Abbateggio was an isolated spot: there were no telephones, and in winter it was cut of from the rest of the country for long periods, because of the snow.

Maria soon turned out to be an excellent assistant and interpreter for her husband: although she was originally from the north of Italy, she learnt the local dialect quickly. Patients often consulted her first, leaving a ‘cumplimente’, a present, which might be cheese, eggs or potatoes. They opened their hearts to her, and she then communicated what she had learnt to Ugo.

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The villagers were superstitious. Once a woman who had caught a cold in April consulted Ugo: ‘Perhaps it’s because I washed my feet too soon after the winter,’ she said.

Often a witchdoctor was consulted, as well as Ugo, in a ‘belt and braces’ effort. In addition, offerings were made to the protectress of the village, the Madonna dell’Elcina: legend had it that in times gone by she had appeared to two mute boys and asked them to build a church. They ran home, and for the first time in their lives, spoke, communicating the Virgin’s wishes. Ugo didn’t mind who got the credit for a recovery.

The women in the village had to go to a stream far away to do their washing. To save on clothes and energy, women used to cut a little hole in the front of their sons’ trousers, from which their penises could peep out. A practical solution, perhaps, and fine in the summertime, but they must have been pretty cold in the winter.

Again in mid-winter, two years after the birth of the young couple’s son, a daughter was born. Both times, they were alone in their own home for the delivery, but this time, it was very fast. Maria kept nudging Ugo: ‘I think it’s time!’, but he’d just roll over and go back to sleep. Finally, at five in the morning, she could bear it no longer: ‘The baby is here!’ He got up just in time: ‘What a lot of hair!’ he exclaimed, as my sister Silvia came into the world.

After Silvia’s birth, preparations began for what had been Ugo and Maria’s dream for several months. Maria had a cousin in what was then Tanganyika (now Tanzania), a mandate under British administration in East Africa. ‘Come!’ he wrote to them. ‘They need doctors here!’ Ugo managed to get onto the Register of Medical Practitioners, and in March 1951, on his 27th birthday, when Maria was 22, they set off with a two-year-old toddler and a two-month-old baby. They had spent all their savings on the passages, and he had no job lined up at the other end.

This leap into the dark turned out, in my father’s words, to be ‘a jump into the light of an incredible experience, into a world distant light years from ours, a world whose dimensions are so different from those in Europe, where one lives in another climate and another atmosphere.’