My family just after the end of World War II. From left: my older brother, Giampiero; my mother, Bianca; me; and my sisters, Ofelia and Paola. (Photo by my father, Bruno Bozzacchi.)
At that point I got my first-ever job: as sales assistant, bicycle guard, and flycatcher delivery boy. Every one of the few shops yet open wanted one of my father’s contraptions, and in no time our well-to-do apartment block became a factory, where the boss was the pauper in the basement and the workers the wealthy inhabitants upstairs. I remember my father taking them their wages every Saturday and, above all, the table laden with black-market food, until then entirely unavailable to us. Ever since, whenever some fly buzzes around me, I remember all this, smile, and leave it be!
Our house was near the railway line, in the Villa Fiorelli district, which made daily life particularly dangerous. The air raids had finished. But the rail tracks were littered with unexploded bombs, and many people paid dearly for their curiosity or lack of attention, including some of my friends. Others simply disappeared from the district, merely because they were found together with the wrong people in the wrong place or because they said the wrong thing at the wrong time. This was when my antipathy for politics developed. I felt small, alienated from society. I thought more about running away than trying to find a place in the world around me. I didn’t want to find another world; I wanted to flee the one I was in.
Many of my contemporaries embraced politics, from left to right, conforming to a system and to dominant myths that, fundamentally, they didn’t understand. I could sense the suffering of those difficult and turbulent years, a time when suddenly you could be arrested for simply doing or saying something that only a week earlier had been accepted and even acclaimed.
I remember only one big party in my house, given in honor of the birth of my brother Renato in 1950; I can still see in my mind the gigantic bowl of spaghetti, dripping with butter and parmesan cheese, that my father prepared for the occasion. If I could only reproduce the sounds and smells of that day . . . It’s now almost impossible to imagine what it felt like to a seven-year-old boy like me. Breakfast for us was rarely more than a crust of yesterday’s bread soaked in water and sprinkled with a few grains of sugar, to ward off hunger and “fool the throat,” as we say in Italian. It would be years before I got my first taste of a real amatriciana pasta. Bacon just wasn’t available in those hard times. That mountain of steaming spaghetti looked like Vesuvius to me, the butter a river of golden lava and the handful of parmesan manna from heaven, quenching the steam and giving off a smell of paradise. What a day we had! And when I got the honor of grating on a little more cheese, my father insisted that I whistle the tune to “My World Was My Family.” If you whistle—my father would say—then your mouth can’t steal the cheese.
Then we were five: that’s me between my sisters, Ofelia and Paola, while my parents proudly present our newborn brother, Renato, all of us posing in the Villa Fiorelli park in 1951. (Photo by my brother Giampiero.)
To think that my father was of noble birth now brings a contented smile to my face. My paternal grandfather was Angelo Bozzacchi of Cannobio, a title originally from Lake Maggiore in the north of Italy. Angelo worked as a functionary with the State Education Ministry after being sacked from the Bank of Italy for having “ensnared”—as they used to say—my grandmother Liberta. Angelo came from a wealthier family than Liberta, and the wealth difference, together with my grandfather’s jealousy, led inevitably to a separation, which he hadn’t wanted. It was 1935. You can imagine the scandal! He left Liberta with their apartment and all the furnishings, hoping that she might change her mind. But when this didn’t happen, the pain of the separation and the humiliation he felt led Angelo to end his life in a horrible way: he cut his wrists and drank muriatic acid.
In time, though in a less frightful way, my father also had to pay for this class distinction and my grandmother Liberta’s wealth. She opposed his decision to marry my mother, Bianca, on the grounds that she came from a family with no title or money. To make her position absolutely clear, she bought a house for my uncle Mario, my father’s only brother, simultaneously putting the family inheritance in his name. My father, aged twenty, married my mother anyway and kept working as an army photographer for the National Photographic Collection, which posted him to the Army Film Corps. During the war he was part of a reconnaissance team detailed to photograph target zones before and after bombing, mostly in North Africa, Somalia, Eritrea, and Libya.
My father had to sweat blood to get what he had, but he did it for love of his wife and his work. And he taught us kids that there is nothing more beautiful than doing what you love and living with people you love. Maybe it was thanks to this that we all felt that the little we had was actually a lot. Our apartment was in a basement. Through its windows I could see the street that ran above it, and I felt smaller than a tiny child. Those people outside were walking on my head. Inevitably, I learned to look up at people from the ground up and, as a result, never to lower my gaze.
The apartment consisted of three rooms. Not three bedrooms. Three rooms, total. Plus a corridor, where I slept until I was sixteen. The kitchen had just enough room for a table, a four-ring gas stove, a sink, and a dresser, where we stored our few provisions. The adjoining room, the bathroom, shared the same plumbing: the kitchen sink on one side of the wall and the washbasin on the other. This was a guaranteed source of fun for us kids. Our father would finish dressing and then go into the bathroom to wash his face. We’d race into the kitchen and open the tap. Therefore finding almost no water pressure in the washbasin, he’d open that tap fully. We’d then promptly cut off the one in the kitchen, causing a geyser of water to gush into his washbasin. He’d bellow and storm out of the bathroom like a fury, though in truth he was never really angry. He’d let us have our bit of fun, especially on days when food was short or there was no money, days when we had nothing else to laugh about. And my father always respected our right to be kids.
The third room was the dining room, where there was another table and a fold-up bed where my older brother, Giampiero, slept. He was the only one of us with a lockable bedside cabinet where he kept his things. I would regularly pick the lock and filch any small change. My sisters had their own space in the corridor and slept on a bed that folded out from the wall. My own bed was by the front door, facing the kitchen and bathroom. I remember the cold—we often couldn’t afford heating. But that house was everything to me, and it was only at home with my family that I felt that sense of being safe in a nest of union, of belonging. I didn’t like the world outside. To me it always seemed an unpleasant and dangerous place.
One day my older sister Ofelia came to get me from kindergarten. We were walking home, hand in hand, when a gypsy woman stopped us. My sister moved to shield me from the woman, but she was actually very kind. She insisted on reading my palm, asking for nothing in exchange. I’ve never forgotten what she told me: “One day you will have a bad accident, but you’ve no need to worry, because your lifeline is very long. And your father will have five children.”
At the time, my father had only four children. I thought the gypsy woman was making fun of me. But her prediction came true: in 1950 my father had his fifth child, Renato, also known as “butter and cheese spaghetti.”
However, it was another thing in that encounter that really struck my young imagination: the gypsy woman wasn’t able to find my luck line, which generally runs parallel to your lifeline. Back home, I got a penknife, shut myself in the bathroom, and tried to carve my own luck line across my palm. Hearing me weep with pain, my father rushed into the bathroom, took me in his arms, and said: “Little Gianni, what are you doing?” I replied that I was tracing my luck line. “That’s all nonsense,” he said. “You are our good luck.” He then disinfected my hand and we never mentioned it again. That was my father, too: he respected my decisions, often saying nothing even when he disagreed. I’d love to meet that gypsy woman again one day, just to tell her she got it
dead on. Who knows how old she was that day: twenty, thirty, forty? All I know is, more than sixty years have gone by since then . . .
After leaving the army, my father became head of the government photography department and then went on to work until he retired for the Pathology of the Book Institute, which still has its headquarters in Rome and enjoys worldwide renown. The Pathology of the Book Institute is one of those places that few people have ever heard about, unless you happen to be one of its impressive clients: governments, museums, leading libraries, and top families from across the globe. To them it’s world famous, a renowned center of excellence for rescuing, restoring, and preserving priceless books and documents.
Me, age two and a half, in Villa Fiorelli, the city park outside our home in Rome. (Photo by Bruno Bozzacchi.)
These days, the first thing you find on its website are photos: fabulous shots of microscopic fungi that rot books, minuscule insects that eat them, acidic medieval inks that burn them over time. Whatever the problem, the institute has a team of international experts who know what to do about it. Currently, it’s involved in restoring a precious copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron, pages of the still-mysterious Dead Sea Scrolls, a key medieval papal decree, and an extremely rare seventh-century copy of the Koran, found recently in the Great Mosque in Sana’a, Yemen.
The institute was founded in 1938, and my father was a central part of its life for decades. Applying a photographic technique using ultraviolet rays, he effectively spent his career bringing back to light images—on paper and parchment—that had faded over time. His work there involved photographing a huge number of valuable documents, with the result that my family came into contact with important people in political and ecclesiastic circles. For instance, I often met Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, the man who would soon become primate of Poland, and is known by many today as the Primate of the Millennium. My father collaborated with him for many years on restoring the archive of the Polish Catholic Church, making microfilm copies of books destroyed in Poland during the war, using replacements that Polish people from around the world were sending to Rome.
But my favorite priest was Father Karol. I met him on numerous occasions between the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s. He was the goalkeeper for us kids. He’d stand guard between a tree and a fountain, and we would take turns shooting penalties at him. Only later, when the memory matured, did I appreciate the extraordinary metaphor in Father Karol acting as goalkeeper for our best shots.
He was a good-looking man, with penetrating eyes. I’d make fun of him for his Polish accent. One day he got his pronunciation so wrong that I thought he wanted to dance, when all he actually wanted to do was talk. He was always very kind and generous. He always had candy or some little gift for us kids. Intuitive, he had a great sense of humor and a very poetic way of talking about life and God. I didn’t understand everything he told me, but I pretended to because I didn’t want to appear ignorant.
I saw him as a very spiritual person and, even though I was just a kid, when I heard him talk about God, or politics, or my duties toward my family, I knew that Father Karol was different, that he possessed a special kind of compassion, a greatness and a profound faith in God that would one day be revealed to the world. Indeed, many years later a puff of white smoke emerged from the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel chimney announcing that the world had a new pope: our Father Karol Wojtyla had become Pope John Paul II.
Father Karol often questioned me about my faith because he knew my mother attended a different church, the Seventh-day Adventist. But he never made me feel I wasn’t a good Christian. One day I told him about a priest who had come to our school because one of my classmates had lost his mother. The priest gave us a long sermon about redemption, telling us that our classmate’s mother was in heaven. I raised my hand and asked if the dead were judged immediately. He said they were, so I asked why Catholics believed that Jesus would come to judge both the living and the dead. So it is written in the “Creed,” a prayer I’d heard often in church. He didn’t reply. But from that day on they wouldn’t let me stay in class during the religious education hour. Father Karol was very annoyed about how I had been treated.
Happily, Father Karol’s gifts were noticed and appreciated by those above him, with the result that two things happened: he began to scale the ecclesiastical ladder, and—quite understandably—he visited our neighborhood far less often. I remember one or two other teenage soccer matches. But then, in 1963, Pope Paul VI named him archbishop of Cracow, and his visits became increasingly rare. I can imagine what you’re wondering. The answer is yes: Pope John Paul II, as well as being an exceptional person, was also an excellent soccer player.
One day in 2005, I met Giuseppe Rusconi, editor of the ecclesiastical magazine Il Consulente RE, on a train. He asked if he could interview me about my career, and he published the result in the September issue of that year. It’s thanks to him that I began to recall certain dates and details of my relationship with Father Karol. In a life like mine, where you go beyond your dreams, then decide to start again from scratch, certain moments inevitably get filed away in hidden archives, then sit there like bricks, a part of the building, waiting for something to bring them back to light.
I can remember every detail of the day I first started taking photos. I was eight years old. My father had a number of cameras at home, but I wasn’t allowed to touch any of them because they were state property. The best was a Rolleicord, just a notch below the queen of cameras, the Rolleiflex. I spent my days looking longingly at the cameras and begging my father to let me use them. He patiently began to explain how to adjust the focus, the differences between the various lenses, and so on. But it was my first shoot outdoors that I remember so vividly. We were sitting outside a bar after my cousin’s wedding, and I was on my mother’s lap. I asked my father if he would give me his camera. And he did. My first subject was my sister Paola, a beautiful girl with red hair and marvelous brown eyes. This was when it all started.
From then on my father began to take me with him to work. I learned by observing him. And he paid me, teaching me to value time even when you are doing something you love. He wanted me to discover this, and many other things, by myself. There was a changing room outside the darkroom where we’d hang our coats and change into overalls before going inside. He’d leave money in one of his pockets and let me take a little cash after I’d helped out, always checking to see just how much I took and whether it was appropriate to the amount of work I’d done. It was like that rule of giving and receiving, respecting all parties in a deal. He wouldn’t let me print my photos on state material. I had to spend the money I’d earned to buy my own paper. But even though I liked learning all that stuff about photography, I didn’t want to become a photographer then. I knew my father didn’t earn much, and I was convinced there was no future in his profession.
Nevertheless, the more I used a camera, the more it became a passion. I’d watch while my father took endless photos with his enormous woodenbox camera, a huge machine that projected an inverted negative at the back of the box. Since the image reflected on the glass was upside down, and I wanted to see it as I did normally, I’d climb on top of that enormous machine and hang myself upside down, thus making the image look right way up. You could say I learned to take photos upside down.
When I wasn’t working with my father, I was out on the streets raising Cain. I was known in my neighborhood as Il Roscio, the Redheaded Devil. My friends and I formed a notorious gang, the Villa Fiorelli Gang, and we were not averse to turning to theft for survival from time to time. We had a system. A lot of families got their groceries home-delivered by young guys on tricycles. We’d hide nearby. When one stopped to make a delivery, we’d run out and steal straight from the basket on his bike: sausages, bread, fruit—whatever we could grab. We had to be careful not to make the theft too obvious by taking too much at one time. So we’d follow the guy to his next delivery, and another bit of his load would vanish. We’d go o
n like that until we’d assembled a decent meal, and then go off together to eat it.
From ages six to ten, my gang was pretty much my entire life. We’d clash with other gangs in stone-throwing battles, which meant we always made sure to keep our pockets full of good rocks. I lost count of how many times I went home with my head cut by flying stones. Later, when my mother realized that the only thing I used my pockets for was to hold stones, she cut them all out.
My youngest daughter, Astoria, perches on top of my father’s old studio camera, just as I used to do as a kid.
Come summer, when our parents would let us go out for a couple of hours after supper, our favorite pastimes were staging battles with water bombs or with paper-cone darts, hand-rolled, licked, and shot through oiled tubes to make the dart fly faster. Often, around dusk, before we’d have to run home, we’d go down to the “arches,” the remains of the ancient Roman aqueduct that you can still see alongside Rome’s Casilina rail lines. Young couples would use the aqueduct’s deep brick alcoves as a lovers’ lane. We’d hide, then ambush poor couples, dousing them with a storm of water bombs before racing away. One night I managed to water-bomb my own older brother during a romantic tryst.
Given that our pockets regularly got shredded with all that stone carrying—notwithstanding my mother’s sewing efforts—we’d often hide around the fountain and play “touch the bird.” This involved waiting for a suitably gullible older girl to come by. One of us would innocently join the girl at the fountain, pretend to wash his hands, and then ask if she could help get his handkerchief out of his pocket. When the trick worked, she got much more than a hanky in her hand.
My Life in Focus Page 2