Editor's Note: My mother has often told stories of her own Savvy Auntie and I asked her to share some of them with the Savvy Auntie community. Thanks, Mom!

by Amy Linn

Every spring when it’s time to clean out the basement and garage, the first item my husband grabs for the Goodwill box is “the lamp.”

It’s a hideous lamp: three plump cupids supporting a pineapple-shaped globe studded with clear gold plastic dots at the intersection of the diamonds and painted cream and gold with a pearly gloss finish. And every year, I retrieve this monstrosity from the “donate” box and keep it safe for yet another year. It has never been part of my home décor, but I can’t bear to give it away because it was made by my cherished aunt, Zi Marianna (as we called her in our Italian dialect), who labored over it for months in ceramics class and proudly gave it to me as an engagement gift.  

Following a bittersweet voyage across the Atlantic in order to join our father, who had spent three years in the US earning enough money to prepare a home for us, my mother, sister and I arrived in Pittsburgh on a blustery December evening in 1957. Exploring the nooks and crannies of the ocean liner (especially the dining room!) had been an exciting novelty, but tinged with sadness as my sister was seasick and my mother was homesick for her village and her parents, and cried for the entire eight days of the voyage.

The cozy four-room house my father had rented for us was filled with unknown relatives and paesani from our mountain village in Abruzzo. The crowd of strange faces was quite intimidating to a four-year old child, but my Zi Marianna, with the twinkle in her warm brown eyes and the broad smiling face, hugged me and handed me a wrapped package. I opened it to find a DOLL! She had curly blonde hair swept back into a ponytail and blue eyes with lids that opened and closed, and wore a silky pink and blue dress with white socks and black shoes. It was my very first doll - it was my very first toy - and it was the beginning of a very special bond. Zi Marianna had a special place in my heart from that moment on.    

My aunt wasn’t even a blood relative; she was the wife of my father’s oldest brother who had sponsored my father’s immigration to the US. She was “American,” born to immigrant parents, and had gone to high school! She didn’t stay home like most Italian women we knew - she dressed up every day and went to work in an office downtown! It was a revelation to us that a woman could have such a life.

Zi Marianna, who had no children, loved us as though we were her own daughters. She brightened many a somber day in those early years when my parents were struggling with making a living, struggling with the language and struggling to raise their daughters in a much more permissive society than the one to which they were accustomed.

As soon as we heard her special knock on the back door, we knew we were in for a merry evening. Zi Marianna would sit down, remove her clip-on earrings which she promptly attached to the neckline of her dress, and begin searching in the bottom of her huge pocketbook for whatever treat she had stashed in there for us: a pair of anklets, a Hershey bar, an embroidered handkerchief or, my favorite, a red plastic change purse that looked like a ladybug.

She remembered our birthdays with practical but stylish gifts, treated us to our first shrimp dinner in a restaurant, took us on shopping sprees downtown and to dances at the Italian club when we got a little older. Most importantly, she smoothed the way for us as we tried to assimilate into American culture while being raised in a very traditional Italian home.  

Her ebullient personality, her ready laugh and her warm heart drew us like bees to honey. We never had to be coaxed to show respect by paying a visit now and then. We willingly dropped by her house after Mass almost every Sunday (where our favorite Danish pastries from the bakery were waiting for us). And once I got my first job at a major corporation in downtown Pittsburgh, I spent many a lunch hour in her small office, keeping her up to date on my social life over a cup of coffee and a salami sandwich.

Although she had nieces of her own, she chose to give her coveted recipe for fiadone, the traditional sweet ricotta cheese pie, to me and my sister. I think of her every Easter when I pull out the recipe and see her handwriting.

Sadly, my aunt passed away shortly after I married, following open heart surgery in her 65th year; she left me with many warm, happy childhood memories…and the “pineapple lamp.” Just the thought of her patiently sanding the surfaces of the greenware and the hours spent painting the individual pieces of the lamp, then learning how to fire it and wire it, make it impossible for me to cast aside, just like my memories of her.