Auntie Ida at the Beach- Carla Simonini

I am not even sure how old I was, but I had to have been at least ten, because that was when my parents built our beach house and we began the ritual of abandoning the mean streets of Providence for the shores of Narragansett.

My father had two aunts who never married. Back then they were referred to as old maids, zitelle in Italian, a word that still defines a woman by her place within a family, zia meaning “aunt,” rather than suggesting any independent life of her own. They were the last remaining connection he had to his father, who died when my dad was only twelve years old.

My father was very attached to these aunties, born Aida and Elena, but always called
Ida and Helen. Auntie Helen passed first. I do not remember her ever coming to the beach with us. She was always the more sickly and frail of the two, with a powdered white face that looked like a blanket of skin draped loosely over the contours of her features. No, Auntie Helen most definitely never came to the beach with us. But Auntie Ida did.

Someone would have had to pick her up in Providence and drive her to Narragansett, a
full forty-five miles away, which, in Rhode Island terms, is something akin to a transatlantic voyage. My grandmother may have picked her up. She was still driving then, and she was always dutiful about making sure her sisters-in-law were included in family gatherings, despite the periodic bickering and long-repressed resentments between them.

My grandmother was the dark Italian from the Ciociaria who married their blond, blue- eyed Tuscan brother, who then sickened and died, leaving her a young widow with two children. What a strange relationship they had, these aunties and my grandmother. The distance between them is manifest in the family burial plots. My grandfather is the only sibling not buried beneath the red granite Simonini monument erected by his father. Instead, he rests in a different cemetery plot beside my grandmother and her siblings.

I found out years later that Auntie Ida had insisted there was not enough room beneath the Simonini monument for both my grandparents to be buried there, forcing my grieving and financially strapped grandmother to purchase a separate plot. And by the way, Auntie Ida was wrong. The extra expense and stress had been entirely unnecessary.

Still, somehow, Auntie Ida periodically made it to the beach house to visit us, likely driven there by my grandmother so she could enjoy a day at the shore. And on the beach, Auntie Ida stood out, even though she barely stood four feet ten inches tall. While the rest of us plopped down on towels or low beach chairs, she sat perfectly upright in a full-sized lawn chair, fully dressed, hat on, pocketbook clutched in both hands atop her knees. I imagine she still wore stockings and sensible shoes, though I cannot be sure. I like to think she at least let herself feel the sand between her toes, or breathed deeply of the heavy salt air.

She seemed so out of place, yet there she sat with us in silence while children played and splashed and seagulls squawked overhead. We built sandcastles and rode waves while she sat in her lawn chair with her pocketbook perched upon her lap. We spent whole mornings and afternoons with her like that on the beach, more than once.

Years later, after Auntie Ida passed away, my father shared her photo albums with me. There were pages filled with photographs of her as a young woman, some with her wearing a 1920s bathing suit, surrounded by other young people dressed much the same. Whoever they were has been lost to time, but to me they became the chorus of Auntie Ida’s youth.

The photographs revealed quite a different woman from the one I knew as the tiny old lady sitting fully dressed in an upright lawn chair at the beach. She looked fashionable and seemingly popular. She was a career woman before that was something to aspire to. I should ask my father about it, because I know she worked for many years and was honored with a retirement party.

The more I looked through those albums, the harder it became to reconcile the woman in the photographs with the sisters I had known as old ladies together in the Federal Hill apartment. By the time I came along, Auntie Ida and Auntie Helen seemed less like two distinct personalities than a single unit—the Aunties.

For my entire life, the Aunties lived in an apartment on Federal Hill. Federal Hill was Providence’s Little Italy, actually one of several Italian neighborhoods in the city, but just as New York’s Mulberry Street eventually eclipsed the other immigrant enclaves to become the Little Italy of and postcard fame, so too did Federal Hill.

The apartment was a typical tenement in some ways, with a massive gas stove anchoring the central room for both heating and cooking. But unlike many tenements described in the “how they lived” sections of history books about the Great Wave of immigration, this one was also more richly appointed. There was even a formal front parlor, though it was seldom used. I strain to remember whether the furniture there was
covered with plastic, but I tend to think not, cautiously taking into account how mythology and stereotypes can color memories.

More significant than the apartment itself was the fact that the aunties owned the building — not just their apartment, but all six units. They had inherited it from their father, my great-grandfather, and had long served as the building’s landladies. On Federal Hill, the Tuscan side of my father’s family was known to be benestante — well-off.

When we visited, Auntie Helen was usually seated beside the giant stove. The apartment was conspicuously devoid of anything that might interest children, a testament to the sisters’ spinsterhood. Yet in an act of supreme affection, the aunties would bring out a whimsical set of bar tools for my brother and me to play with. Three colorful little “people” sat on a wooden bench, though their lower halves were actually a corkscrew, a bottle opener, and a bottle stopper. Their practical purpose was completely lost on us. To my brother and me they were simply tiny figures that animated our imaginations, though occasionally we were reduced to only two characters when the corkscrew “person” was withheld out of an abundance of caution.

Auntie Helen died before my parents built the beach house, so naturally I have no memories of her at the shore. More surprising, though, is that I cannot find any photographs of her among the beachgoers on Prudence Island or in Newport in the old albums my father eventually entrusted to me.

Leafing through those crumbling black pages, mottled with mildew and filled with carefully glued sepia photographs, I recognize almost no one except Auntie Ida and a few relatives identified in my father’s handwriting. I suppose the albums belonged to Auntie Ida, and that in her youth she moved within a broad social circle that may not have included her more delicate sister.

What happened, I wonder? How did Auntie Ida transform from the seemingly independent and spirited young woman in the 1920s bathing suit into the demure elderly lady sitting upright in a lawn chair at Narragansett with her purse clutched tightly in her lap? Was it simply the inevitable progression of time?

And what must life have been like for both sisters after their parents died, and then their middle-aged brother married, leaving them alone together in the apartment building they now owned? From my father’s stories, Auntie Helen appears to have taken on the role of housewife, though wife to none. She wore housecoats, cooked, cleaned, and stayed home, while Auntie Ida dressed in tailored suits and matching pillbox hats and went off to work each day.

But then Auntie Ida retired, and eventually it was just the two of them. It seems safe to assume that many of the laughing young people in those old beach photographs married, had children, and gradually drifted away. The sisters remained close to a few people, mostly relatives, but over time their strongest attachments became us.

That is why my brother and I were brought so often to the apartment with the giant stove to sit on the floor and play with bar tools. That is why, while Auntie Ida was still driving, she and Auntie Helen would arrive at our house nearly every afternoon, dressed in stockings and hats, simply to “see the babies” — my brother and me. And most of all, that is why my dutiful grandmother continued to pick up Auntie Ida, her not always easy-going sister-in-law, and drive her all the way down to our beach house in Narragansett.

That the carefree bathing beauty in the photographs from Prudence Island and Newport was the same person as the tiny, fully clothed woman sitting upright in a lawn chair on the beach remains something of a mystery to me. I sometimes wonder in which version of herself she was happier.

Looking back now, though, I am simply grateful that she was there at all, and that I have these memories — memories of family, love, obligation, loneliness, and devotion in all their complicated forms.



About the Author: Carla A. Simonini earned her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from Brown University and is a scholar of Italian and Italian American literature, transatlantic literary relations, and nineteenth-century American travel writing. She is the former Paul and Ann Rubino Endowed Associate Professor of Italian American Studies at Loyola University Chicago, where she founded and directed the Italian American Studies program, and previously led the Italian program at Youngstown State University. From 2016 to 2024, she served as Editor-in-Chief of Italian Americana: Cultural and Historical Review. Her forthcoming monograph, Traveling Italy, Writing America: Ethnic Identity Construction in Italian American Literature (Fordham University Press, 2026), examines how nineteenth-century American representations of Italy were reimagined by Italian American writers as a means of constructing ethnic identity and cultural legitimacy.