A ray of sunshine falls on William Moriconi’s hands through a wide window overlooking an elegant, small park in Glasgow’s West End. He dusts off his instrument, and then starts playing his oboe for us. Meanwhile, his two small children are turning the living room into their personal chaos, despite the attempts of their grandparents and mother to keep them calm. William does not care. The pleasure of playing those two, three minutes of Mozart and Wolf-Ferrari is so great he is insulated from the rest of the world.

This is the first time he has played in years.

William is, actually, a jeweller. He welcomed us at his shop in a shopping centre, and then we moved then to his apartment. At home, he suddenly became a musician. Maybe he is both at the same time, in the same way that his family is a complex overlapping of present and past.

William used to play for the Symphonic Orchestra of Rome, touring in the US, China, South America, Russia, Greece, Spain and Germany. He played should to shoulder with Dario Nardella, mayor of Florence and close collaborator of Renzi, Italy’s Prime Minister.

In reality, William’s name has nothing to do with Britain, as he is rather a true Tuscan from Barga, a small town not far from Lucca. He moved to the UK after meeting Marilena again, whom he had known since childhood. Marilena is in fact partially from Tuscany too; her parents moved from Barga to Scotland, as so many did in the past. The town is indeed the place from where much of the historic Italian immigration to Scotland originates: in the early 1900s more than one tenth of the whole Scottish Italian community came from Barga.

She was in Italy to visit a few relatives and returned to Glasgow shortly after. After some time, William followed her.

In Glasgow, William tried to continue playing music as a profession. However, he did not like the small freelance roles he covered for the Royal Scottish Orchestra or the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. When a friend offered him the possibility of selling Italian jewellery in Scotland in his spare time, he did not expect to end up being so successful that he had to open a second shop, after only two years.

This is how William became a part of the Scottish-Italian community, shortly followed by his parents who emigrated from Italy for the first time in their eighties. They went to the country, Scotland, which they had heard about all their lives, but never visited.

Marilena and her family are, by contrast, marked by the historic memory of the Italian community in Scotland. She tells us her story in an Italian which is a bit British, a bit inspired by the ancient Tuscan dialect, while William hopelessly tries to recover his oboe from the hands of their children.

A few meters from William’s jewellery shop, Marilena’s great grandfather had opened an ice cream shop more than a hundred years ago. As he died young, from the devastating pollution of industrial Glasgow, his wife had to travel between Italy and Scotland for years to provide for her family. Pushed by the need for a job, one of her sons, an uncle of Marilena, moved south of Glasgow. When the second world war began, he disappeared.

His mother thought he had been taken to an internment camp, possibly to be sent to Canada. She discovered that the ship carrying the Italian prisoners there, the Arandora Star, had been sunk, and she feared for his life. She checked the prisoners’ records from Scotland, but his name was not there. She asked everyone she knew, hoping to find him in another internment camp, maybe on the Isle of Man, where many other Italians were. Nothing came out: his destiny was a complete mystery for years.

Marilena’s family discovered what happened only a few years ago from a list of Italian railway workers who had died outside Italy during the war. They thought their uncle had been in Scotland, but for reasons unknown, it transpired he had been working at Birmingham train station. On a perfectly normal day, the police arrested him, guilty only of being Italian, marking him for Canada, a destination he would never reach.

— Photo: William Moriconi in the living room of his apartment in Glasgow.