In Mary Contini’s new book, Dear Olivia, two southern Italian shepherds on their way to Scotland arrive in a market in Turin. To their astonishment, bundles of rocket and other raw vegetables — leaves they collected from the hedgerows at home — change hands for money.
It is an image that replays in my mind as Contini, a director of Valvona & Crolla and one of a line of formidable entrepreneurial women, orders lunch in the Caffé Bar behind her shop on Elm Row.
Her family business has taken this fortuitous accident of economics to its natural conclusion: an antipasti plate of simple ingredients — griddled courgettes, olives, mozzarella — costs £9.50.
Today Contini, who runs the Italian deli V&C with her husband, Philip, is not merely a pillar of the Italian community. She is a force within Scotland who discusses school dinners with Jack McConnell, charms John Bellany into exhibiting his drawings, and persuades the Canongate director Jamie Byng to publish a book she had, at that point, not written.
Dear Olivia tells the story of the peasant families who came to Edinburgh at the beginning of the past century and established the modestly fronted shop that is now internationally recognised as one of the finest Italian delicatessens in the world.
There is much to uplift and inspire in the book. These families got here on foot and by boat. They slogged, sweated and stuck together to make a life in a cold, alien country only to have their efforts thrown back in their faces when Mussolini sided with Hitler in the second world war.
Interred as undesirable aliens, more than 800 died on their way to Canada when the Arandora Star, a ship full of immigrants, was torpedoed off the northwest coast of
Ireland on June 2, 1940. Among the dead were Mary’s grandfather and her husband’s grandfather.
The families who remained in Scotland rarely spoke of their wartime experiences. So the Continis decided, with V&C’s 75th anniversary approaching and the generation who lived through the war fading fast, it was time to look into the darker corners of their families’ history.
“Uncle Victor never talked about this till the very end. Gloria [one of his surviving sisters] didn’t want to talk at all,” she says. “What they went through was horrendous. They were quite young when they lost their father.”
Contini’s grandmother, Marietta di Ciacca, who kept the family together and ran the chip shop in Cockenzie while her husband and sons were in the camps, was no more forthcoming. “I used to spend hours with her, used to cook with her. She taught me a lot of cooking, but we never spoke about this and I regret it,” says Contini.
She has augmented the family legends with historical research and imagination to produce a tale of a hardy tribe bonded by faith, a powerful work ethic and a deep love of home-cured sausage.
Directly beneath Contini’s seat in the bustling Caffé Bar is the dank cellar where Maria and Alfonso, Philip’s grandparents, started their working lives in
Scotland.
Their families represent two different contributions the Italians have made to the Scottish economy. Alfonso Crolla, Philip’s grandfather, quickly realised the power of the homesick palate and, as well as running a modest café, imported sausage and cheese from his home village and sold it to other Italians from the boot of his car.
When, in 1934, he joined forces with B Valvona & Sons, Italian Produce and Wine Merchants, all the customers and most of the staff were Italian.
The di Ciaccas, on the other hand, realised that Calvinistic, turnip-eating Scotland was starved of sensual pleasures. When they moved into a rundown café and filled Cockenzie seafront with the tantalising smell of frying fish, the tang of vinegar and the swirling sweetness of freshly churned ice cream, they were onto a winner.
When Contini’s father took over the shop, he kept up his parents’ high standards. She grew up in the warren of rooms that were built onto the shop and recalls the scents that dominated her childhood.
“One side of the house, in the morning, smelled of vanilla, sugar and hot milk,” she says. “Then in the evening I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep because of the smell of the fish and chips.”
The Crollas’ genius, it’s clear from the book, was to persuade the dour Scots that they, too, might come to enjoy salami and mortadella. They joined V&C as junior partners, but Ralph Valvona was dubious about Alfonso and his two sons — he considered them no better than barrow boys — being unleashed on his coffee-grinders and sherry casks. Yet their theatrical salesmanship quickly sent sales zooming through the roof. When Contini describes their transformation of the stuffy warehouse — posters, a Madonna, Puccini on a scratchy gramophone, two smart young men in cotton aprons slicing prosciutto and grating pecorino —it is clear that all today’s V&C has added is a cafe and a website.
This taste for the best of produce, and the ability to sell it, was, she says, bred in them and nurtured from birth.
“I think we have a palate, an appetite to eat good food. I was born like that, my father was like that. He used to get up and go to Eyemouth to get fish every morning and gut them himself to make his fish and chips the best he could.
“I think the southern Italians have a certain personality, an exuberance for life. It’s about the effort we put into going the whole hog, to make it more eccentric than it needs to be, when you could just run a deli.”
Saying the Continis just run a deli is like suggesting Michael O’Leary runs a bucket shop.
Their connection with Scotland and their incorrigible entrepreneurial spirit have become intertwined into roots that seem impossible to kill off.
At first their problems were simply those of poverty, language and adjustment, ones faced by immigrant families the world over.
In Cockenzie, the di Ciacca family’s names were quickly Anglicised and they were accepted into the village. In Edinburgh, Alfonso Crolla carved his identity through his business and the fascist party.
His wife, Maria, was left to deliver seven babies in a room and kitchen on Rossie Place. She washed the clothes, served behind the counter of their first business,
a cafe on Easter Road, and dealt with the animosity of her neighbours. She never learnt English and developed a system of pointing to sell sweets.
One of her daughters, Olivia Guiseppina, died of croup at the age of two. Maria was dubious about her husband’s enthusiasm for Mussolini, apprehensive about his business acumen and heartbroken at the death of her child.
Contini’s sympathy for Maria’s plight comes bouncing off the pages. “It’s all true,” she says of the incidents that have become family legend. At one point a police officer comes to the door as the family are sitting down to pasta cooked with wild garlic and dandelion leaves. The woman upstairs had reported a terrible smell, possibly a gas leak. A broader-minded neighbour had to explain there was no danger — the smell was garlic fried in olive oil.
Until the war, the Italians and the Scots rubbed along pretty well. Then, when Mussolini declared war on Britain in 1940, three decades of selling ice cream and cigarettes were forgotten. Hard-working fish fryers became the enemy within.
There were riots, shops and restaurants were smashed and the menfolk were rounded up and taken first to camps, then deported. The Evening News reported this in lurid detail, describing Leith Walk as “running with rivers of wine”.
Contini captures the bemusement, the confusion, the misery caused by decisions taken so far away. Those who had supported Mussolini, such as Alfonso Crolla, and those, like the di Ciaccas, who had kept him at arm’s length were treated exactly the same. Maria, however, swept up the mess, boarded up the shop, waited for news and got on with life.
“As Uncle Victor used to say, remember we stayed,” she says. “That generation loved the Scottish people, their children had been born here. I don’t think they ever felt Scottish, but this is home.
“I don’t feel Scottish, I don’t feel Italian,” Conti says. “I feel Italian-Scots. For me the best place is New York. Everyone’s an immigrant. We’re all the same there.”
The postwar generation of Italian-Scots reacted differently to the privations of the first immigrants. Some wanted to keep the family close: Philip left school at 17 and went straight into the shop. Others thought education was crucial: Contini and her siblings all went to university. She joined V&C when she married.
Her older daughter, Francesca, trained as a pharmacist, moved to London and spent two years in a white coat. Then she came home at Christmas and announced she was not going back.
“Everyone keeps asking me why I’m not in the family business,” she told her mother. “Now I’m thinking, why not.”
Francesca now runs V&C’s VinCaffé in Multrees Walk.
Contini’s first book, a recipe collection studded with family stories, took the form of a letter. Dear Olivia, addressed to the couple’s 11-year-old daughter, was, she says, the logical next step.
“People kept telling me they liked the recipes, but they really loved the stories,” she says.
They might well ask, however, why Dear Olivia stops after the second world war, before Contini was born. Is she keeping that bit for the next book, to be written for her granddaughter? She clearly loves the idea and giggles.
This story is not finished.
Dear Olivia by Mary Contini is published by Canongate at £14.99
