On October 28th, 1907, at the age of 26, my great great Grandpa Pio Piacentini came to the United States through Ellis Island on a ship from Arsoli Italy.

His wife Rose and children made their way to the states soon after and they started a new life on the east coast. From the stories I’ve been told, they struggled financially but had a beautiful life. By the time my Nana, Barbara Piacentini (Grandma Chicki’s mom) was 16, both of her parents had gotten sick and passed away leaving their children orphans. Nana had twin little brothers Michael and Angelo who were put in an orphanage. The story I was told growing up was that Nana would visit them and one day she took them for a ride in her car and never took them back.

They made their way to California and ended up on Catalina Island where they started Italian restaurants. They built a whole life on the island where my Grandma Chicki was born and spent the majority of her childhood.

At my Grandma Chicki’s celebration of life, we took a boat out of the Catalina harbor and spread Chicki’s ashes in the Pacific. My dad and his twin sister, Patti talked about their mom and her life. Chicki (Martha Mallan) loved to travel and after losing her second husband, Gordon Lange suddenly while living in Indonesia, she decided to move to France with the twins, my dad Bryant and his sister Patti who were around 6 at the time. Patti read a letter that Chicki had written to her best friend which expressed her grief in losing her husband and her loneliness living in a foreign place while processing it all. She always wanted to be a writer and in this letter she said how she was finally taking the time to write like she’d always wanted to. She wrote how she wondered if she’d ever write anything good enough to be published. She was in her 40s at the time of that letter.

She and her third husband Oz, had a deep love for Mexico and Belize so they would spend months at a time exploring and creating guide books all over the Yucatan Peninsula, different parts of Mexico, Catalina and Belize. My grandma Oz was a photographer so together they were able to spend their later years making friends all over and learning about these different cultures. They were able to build an exciting life together and eventually retired to Paradise, California where they lived the rest of their lives.

On October 28th, 2023, the day before Grandma Chicki’s celebration of life, we ran/biked the Catalina Island duathlon.

It was pretty rough.

The 6.2 mile run and 24.8 mile bike ride were through the hills of Catalina island. As I was biking + running up and down these hills I thought of my ancestors. I thought about the lives they they built and all they went through. They were dreamers.

I thought about Pio and Rose Piacentini, how they must have been so brave and hopeful to come to the United States without knowing what life would end up looking like for them.

I thought about my Nana and how she must have been such a badass to raise her little brothers while processing the loss of her parents at 16.

I thought about Grandma Chicki and how incredible she must have been to explore the world and go after her dreams in her older years.

I thought about the restaurants they owned, the books they wrote, the photos they took and the families they grew.

I thought about how wild it was that I was going through the same streets they walked.

I could feel them giving me the strength to make it up those hills.

I could feel how stoked they were at the finish line.