Livework

Grandfather Armando Biondi (on her father’s side)


	Grandfather Armando Biondi / from Tuscany (second generation immigrant, came to Switzerland in 1907 aged five)

My grandfather Armando grew up in Dietikon, where he went to school and later completed an apprenticeship as a mason. Following his apprenticeship he rapidly rose to become a foreman. In April 1930 he entered the Zurich construction firm Heinrich Hatt-Haller. This was a well-known company, and it had been given the commission for the creation and technical supervision of the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva (where the UNO now has its European headquarters). My grandfather was soon promoted to the rank of supervisor, and later was involved in many major construction projects of the period in the role of supervisor in chief. These included the freight building at Kloten Airport, the very first Zurich high-rise building in Bärengasse and the high-rise building in Gutstrasse. Still in the role of chief supervisor he directed the construction of the main Brown Boveri building in Baden and that of the testing tunnel for shooting practice at the armaments manufacturing firm SIG in Neuhausen am Rheinfall. He was involved in a number of other tunnel, road and bridge construction projects, and also in the building of a tunnel at Ernen in the canton of Wallis.

During the Second World War he was engaged in the construction of the Susten pass road. Among the workers there were many foreigners who had been interned in Switzerland and were compelled to earn their bread in this way. Many of these were academics, who with their fine white hands “picked and shovelled”, as my grandfather put it. It impressed him deeply that even people like this could “lay to”, and he respected them for it. – My grandfather stayed with the Hatt-Haller company until his retirement.

He married my grandmother when he was nineteen years old. Her name was Lina Maria Widmer. She was five years older than he was, and came of a Swiss family that had originally been resident in Kirchdorf in the canton of Argovia, and later moved to Geroldswil in Zurich canton. She was the eldest daughter of Christian Widmer, who farmed on a large scale, and his wife Lina Keller. When my grandfather first made her acquaintance she was employed as a factory worker in a well-known Dietikon weaving works. My grandfather, whose Swiss German was better than his Italian, still had very much an air of the southlands and a southern temperament. At that time many Swiss women succumbed to the charm of the Italians. Swiss men tended to be reserved and bourgeois in their attitudes, and their reaction was frequently jealous. The lively Italian temperament was foreign to them; the intense language of gesture was perceived by them as threatening. For them it was difficult to see what differentiated a normal Italian dialogue from a conflict. This was the period when the soubriquet “Tschingge” came to be applied to all Italians. Italians were fond of playing a game called “La Mora”, where you had to guess how many fingers they would hold out. The word “cinque” [five] stuck in Swiss ears, because it drowned out the other numbers (uno, due, tre, quattro and so on up to dieci). So they just called Italians “cinque” or – as it became in Swiss pronunciation – “Tschinggä“.