Adorned in a rose pink sweater and wearing hazel tinted glasses, Maria Vigliotti reveals the now humorous struggle to break free from her restrictive family and marry her older lover. Maria, boasting an wide spanning smile and an ebullient demeanour, goes on to describe the hazardous conditions in which her love for her older and now deceased husband flourished.

“Back in those days in Italy,” Maria begins, “it wasn’t uncommon for the mother to pick out her daughter’s husband, and my defiance wasn’t well received,” she concedes, gently chuckling.

But Maria’s mother’s cultural role was unnecessary in this situation, as Maria was enamoured with her older, sophisticated and genteel boss. Her work as a seamstress was to be a temporary vocation; a necessitating job to help furnish her wilder ambitions. But her bosses romantic intentions and gentleman theatrics was too much for the beautiful 18 year old to resist.

“I was passionate about writing and wanted to be journalist and probably would’ve been if I never met him,” Maria states gently grinning, “but he was so romantic, and a gentleman; he’d walk around me as I work. I just couldn’t resist.”

Maria then reaches into her purse and reveals a fraying picture of a handsome man with a soft well groomed face wearing a dapper black suit. She smiles as she recalls the intense beauty of his dark blue eyes and his sharp elegant features.

“He had the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen; they were soft, mysterious and cerulean tinted. He had a dark, brooding handsomeness that drove me crazy.”

However charming and good-looking Maria’s lover was, the man was not only ten years older than her but also owning of a chequered past. The man, Luigi Vigliotti, was a 28 year old master tailor from Naples who, along with his pyrotechnician cousin, left Naples after enduring a handful of years engulfed in a tumultuous marriage that had produced two young boys. After an onslaught of arguments, Luigi left and headed to Venice, yet by the time he set his eyes upon the teenaged Maria, he was still married to his Napolitano wife; presenting an array of sticky issues in conservative Catholic Church dominated post World War Two Italy.

“You see in Italy at that time, divorce was very difficult; especially how the Church dominated social life. Even if you got a divorce, you still risked being shunned by your family, friends and community.” Yet, once Maria’s parents discovered the couple’s romance, they insisted that if the two were to remain together, they were to be married. The persistence of Maria’s father for the two be wed was exactly what the young Maria wanted but Luigi’s revelations of his complicated past considerably clouded the two’s future.

“I was very disappointed and I considered leaving him but deep down inside, I couldn’t; I loved him.”

So Maria remained with her lover and the together the two trudged through the difficult proceedings, as Luigi was granted his divorce and was able to retrieve his two young boys from a Naples orphanage, where their mother had placed them. Despite the difficult start to their romance the two stayed together through it all. Soon the couple and their young expanding family darted off to Norway before finally settling in Ottawa where the two remained until his unfortunate death from cancer in the early 1980’s. When, recalling the whole episode of her life, Maria insists that she would do all over again, only with bearing one big regret.

“I wish I never stopped pursuing my dream of being a journalist but what can you do, love makes you a fool.”