“Every book, every film, every anything has a parent. It is somebody’s pride and joy. And even if it is bloody awful, there’s somebody out there who, for some reason, has it as their all-time favourite piece of art,” writes Kindness columnist ANTONIO DI DIO.

Last week, I couldn’t sleep. With Rafa the wonder dog quietly snoring at our feet, I searched for I Figli Di Nessuno (Nobody’s Children), a 1951 fillum (French-Italian, like Cinema Paradiso).

It’s a deliberate melodrama film directed by Raffaello Matarazzo and starring Amedeo Nazzari, Yvonne Sanson and Françoise Rosay. 

The owner of a marble quarry falls in love with the daughter of one of his employees, and they have a baby together.

The girl’s mother attempts to sabotage the relationship with tragic consequences, involving orphanages, people becoming nuns, reunions, and sick kids in hospitals.

It is utterly predictable, but so is every song on Springsteen’s first five albums and it doesn’t stop me loving every minute over and over. 

The show was inexplicably special to mum and dad. They talked about it all the time when I was growing up and to me it was like The Greatest Film Ever Made because of their attitude, and that, of course, I’d never seen it and probably never would. It just meant so much to them. 

Years pass and I’m in my twenties and there are shops in Sydney that sell Italian veggies, pastries, salamis, godawful baccala salted cod, and the other things they missed. Most holidays I’d schlep home with some of this stuff in the car (on the condition that they were not allowed to cook the fish till I was at least past Kempsey on the way back to Sydney – that stuff was the napalm of the sea).

These marvellous Italian shops in Five Dock, where I became a local GP, one day started selling videos, and I found this show! Maybe it was 1994, and Italy’s heroic striker Robbie Baggio had missed a World Cup final penalty against Brazil to crush the hearts of millions (I’m not bitter, really, I’m totally fine) and I drove home with patient wife, stinky toxic fish and Italian videos.

We excitedly put the movie on, planning a five-minute intro before lunch, then to go back and watch the whole thing later. For 10 minutes I watched the tear jerker start up, then for the entire rest of the show, I watched my parents as they watched it. Piecing it together.

The movie was released in 1951. They’d met and married in 1951. Their dads had set it all up and they’d met for a couple of walks in the park and a movie (in an old building that looked exactly like Cinema Paradiso, where many years later I did some growing up, too) – this was that movie!

The key plot driver is an evil mother-in-law, and mum had some views on them, especially her own. In Australia in the ’90s, they silently watched the whole show, for the first time in 43 years, then wordlessly played it again and again. No lunch or dinner. Unbelievable.

Eventually we were reciting the speeches at the end together. It was amazing. How good was this movie? It was terrible. It was wonderful. It was a joy to see what they’d seen. Imagine mum, an old maid at 22 when her five older sisters were all married at 14 and my aunty Rosa and aunty Fortunata already nonnas in their twenties. She’d met this bloke for five minutes and thought he was a boofhead and had to marry him next week and here she was watching The Greatest Film Ever with him and maybe… maybe he wasn’t so bad. 

Anyway, last week I watched this show and every word seemed to come back to my memory like Born to Run or the averages of the 1977/78 Australian cricket team. Not a minute had passed. 

Every book, every film, every anything has a parent. It is somebody’s pride and joy. And even if it is bloody awful, there’s somebody out there who, for some reason, has it as their all-time favourite piece of art.

I will watch this silly wonderful show every year forever, because it connects me to those two lovely folk who I knew better than anyone and yet hardly at all.

One of the Rules of Kindness is never criticise someone’s bliss, and that seems pretty right to me.

Antonio Di Dio is a local GP, medical leader and nerd. There are many more of his Kindness columns at citynews.com.au