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20th Century
Artist and Sculptor, based in |
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After leaving Boston, he returned to Italy and to the
Isle of Capri where he married our mother. At the time, there was no
diplomatic relationship between China and Italy, besides which Fascist ideas
were being promoted by Mussolini who was Minister of State Marrying a
Chinese was probably not the most political thing to do at the time. Our
mother lost her Italian citizenship by marrying him, but she did it
anyway. Practically the whole island came to the wedding, as she was born
there, the granddaughter of a previous Governor of the Island, Majore Guiseppe
De Maria, who had, built a house which still stands today on Capri, not far
from the main square. The house that Guiseppe built is distinguished by the
marble head of a Roman girl which was excavated from the site and placed
above the front door of the house by my great grandfather, with the face, of
course, facing outwards. In any event, because of her local connections, the
sailboats and many fishing boats,( the fishermen being all her friends,)
followed the married couple out to sea from Capri to Naples where they
boarded a Japanese steamer on the long journey to China. As they sailed
away, our mother recalls seeing the dim outline of the Isle of Capri getting
smaller and smaller. She had no idea then, that it would be at last 20 years
before she would return. On their journey, slow as it may have been, with many stops along different places such as the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, into Saudi Arabia, India, Singapore and eventually to Hong Kong, there were new sights and sounds for our Mom and even for our father. It was a 25 year time span from when he first left China in 1906 to this return to China. He had, however, always wanted to return. He had no ideas of staying in North America. His purpose for coming to North America, initially, was to respect his mother's wishes of coming and learning, she thought, Western medicine, but he was more interested in Art than medicine and, as a result, he did fulfill part of her wishes by coming to learn, though in a very different direction.
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