because at the end of the day it is entertainment based on the tragic death of somebody's son, somebody's daughter.  Even in fiction, I think it is a big turn off for the reader when the murder becomes a technical exercise, with it having no emotional effect on anybody, especially the investigative team.

It's a line I think we all have to draw somewhere.

However to balance that I do believe that crime writers have a chip of ice in their heart, as do most medics. You need to have an investigative mind. As soon as the empathy is over, the investigation begins - the what if's, and the why's, and all the other questions.

I've thought a fair bit about including this case in this blog, as it is close to the bone. If I had read it in a fictional novel, it is fascinating, reading a factual account would be interesting

 but as it happened  in the last week, not to somebody that I know, but somebody who is a friend of a good friend it's a bit raw but also serves as an example that we should be aware of the tight rope that we walk sometimes.

                                    

                                                               Margaret and Nicola

This case raises all kinds of questions, something that we might never get to the bottom of. It is a tragedy in every sense of the word.

It concerns a mother and daughter, two very normal people from Paisley. Margaret was 52, a nice, happy woman, committed politically - she had stood for the Lib Dems in two local elections - a hard working woman, mother of five grown up kids, foster mother to another two. She was divorced but on very good terms with her ex husband.

Her daughter Nicola was 23, a graduate in social work and was working for a local charity.

Then last week something went drastically and horribly wrong.

On Thursday at 9am, Margaret dropped off one of the children at nursery in Paisley. She is then seen with Nicola in Balloch at about 11am. The 17 hours after that are confusing. At 2pm Margaret fails to pick up the child from the nursery, the staff alert the family, the police pay a  visit to the family home at night as a routine call. But it's not in Margaret character to fail to turn up where she was expected.  There are now concerns about their welfare.

                                     

                                             Premier Inn, Courtesy of The Daily Record

Later it was discovered they had driven to Greenock and checked into the Premier Inn (which is a respectable motel type of place ideal for short stays for business men, overnight stays for early morning flights etc)

On Thursday night, they are both spotted in Linwood and Paisley, before returning to the Premier Inn somewhere between 12.30 and 1 am.

                                    

                                                      The last known movements- courtesy of the Scotsman

The tragedy unfolds at 7am the next morning, when a guest of the inn walking along the corridor discovers Nicola, lying badly injured in the hall. Her mother is found in a nearby room. The wounds have been described as slash wounds.

Both are rushed to hospital, the mother is critical, the daughter is serious. Margaret died later in hospital. Nicola held onto life for two more days, her dad holding a vigil at her bedside. Then she too passed away from her injuries.

The local papers are all screaming blood bath.

But it has to be noted that the police, very early on said that they were not looking for any third party. Vague sources (who refuse to be named) say that there may have been a suicide pact between mother and daughter and that an amount of paracetamol was found in the room. As yet the police do not have the results of any tox screen.

The police are still very keen to find out why they were driving around the area back tracking on themselves, why book an inn less than twenty miles from where they lived?  And so the questions go on, so the chip of ice eats away. And I'm sure it is eating away at their family and friends more than anyone.

The police as yet have given no indication as to cause of death, but they have confirmed that the family was not known to them.

The whys and the what ifs - the strange drive, the last few hours,  what was going on in that room, why did nobody hear, why did nobody help, could anybody have helped... we just don't know... and we may never know.

Maybe at the end of the day it is none of our business.

It's all very sobering and a reminder that we do have some responsibility in what we write, and that we shrug off that responsibility at our peril. But I'm sure that some crime writers take comfort in trying to make sense of such heartbreak.

                                       

Here's Nicola in happier terms, a clever, bonnie lassie with everything in life ahead of her.   Like I said, a huge tragedy.

Caro GB 17/05/2013 

SOETE SONDER END

This is a story of love, courage, and feet-on-the-ground entrepreneurship. 

I don't have any children of my own, but I love kids in general.  So when my late brother's eldest son, Ivor, and his wife, Marie Louise, had a daughter, Maya, 22 months ago, I appointed myself as honorary grandpa.  This was made a little easier by the fact that they live in a South African village called Riviersonderend (River without end) only a three-and-a-half-hour drive from the small town of Knysna (pronounced NY-ZNUH) where I spend half the year.

The two never had much money, and they ran an outlet in Riviersonderend for Marie's father, selling the South African delicacy called biltong to travellers on the N2 - the main road along the south and east coasts of South Africa.  Biltong - dried, seasoned meat similar to but tastier than jerky - is extremely popular, so they managed to keep the hyenas from the door.  But barely so, especially after baby Maya arrived.

Marie-Louise was very worried about their financial situation and decided to take matters into her own hands, amply assisted by Ivor.  What follows is her account that I took from Facebook of how she started a small business called Soete Sonder End, which means Sweets (or Candies) Without End.  Marie-Louise has Afrikaans as her first language; Ivor's is English.  Both are bilingual, and Maya will have two first languages.

_____________________________

THE STORY OF SOETE SONDER END AND HOW IT ALL STARTED

I started making fudge for our biltong shop two years ago with the idea to supplement our income. Using my grandmother's recipe and after loads of tears and many late nights, we finally got a great product.

I was six months pregnant and woke up one morning feeling very discouraged, thinking how will we be able to look after little Maya if we don't even have enough for ourselves. I asked the Lord to please give me guidance.

That same week, my housemaid Christine's husband accidentally stepped onto their 4 month old puppy which led to a broken hip. That Friday morning we took the puppy “Ounooi” to the SPCA. After a long wait the vet told us that he will have to operate and we will have to put down R800 (about $100) on Monday or they will have to put Onooi down. Christine was in tears...

That night I could not sleep, trying to figure out how we are going to get the money in two days? The next morning I woke up and phoned Christine telling her she better hurry up, we are going to make fudge and sell it in town.

The Golf Club had a golf day on and everybody told us we should try and sell our fudge there as well.  Andre, the captain of the club, was so kind to tell the whole sad story at the prize giving and auctioned the fudge starting at a R100! Some people were even willing to pay a R150!

By the end of the day we made R800! What a wonderful closed knit community we have, I thought to myself, everybody is always willing to help.

They absolutely loved the fudge and it made me realize that maybe I should take this further. The Lord gave me the guts to go out there and sell my product. The next week I got into my car starting at the Oumeul Bakery in town and went all the way down the N2...

I must say my big belly helped a lot because a lot of people could not say no to a pregnant lady....

Two years later we have 6 ladies in our employ. Making our own condensed milk and producing over two tonnes of fudge a month. We supply close to 250 shops and are now also making coconut ice. We have plans to start making our own butter soon. The feedback we get from our customers is very positive, and they are always asking us what we are going to make next.

Marie-Louise

_________________________

Obviously I'm very biased in this case, but I love to see people work hard to make things better for themselves.  Marie-Louise and her staff make the soete, and Ivor delivers all them over the Western Cape.  The only downside I see to the enterprise is that it is taking time away from Marie-Louise's artistic expression.  On the wall is a large mosaic that I commissioned from her a few years ago.

Throughout all of this, Ivor and Marie-Louise are truly equal parents - a pleasure to watch.  And Maya is one happy kid.

Thank you for indulging my sentimental side.

Stan - Thursday

On the rocks

 

There is a difference between Europeans and Americans that I have noted from observations in restaurants on each side of the Atlantic. Nothing huge and it only applies in general. Europeans do not like lots of ice in their soft drinks and Americans do. If you buy a glass of coke on an extremely hot day in Europe you will get one or two ice cubes that will melt away before you can bring the glass to your scorched lips. In America you will get all the ice you want and your drink is guaranteed to be very cold. This is just a matter of taste – I am sure the drink does the same magic irrespective of its temperature – within a certain range of course.

Personally I like ice since I like cold drinks when thirsty. My husband would rather skip the ice in his. Since we are both European one might think it counter my theory about the difference in European and American tastes regarding ice cubes but it does not. It actually is the basis of another theory, one based on a two person sample. This theory is that it is in childhood when one develops the taste for cold American drinks or not so cold European ones. I spent part of my childhood in America and my husband all of his here in Iceland.     

It is interesting that of all matter in the world the only non-metallic substance that starts expanding when about to freeze is water. Other materials contract. The general rule is the hotter matter is the more energy it has to overcome the ties that bind – hence it expands. But water, once frozen takes up 9% more space than it did when in its liquid state. A bit like expenses, they usually expand to 9% over income.

This anomaly is extremely beneficial for us humans. Not because we like the occasional drink on the rocks and would prefer them floating on the top and not lying at the bottom of the glass. The benefit is much greater than that. And it also applies equally to elephants, birds, worms and fish. As well as all the other animals that I can’t remember. But especially the fish.

Great, great......great grandfather many times removed - a fish out of water

If water behaved like other liquids it would contract when frozen and become denser and heavier. It would therefore freeze from bottom up or what froze on the surface would sink to the bottom, killing all bottom vegetation. And this would mean all other life in this water could not survive which is serious stuff since all life not only originated in water but evolved there. So our relative the fish that grew lungs and legs would never have grazed on that prehistoric water bank, looked around and thought: not bad. No sharks, no currents. Warm. Not bad at all.

Life on earth as we know it is all because of water expanding when frozen.

So we can thank life to the behaviour of water, or more precisely the behaviour of ice. Meaning that Iceland is a very nice name for a country. No matter how you like your drinks.

Oddly enough this started off as a post about lava.

 

Yrsa - Wednesday

Madame Pierrette la belle Resistant

Madame Pierrette Rossi or Villars, her nom de Guerre, is  97 years old and was a Resistant in Lyon during the war. Just a month before Lyon was liberated she was denounced and deported on the last convoy to Ravensbruck.  She had coffee with me on a sunny afternoon in Paris, a block from her apartment on Blvd de Montparnasse. With her helper, a lovely woman from the Ukraine, we spent several hours and Madame explained more about her exploits during the war.
"I was on the last convoy, just my luck," she said. Her father ran a printing press, her mother had died when she was seven months old, while her grandmother helped raise her and her sister 'laissez-faire' giving her an independence. Pierrette has a certain resilience, fiestiness and little time for fools but a warmth that shines through. She's also a bit deaf, and speaks loudly for which she apologizes. She's also trés belle, a beautiful woman and if that photo reveals anything of the past, she was also a trés belle young woman.  A Catholic. In 1939 when the war started  Pierrette said it wasn't a conscious decision but her grandmother knew a contact in the Resistance. She never 'chose' this but she needed to breathe, to fight against 'les Nazi's'.  She distributed tracts (anti-German Nazi notices and essays and news). One time she hid arms in the Academic Center, a burocratic office where she worked. Other times she rode a bike to give and take info to the Maquis, the underground paramilitary groups of men and women who hid in the countryside. Pierrette spoke of the fires they made to light the makeshift countryside runway for the British Lysander planes who dropped parachutes with money, arms and men. In Lyon the Resistance was made of people from all different social classes; shopkeepers, teachers and communists, anarchists and foreign-born Jews.
Pierrette was arrested on July 11, interrogated many times, then deported to Ravensbruck in August 1944. She was interned for a month before the Russians liberated the camp. It took her until May 1945 to return to France. Because of disease and lice in the Turgau Displaced Persons camp established by the Allies, her head had been shaved. Her hair had grown into spikes and she looked like 'a hedgehog'. Finally almost a year later she made it back to Lyon. One time on a tram,  the passengers gave her dirty looks, snickering regarding her as a 'Tondu" the women who slept with the Germans and had their heads shaved at Liberation.  Pierrette couldn't take it, stood and said in a loud voice for all 'I'm not what you think, I was in the Resistance and deported'.
Passengers apologized - one can imagine the shame and sheepishness in those who'd sat out the Occupation.
 What an honor to spend time with Pierrette as she shared her experiences, her spirit and her smile.

  .Cara - Tuesday

Garibaldi's Brazilian Wife: A Love Story

We are honored to have distinguished author and tireless advocate for mystery writers everywhere, Annamaria Alfieri, as our guest blogger today.  Her newest cannot-put-down-novel, BLOOD TANGO, launching on June 25th, takes place in Buenos Aires in 1945 and imagines the murder of an Evita Peron lookalike. Kirkus Reviews said Annamaria's Invisible Country, "compares with the notable novels of Charles Todd," and The Washington Post raved, "As both history and mystery, City of Silver glitters."

Welcome, Annamaria.

 Ana María de Jesús da Silva was the daughter of Benito Rivero de Silva, a minor trader on the Brazilian coast of Santa Caterina.  She was seventeen and betrothed to a wealthy landowner who was ten years older than her father.

Enter Giuseppe Garibaldi, a blond, blue-eyed, dashing Italian.  (An aside for those who read Leighton’s August 8, 2011 post on this subject: yes, Garibaldi was born in Nice, which was French on the day of his birth, but had been Italian and would be again during his lifetime.  One of Giuseppe’s beefs about governments, the one that made him a life-long republican, was the practice that kings and dukes could trade a plot of land and change the nationality of its citizens at will.  He wanted Italy to be a Republic so that its citizens would always be Italians.  And he saw to it that it became one.  But that’s another story.  Let’s get back to that Brazilian woman.)

Here are Garibaldi’s words about how he fell in love with Anita (the diminutive for Ana).  Giuseppe was thirty-one at the time and fighting as a sea captain for the republican cause of Rio Grande do Sul in its attempt to separate from Brazil.  A disastrous sea battle had drowned his companions, other exiled Italian republicans who had been fighting at his side.

“The loss of Luigi, Eduardo, and the others of my countrymen had left me utterly desolate.  I felt quite alone in the world.  Of all the friends who had made those desolate regions like home to me, no one was left….In short, I needed a human heart to love me—one that I could keep near me.  I felt that, unless I found one immediately, existence would become intolerable.

            “Pacing up and down the quarter-deck of the Itaparicia, wrapped in my own gloomy thoughts, I came, after trying every sort of argument, to the conclusion that I would seek for a woman so as escape from a weary and intolerable condition. 

            “By chance I cast my eyes toward the houses on the Barra, a tolerably high hill on the south side of the entrance to the lagoon, where a few simple and picturesque dwellings were visible.  Outside one of these, by means of a telescope I usually carried with me on deck, I espied a young woman, and forthwith gave orders for the boat to be got out, as I wished to go ashore.  I landed, and making for the houses where I expected to find the object of my excursion, I had just given up hope of seeing her again when I met an inhabitant of the place whose acquaintance I had made soon after my arrival.

            “He invited me to take coffee in his house; we entered, and the first person who met my eyes was the damsel who had attracted me ashore.  It was Anita…We both remained enraptured and silent like two people who met for the first time and seek in each other’s faces something which makes it easier to recall the forgotten past. . .  At last I greeted her by saying, ‘Tu devi esser mea .’  (‘You have to be mine.’)  I could speak but little Portuguese and uttered the bold words in Italian.  Yet my insolence was magnetic, and I had formed a tie, pronounced a decree, which death alone could annul.”

Hot stuff, huh?  I told you he was Italian!

Six weeks later, Anita stole out of her father’s house and rowed out to Garibaldi’s ship in the dark of night.  They honeymooned onboard.  She fought beside him in ensuing naval battles.  When their ship was about to go down after an attack, he shot the dying, and she helped him torch the bark as they and the other survivors fled to shore.

After that defeat, they joined the republican land troops and fought in the jungle of interior Santa Caterina.  When that province was lost to the young Brazilian emperor, Anita and Giuseppe went on to fight in Rio Grande do Sul.  Pregnant with their first child, Anita remained behind the lines, but she took charge of the rebel army’s ammunition supply.  While delivering munitions to the front, she found herself surrounded by the enemy and tried to flee on a horse.  The animal was shot out from under her, and she was taken prisoner.  But she managed to escape across a desert and rejoined Garibaldi eight days later.

Even after giving birth to her first child—Menotti, she found no peace.  Hidden out in a farm house with Brazilian troops all around her, and half naked, she took her fifteen-day-old infant, leapt on horse, and escaped into the forest where she hid until Garibaldi came to rescue her.

That republican dream soon died when Rio Grande do Sul capitulated.  Goncalves, its rebel leader, gave Anita and Giuseppe 900 head of cattle in thanks for their brave service.  They drove the herd before them to Uruguay.  They had been together for two years when they were married in Montevideo. There Garibaldi became a school teacher and in addition to Menotti , Anita bore him Rosita in 1843, Teresita in 1845, and Ricciotti in 1847.

There were four thousand Italian families in Montevideo at the time.  When the city was put under siege by Rosas, the Argentine dictator, Garibaldi put together a force of Italians to help defend the city.

In 1848, Garibaldi took his red-shirted legionnaires back to fight in the Italian republican revolution, which he seems to have been born to lead.   Anita and the children went with him, and she joined him in February 1849 in defending the ill-fated Roman Republic against a siege by Neopolitan and French armies.  She was pregnant and battling a bout of malaria when Rome fell to the combined forces of French and Austrian occupiers.  She fled with the Garabaldini and, at a farm near Ravenna, she died in Giuseppe’s arms on the 4^th of August.

Though Garibaldi went on to become a world-renowned hero, he loved Anita and revered her memory to the end.  In 1860, like a victorious knight astride his horse (that she had taught him to ride), he went to hail for the first time Victor Emanuel II,  King of united Italy.  On that singular occasion, he wore his lady’s favor—Anita’s striped scarf—and the gray poncho of her South American heritage.

Annamaria for Leighton—Monday