For our next Zuppa Inglese project, we are taking on the short story “Il Cinghialetto” by Grazia Deledda: I am adapting the Italian text into English, and Erik is creating drawings that highlight moments of drama in the story. In “Il Cinghialetto,” a little boy in Sardegna finds a lost little wild boar. He is very poor, and his mother washes the clothes of prisoners to make ends meet while her husband is in jail himself - for stealing out of need. 

In the small town in Calabria where my mother was born, Mongrassano, women did their laundry - and still do - in ancient communal fountains, called “Kroi” in the local dialect, a minority language of the Albanians who settled the town in the Middle Ages. In 2001, I visited one of these fountains, Kroistiro, with my mother, and found it full of women, young and old, who had smocked themselves in black plastic garbage bags, and wore plastic bags on their feet. They washed their clothes together in the cold, clear mountain spring water. It’s the only way to get your clothes really clean, one of the young women told me, as she beat a pair of jeans against the tile wall of the fountain basin. I couldn’t take any pictures of them, as I stood there, as an interloper, watching them do their work.

I do have some photos from another visit, when the fountain was empty, and we could drink the crisp, cold water right from the taps. Later that day, women would return with their washing. 

On the village of Mongrassano website, I found some photos showing Kroistiro full of women taken about 50 years ago. I hope that these photos, although from Calabria, and not Sardegna, could inform Erik as he draws the woman washing clothes for prisoners for our project, so we can connect our own histories in Italy with the story we are telling.