Zia Lisetta, Great Aunt is right

For those of you raised in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, let me explain what may not be clear: family ties tend to be tighter for people with Mediterranean temperaments.  Cousins are like siblings. This may lead you to the very reasonable question, what, then, are siblings like? Siblings are like an extension of yourself, a limb you hold very dear, say.  So that the feeling of seeing a sibling in pain is not unlike the feeling of being wounded on your own limb.  This is the only way I know how to describe it, I'm not saying this is always a good thing nor am I in any way suggesting that we love more than you, just that we're crazy when it comes to family. CRAZY. My family is particularly insane in this respect, I won't go into specifics and I know everyone thinks his/her family is nuts so you'll just have to take my word for it (or not, whatever). 

Zia Lisetta, my grandmother's sister, for example, was not someone I only saw twice a year at family reunions. This was the lady whose house my little brothers and I would run to when my grandmother was being mean to us.  She always stuck up for us, she'd get into screaming matches with her older sister, call her a tyrant, stop speaking to her for weeks, all to defend four little rugrats who, truth be told, probably had whatever they got coming to them.  She was a drunk.  I can count on one hand the times in my life that I saw her sober and in rural Italy being a drunk is bad enough but a drunken woman is just short of criminal.  Zia Lisetta didn't seem to care much what the townsfolk thought of her though and neither do I.  You'd be hard pressed to find a cooler lady.  She was the mail lady in our village, the first woman in the town of 800 to get her license, back when women did not drive. Her beat up old Fiat always smelled like homemade wine and the back was always filled with burlap sacks of undelivered mail and she's drive it around the steep narrow treacherous roads of our little mountain village like it was a Ferrari... Zia Lisetta usually forgot to wear her dentures which made the many kisses she always insisted on showering upon us rather painful since her pointy protruding chin would always reach our cheeks long before her lips did.  I'm thinking about her today because I'd give anything to be sitting in her kitchen right now, pouring myself a glass of gassosa with a healthy helping of wine added to it and listen to her drunken ramblings for hours on end.  Zia Lisetta was a hot-blooded, hardcore, tell it like it is, powerhouse.  And I loved her awful.