Victoria Hotel

January is a strange month; it carries with it the euphoria of the justbpassed Christmas holidays and the awareness of being a new beginning of something not yet well defined. The days were short, the daylight disappeared around 4:00 pm and reappeared the next day around 8:00 am. The sun was barely visible, only clouds, rain and wind for days and days. My working day started very early, waking up at 6:00 am and at 7:00 I started preparing for breakfast. Every day I met new people, who had arrived on the island for work, or to visit relatives or to bury someone in the small cemetery and, why not, with great surprise, even Italian hunters who had arrived on the island in search of woodcocks. I slept in the hotel, I ate in the hotel, I lived in that small microcosm full of humanity.

Life passed slowly, marked by work shifts and rest periods. I liked that atmosphere of a seaport, always new people arriving, but also locals who came regularly for a coffee or to eat at the restaurant. Little by little I recognized their faces and their stories and I often stopped to chat with them. Everyone asked me to speak Italian because they loved listening to the sweet and cadenced rhythm of our language. They said it was like listening to melodious music. Needless to say, the English spoken in that part of Scotland was almost incomprehensible to me. The Glasgow accent was very strong and it was really difficult for me to get on well with the locals right away, it took a lot of time and patience to understand what they were saying. I also had the pleasure of meeting the Parish Priest of the Catholic Church on the island, who, intrigued by the presence of this Italian, came to visit me at the Hotel. He had studied in Rome and spoke a little Italian.

In a short time I had made friends with the whole team and I had particularly bonded with a Romanian girl, Lucy and a Polish girl, Daria. I still remember them as two beautiful people. Their company was pleasant and we often went out after dinner to take refuge in some pub. They were much younger than me and both had come to Scotland to save some money and return to their homeland, unlike me who had other ambitions such as building a new life in Scotland.

Rothesay is a beautiful village of about 3,000 souls. It has several hotels, countless restaurants and pubs, a cinema, a small hospital, the fire station, 2/3 churches each with its own cemetery, various small shops on the main road and facing the sea, as well as of course unforgettable naturalistic scenery. The supermarket is the Co-Operative Food (not to be confused with the Italian Coop) there were 2 in the village; the largest was near the hotel and I went there very often to buy fresh fruit, which I absolutely needed. I ate at the Hotel and I still remember the delicious hot soups accompanied by bread and butter. Fresh salmon was also a great passion of mine along with the "Scotch mince beef pie" (a double crust meat pie). However, I never managed to eat Haggis (a typical Scottish dish) because the flavour was too strong for my palate. Despite all these delicacies, I started to lose weight. The constant daily movement and the lack of carbohydrates were starting to have an effect.. The lack of Denis and my son was deeply felt. Every day I called with them and tried to tell them about my day and get them to tell me how it was going. It was hard but we all had the same goal and we were fighting for it. After years of living my life in symbiosis with a person, I found myself alone to face all these exciting new things and I would have liked that person to be there with me to share it. But unfortunately it wasn't the time yet.

.The Vittoria Hotel had a beautiful and renowned restaurant located on the first floor, from which you could enjoy a wonderful view of the port and the bay. In front of the Hotel there were beautiful well-kept gardens with evergreen grass that in Spring filled with multicoloured flowers. The menu we offered was very varied with meat or fresh fish. I still remember with amazement the boxes of fresh scampi just caught that the fisherman brought us every 2 days. In addition to the restaurant there was also another room that was used for banquets and events; it is here that I learned something about "funeral parties" something unknown in Italy. The deceased was remembered and celebrated with a real event after the funeral service, where hot soups, salty and sweet snacks were served, with drinks such as tea and coffee or beer. A joyful way to remember the dear departed. On the ground floor we also had a bistro where on Saturday evenings there was always live music. I had a lot of fun and was learning a lot.

January had passed and February had arrived. I hadn't seen Denis for over a month and the melancholy of the distance was making itself felt more and more insistently. In the end Denis decided to take a weekend and come and visit me. Obviously, since it was only for a few days, we decided to meet in Glasgow. I took the ferry and then the train and we met at the airport. I had booked a beautiful Victorian hotel outside the city center, but it was easily reached by train. Seeing each other again after 6 weeks was exciting. We hugged each other for a long time and felt united and happy again. We spent a beautiful weekend together exploring Glasgow from top to bottom and it was very cold but we didn't care. We wanted to live every minute trying to store memories and feelings that would help us move forward in the following weeks. The two days passed so quickly that we didn't even realize that it was already time for both of us to go back, Denis towards the airport and I towards Rothesay. We said goodbye with the intention of seeing each other again as soon as possible. The distance was tearing our souls apart. I went back to the Hotel to my room and suddenly I realized that now I needed to find a space of my own to call "home". Living in the Hotel had been fantastic and had helped me a lot to get through the first few days away from home. You never felt alone, since there was always someone to share a chat with or ask for advice but now it was time to find a place that I could feel all mine. And so I started looking and immediately understood that it was not an easy thing. But I will tell you everything in detail in my next post.