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Italian and Austrian Branch,
My Mother Adrienne Scotti |
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My mother, Adrienne Scotti, was born in Budapest (on the Pest side) 11th July1912, N°.2, Salay utsa, near Falk Miksa Street, where she went to school. |
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Her mother, Marie-Philomena, born Praindl in Tyrol, at Igls, had a young brother who died at a young age; he sang and played many instruments at all the fetes.
Their mother (my great-grandmother), Maria Ebener was a true Catholic, but she had an independent spirit verging on temerity : madly in love with a married man, in her little village of Keuchach, at the deep end of Austria - that kind of one-horse-town “where the fox and the goose have to say bye-bye” (wo der Fuchs und die Ganse mussen Adieu sagen) -, she revealed one calm and sunny morning to her father that she was expecting a baby. The father sent her packing and actually asked the nearest Church to toll the death-knell: from that day, his daughter was dead to him. Maria Ebener went to the nearest city, Innsbruck, and there, with the help of the Church, she was able to raise the « love child », little Franz. A tough character and a self made woman, she eventually became a town councillor of Innsbruck. Franz became a local notable, in a management position at the Austrian railroads. And Maria married Mr. Praindl and had with him two children, Joseph or Peppi, and my grand-mother, Maria-Philomena, who supported her brother artist her whole life; she wanted even to adopt his two children after his death, but they were too sick and she could not take them with her.
As for my great-grandfather Praindl, he boozed a little too much and died from cirrhosis of the liver. But, before taking his final exit, he had enough time to escape from the hospital, walk in the snow, and ring the familiar bell. Opening the door and seeing somebody in a long white nightgown, his wife thought that he had died and that it was his ghost. She fainted and fell on the floor. He strode across, opened the door of the sideboard, sipped delightedly at the plum brandy of which he had been dreaming in his bed in hospital, and fell dead. The law being at the time to bury a deceased person where he was born, he was buried at the Brixen’s cemetery.
Maria-Philomena, her daughter, married Baron Eugene-Maria Scotti, an Italian diplomat who was born near Parma.
 She lived her life with panache, rode horses side-saddle at the Tatersaal, and owned shares in the most beautiful hotel in the capital – the Ritz, Bristol, Hungaria. During the summer, she used to visit Chiofog on Lake Balaton. Till the day the Hungarian Communist Bela Kun (1886-1938) seized power, established in Hungary the Republic of the Councils (1919) and nationalized the properties of the (murdered) Nobles, Bourgeois and their allies.
Therefore, my mother was only around ten, when, with the help of foreign diplomats like Robien or Romanelli, her mother managed to escape to France. In Paris, she was attending a course to become executive secretary, when a fellow-student asked her to step in for his friend, with whom she had a rendez-vous, and she found herself typing letters for the student president (my father). He married her in 1939.
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