My name is Indro.
The reasons for which this name was given to me at the baptismal font are very numerous and have a political and social content. I want to tell you about them because from them they can draw many insights about my origin and the environment in which I was born and raised.
You must know that Fucecchio, my homeland, is a town in the Valdarno, located halfway between Pisa and Florence. It is a fairly ancient town, which developed around the feudal core of a Florentine castle, as are many towns in that district. [...] With the passing of time, the village began to descend towards the plain, the Arno and its streets. Here it 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 was divided into "insuesi" and "ingiuesi". Gl'insuesi were those who stood up, that is, in the old part, around the castle and the Collegiate Church; those who were on the way down, that is, along the provincial roads leading to Florence, Pisa and Lucca, were unjust.[...] The marriage between my mother, insuese, and my father, ingiuese, was one of the big business of pre-war Fucecchio. My mother belonged to the Dondoli family which was, as I have 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 does not go back further than my grandfather. But I don't think it was very old in the place. Its strength came more from money than from tradition. The palace, which was the most sumptuous in all of Fucecchio, had been bought by my grandfather Alessandro, who kept a counter for the wholesale trading of cottons. [...] Rosamunda - who was a beautiful woman, with a cold and merciless beauty like her eyes - had seven children by Alexander, four boys and three girls: my mother Maddalena was the fifth. She gave birth to them without a moan and reared them without a caress, determined to sacrifice all the females for all the males.
Of the four male offspring, two studied and became a lawyer and a doctor; and two instead, to Rosmunda's great despair, did not feel like it. The lawyer followed the schools in Florence, then in Switzerland and finally in Pisa. When he was in Florence, he was a schoolmate of my father, of whom it is time to talk to you. My father was ungiuese and from an obscure family, although there are some quite famous Montanellis in Fucecchio because of a revolutionary of '48 to whom the Fucecchiesi dedicated a monument. But the Montanellis to which my father belonged were from another branch, the poor branch obviously, and my grandfather Raffaello had an oven.
[...] At the bakery there was his wife Edvige, known as Eduige, who also ran a restaurant and who, active and miserly, ran a family of four children: one 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 focused on him and decided to make him a professor of literature.
[...] At school he was a companion of Alberto Dòddoli who, very intelligent and lazy, let Sestilio do his homework. The latter, returning from holidays in the village, the friendship with Alberto allowed him to ascend to Palazzo Dòddoli and meet my mother there. The rest you can imagine. But do not imagine, instead, the war that Rosamunda waged against Sestilio who, by dint of repetition, succeeded in getting Curtatone, the seventh of the Dondoli sons, to take the high school diploma. A little bit of this, a little bit of the intercession of the mayor and the archpriest, finally allowed my father to impalse my mother. [...]
The latter, who was then teaching the techniques of the country, took his wife downstairs to a house with a garden, and, having obtained the pardon, fully embraced his subversive ideas. Shortly after, my mother became pregnant. Rosamunda immediately came down from the hillock to take back her daughter so that the heir might be born for up. In fact, I was born on April 22, 1909. But shortly after, Rosamunda having become ill, my father came to take back his wife and offspring and, to avenge himself, obstinately began to search for me a name that was not in the family , nor in the calendar. I find it.
From "Gente qualunque", Bompiani 1942, in Anthology of Fucecchiesi writers, Edizioni dell'Erba (1990)