Sugarì is the nickname given to my ancestors at least 100 years ago.
The first Sugarì known in my family has been my great-grandfather Giuseppe, that this the father of my father’s mother, named Giuliana. Giuseppe, a producer of very good wine, liked to be the first taster of his masterpieces and for this reason he often opened his bottles in a very proud and noisy way. These bottles were closed with a cork, called “sughero” in Italian language. This is why his friends started to call him “Sugarì”.
His daughter Giuliana unfortunately was left a widower very young, during the Thirties, and due to this very sad and unexpected event she was the best known “Sugarina” of her generation, with her beloved six children. Grandmother Giuliana, called grandma Giulia by all of us, the perfect “vergara” (that is, the real boss in the patriarchal family!), strong and stable, courageous, at the same time loving and sweet, remains in our heart and in our mind, with the so warm memories we keep of her.
During the Fifties most of “Sugarì” family still lived in Chigiano, a very small village in the country of San Severino Marche, and the nieghbours playfully called my uncles in a rhyme: “I sugarì, l’estate l’acqua e l’inverno lo vì”, that is, “The Sugaries, water in summer and wine in winter” to remind their devotion in good wine production and their satisfaction to be the first consumers of it, so that their wine was never enough for the whole year but finished before the next vintage time.
My father Elio was the forth son and was a dealer of products for the agriculture, he kept this nickname during his life and I still remember with great affection how I was sometimes called when, being a child, I walked with my father and he stopped to talk with some friends of his: I was called, in fact, the “Sugarina ciuca” that is, translated into Italian, “the young Sugarina”.
