My name is Indro.
The reasons why this name was given to me at the baptismal font are very complex and have a political and social content. I want to tell you because from them you can get many lights about my origin and the environment in which I was born and raised.
You should know that Fucecchio, my homeland, is a town of Valdarno, located halfway between Pisa and Florence. It is a fairly ancient village, developed around the feudal core of a Florentine castle, as are many towns of that district. [...] As time went by, the town began to descend towards the plain, the Arno and its streets. Here he settled down and began to swell especially as an agricultural market. Since it is a good rule of every Tuscan village to always divide into two factions, Fucecchio divided into "insuesi" and "ingiuesi". The Insuesi were those who were going upwards, that is, in the ancient part, around the castle and the Church of the Collegiate Church; those who were going downwards, that is, along the provincial roads leading to Florence, Pisa and Lucca.
[...] The marriage between my mother, Insuse, and my father, Ingiuese, was one of the big business of the pre-war Fucecchio. My mother belonged to the Dòddoli family which was, as I said, one of the most conspicuous, perhaps the most conspicuous, of the Insuesi families. I don’t know exactly where this house came from because my genealogical knowledge doesn’t go any further than my grandfather. But I don’t think it was very old there. Its strength came more from money than from tradition. The palace, which was the most sumptuous of all Fucecchio, had been bought by my grandfather Alessandro, who kept a counter for wholesale cotton merchandising. [...] Rosamunda - who was a beautiful woman, of a cold and merciless beauty like her eyes - had seven children from Alexander, four boys and three girls: my mother Magdalene was the fifth. She gave birth to them without a complaint and raised them without a caress, well determined to sacrifice all the females to all the males.
Of the four male offspring, two studied and became a lawyer and the other doctor; and two, however, with great despair of Rosmunda, did not want to. The lawyer followed the schools in Florence, then in Switzerland and finally in Pisa. When he was in Florence, he was a school friend of my father, about whom it is time to talk to you.
My father was Ingian and of a dark family, although there are, in Fucecchio, Montanelli quite famous because of a revolutionary of '48 which the Fucecchiesi dedicated a monument. But the Montanelli to whom my father belonged were of another branch, the poor branch evidently, and my grandfather Raphael had an oven. [...] In the oven stood his wife Hedwig, called Eduige, who also ran a trattoria and who, active and miserly, ran the family of four children: a girl and three boys. Of the boys, My father Sestilio was the most promising, he studied well and with excellent results; therefore the hopes and resources of the family that decided to make him a professor of letters were concentrated on him. [...] At school he was a companion of Alberto Dòddoli who, intelligent and lazy, He was allowed to do his homework by Sestilio. After returning from his holidays in the village, his friendship with Alberto allowed him to ascend to Palazzo Dòddoli and to meet my mother there. The rest you can imagine. But do not imagine, instead, the war that Rosmunda made in Sestilio, In order to ingratiate her, she was able to get a high school license from Curtatone, the seventh of the sons Dòddoli. A little this, a little the intercession of the mayor and the archpriest, they finally allowed my father to impale my mother. [...]
He, who then taught the techniques of the village, took his wife down, in a house with a garden, and, having obtained grace, fully embraced his subversive ideas. Soon after my mother became pregnant. Rosmunda fell from the hill to get her daughter back so that the heir would be born for it. In fact, I was born upwards on April 22, 1909. But soon after, Rosmunda having fallen ill, my father came to take back his wife and her offspring and, in revenge, began obstinately to seek for me a name that was neither in the family nor in the calendar.
He found it.
