Wife and cattle from your own village

Moglie e buoi dei paesi tuoi!
This is an old italian proverb, or maybe more an advice to the italian man: that he should, for his own best, choose his wife and cattle from his own village. Why on earth should he, you may ask, and so did my mum when she first heard this proverb (and wondered why my dad had ignored this simple advice and chosen a wife from a icy volcanoe island far far away). But recently it dawned on my mum that whichever the original meaning was, there is now a new interpretation.

In Italy, only SIX % of babies aged 0-3 years have access to kindergartens run by the city or town administrations (compared to 64% in Denmark!). There are, of course, also private kindergartens, but what they all have in common is that they are quite expensive, and since salary in Italy is not very high, not everyone can afford sending their children to a kindergarten. Therefore, if you cannot afford the kindergarten you have three possibilities: you opt not to have children; one of the parents stays at home with the baby the first 3 years (if you can afford to live on one income only); or you chose your wife from your own village. It goes on to say that it would be useless to chose the wife from your own village if you then chose to abandon the village for greener fields somewhere else -at least if you want to follow the old proverb in its new interpretation! This is because the biggest treasure for italian parents is i nonni -the grandparents, that step in when the state and local administrations fail to fulfill their educational role. The nonni have become the prime childcare-giver in Italy! This is obvious to you if you go to a playground or walk the streets of a town during the day, e.g. here in Ponte San Pietro, as I do almost daily with my parents. One hardly ever sees parents with their kids!! The only babies that one sees are accompanied by their grandparents (another possibility is that parents in italy are THAT old...but I don't think so). Luckily in Italy, the grandparents retire relatively early and are also relatively healthy (thanks to the mediterranean diet???). And luckily they're also kind enough to set aside their plans to enjoy old age with travelling, attending their hobbies or whatever they've set their mind to, to become almost parents for the second time. This is also one reason for why it has been difficult for us to get to know other parents here in our new hometown. We know a lot of grandparents, basically there isn't a person over 60 years in this town that doesn't greet us, or start chatting with us, on the street, but the younger generation is almost completely missing from our circle of aquaintence.

To sum up: if you chose your wife from your own village, and then don't move away from that village, chances are that you have two sets of grandparents to take care of your little ones. But what then about the cattle?