“He never left Switzerland,” says Alicia, wife of Gianfranco Consolascio, in their home in San Rafael, California. The retired watchmaker explains how he started a new life in the New World more than 50 years ago, while maintaining a strong sense of nostalgia and love for his country.
This content was published on March 18, 2023
minutes
Flavia Leuenberger Ceppi
Last year, I was at the Swiss consulate in San Francisco for a personal exhibition devoted to the Moghegno-Monterey project, a series of portraits dedicated to the members of the families of emigrants from Ticino. An elegant, elderly man approached me and said proudly: “I am the last emigrant to have left Ticino”.
Gianfranco Consolascio wanted to tell his personal story of emigration, and I wanted to understand what he meant by this sentence, since people had left Ticino after him and continue to do so. I think he was referring to a question of generation: people leaving out of necessity, rather than a desire to change their lives in another country. Gianfranco wanted to see America.
He was born in 1938 in Brione sopra Minusio, a town overlooking Lake Maggiore in the canton of Ticino, in southern Switzerland. In his early twenties, he worked for various watch companies in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the French-speaking part of the country.
Now 85, he says he has fond memories of that time, both professionally and personally. He tells how he participated in several evening classes, eager to broaden and refine his skills. Having mastery of several fields, for example stopwatches and spirals, helped him a lot in applying for jobs in the various factories.
He didn’t have a car, lived in a new neighborhood and walked to work. He used to get together with colleagues – including several from Ticino – with whom he spent much of his free time going dancing or drinking coffee.
In 1969, while in Ticino, he saw an advertisement in a Swiss newspaper in French-speaking Switzerland: one of the companies he had previously worked for, Universal Geneva, was looking for people to work in its New York office.
Gianfranco jumps at the chance and decides to cross the Atlantic. In New York, his life changed dramatically: he met his Venezuelan wife, Alicia, at work, and a few years later they moved to California, where he opened a watch repair shop in San Francisco and where the couple are raising their two daughters.
Feeling of nostalgia
Their house in San Rafael contains many references to Gianfranco’s life in Switzerland: books on Ticino and the rest of the country, photographs depicting panoramic views of the Locarno region, the family coat of arms and a faded postcard. sepia color. Moved, he explains that one of the two women who appear there is his grandmother, Maria Sciaroni, at the Locarno market. She walked there from Brione to sell fruit.
Although he did not know his grandmother, there is a link that suggests otherwise, perhaps the same link he has with Ticino, which he never stopped visiting regularly.
When he lived in Ticino, Gianfranco would go on vacation to Italy, Spain and Portugal, but today he wouldn’t go anywhere else but Ticino. Over the years, he grew to appreciate her more and more, he says.
Alicia says that this feeling of nostalgia is palpable and that her love for her homeland is constantly present – in her words, but also, and above all, in her moments of silence.
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