Verdura and Pica

The Picas came from Fragneto Monforte, a village in the province of Benevento, in southern Italy. Juan Pica managed the estate of the local countess, Donna Carlotta Cirelli de Pellegrini, and with that work he supported his wife, María Verdura, and their five children: Nicolás, María Rosa, Josefina, Juan and Pascual.

Juan had fought in the First World War and feared another one would come, and that his eldest son would have to go. So he persuaded Nicolás to leave for Argentina, near his mother’s family, the Verduras, in the south of the province of Santa Fe. Nicolás rented a farm between San José de la Esquina and Los Nogales, and from there he wrote letters urging everyone to come. In the end they agreed. He went back to Italy to help organise the journey and to marry his fiancée, Paulina, who had been waiting for him. He also persuaded two cousins: Nicolás, who was single, and Lorenzo, who left a wife and a six-month-old daughter in Italy because he wanted to see for himself the country his cousin praised so much.

Juan sold everything he owned. Before leaving, he took his daughter María Rosa to Rome, because she wanted to be a nun, and she stayed. On 11 October 1927 the others boarded the Principessa Mafalda in Genoa, bound for Buenos Aires: Juan and María, their children Nicolás, Josefina, Juan and Pascual, their daughter-in-law Paulina and the two nephews.

On the night of the shipwreck Josefina lost sight of her family. Her parents, her two younger brothers and her sister-in-law died. She was sixteen. She reached Rio de Janeiro without remembering how, without knowing who had saved her, and for a while she hoped her parents and brothers were alive somewhere in Brazil, in Montevideo or in Buenos Aires. In Rio she was taken in by the wife of the Italian consul, who gave her a home, food and clothes. Her brother Nicolás reached Montevideo on the French ship Formose; the cousins Nicolás and Lorenzo reached Buenos Aires. Josefina, who was deeply religious, used to say: “God only sends you what you are able to bear.”

On 7 November 1927 she arrived in Buenos Aires with no luggage at all, and her uncle Miguel Verdura was waiting for her. They went by train to Los Nogales and from the station to the farm by sulky; the bridge over the stream had been broken in the political fights of the time, and crossing was hard. The place looked nothing like her homeland. She went to live with her uncle Nicola Verdura, who was married with children, and the pampered girl from a middle-class family became the one who cooked, looked after the children and, at harvest, picked maize. She was not allowed to sit in on the lessons of the teacher who came to the house for her cousins; she learned by listening in secret. Her aunt and uncle let her learn to sew: she earned the diploma of the Academia de Corte Parisien Mendia, in Buenos Aires, with top marks in every subject, and her uncle Miguel bought her a sewing machine.

The cousins did not stay long in Los Nogales. They went back to Buenos Aires, opened a plant nursery and kept it for the rest of their lives. Afraid of the sea, they never went back to Italy. Lorenzo never saw his wife and daughter again; out of the same fear, they never came. They wrote to each other, and neither of them ever had another partner.

María Rosa, known as Rosina, came to Argentina as Sister Tomasina, the first of the Pious Disciples of the Divine Master in the country. In the summer of 1931, when the founder, Giacomo Alberione, asked for missionaries, she was the one chosen for Argentina, and she later said she felt a strong resistance before accepting: she would have to cross the sea where her parents had died. She sailed on 10 December 1931 on the Conte Verde and reached Buenos Aires on 30 December. Those are the dates on the congregation’s page; the school project about Josefina says 1936. She was superior of the houses in Florida, Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Mar del Plata, and in Mar del Plata the two sisters visited each other more and more in later years. She died on 14 February 1992. Josefina got the news while she was baking a birthday cake.

In 1944 Josefina met Nicolás Viglione, a widower with a six-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl. The Viglione and Verdura families were neighbours, and even so the two courted by letter, through the post. Her uncle agreed to the marriage; her aunt, offended, saw it as desertion and stayed away. They lived on the farm until 1948 and then in a house in San José de la Esquina, where Nicolás was a mechanic and the taxi driver who took passengers to and from the station. They had two daughters, and Josefina raised all four children without the slightest difference.

In town she was “the dressmaker”. She sewed for her family and for customers, even made men’s suits, taught many women to sew, and with that money paid for her daughters’ education. The house was always full. One of the rooms became a prayer room, with saints, holy cards, rosaries and candles. She asked her children not to leave her in hospital if she fell ill, and she died at home, in her own bed, in 2002.

Eugenio spent many summers in San José de la Esquina with his grandmother, Anita Graciosa Verdura, Nicola’s daughter, who practically raised him and stayed close to Josefina to the end. He remembers his aunt’s smile: she had lost everything in the shipwreck and built a family, with love for everyone around her.

One point remains open. The list of survivors has three Picas in third class: Lorenzo, Nicola and Nicolás. According to the school project, they are the brother Nicolás and the two cousins. Eugenio remembers it differently: for him, Lorenzo and Juan were the same man, known by one name or the other, and in a photograph he annotated the father appears as “Juan Pica (Pasquale di Lorenzo)” — in Italian, di Lorenzo means son of Lorenzo. The 1927 list was written down by ear and does not settle it. Both versions stay here.