A family account that one war forced him to flee while the other returned to the country of origin

In recounting the story, Alberto Livadiottt looks at the old pictures, some black and white, others colorful, in the company of his girls playing peacefully with Stella, the cat of their home, on the floor of the outskirts of Catania, in eastern Sicily.

The Alberto account is accompanied by a Turkish cup of coffee as his wife, Rashi, approaches him in the living room.

The room is decorated with hooks and oriental lamps with colorful mosaics.

This is your father when he was your age”, says Alberto, gently wrapping his arm around his six-year-old daughter Fajer the youngest of his five children after showing a picture of him as a young boy dressed in traditional Syrian clothing.

Popular photos on the living room tea table tell a happier history in his homeland, Syria, before the civil war erupted in 2011 changed his course of life forever.

Despite his Italian name, 50-year-old Alberto was born and grew up on the outskirts of Damascus, writes AlJazeera, wiretaps Telegrafi.

Before arriving as a refugee in Italy with his family in the summer of 2014, he had never embraced Italian culture, learned the language, or gone to Italian soil.

But he had proudly kept Italian citizenship inherited from his grandfather Alfonso, an inheritance that Alberto had also carried to his five children.

During World War II, Alfonso Livadiotti, a nonpracticing Jew from Sicily, took refuge in Syria from the fascist regime of Italy.

Like millions of Syrians, who in the past nine years have risked their lives to gain security in Europe, 80 years ago, thousands of European refugees traveled the same ways to find refuge elsewhere.

By 1942, the British agency led by Middle Britain and Refugees Assistance (MERRA) operated refugee camps throughout the Arab region, placing about 40,000 people in camps in Syria, Egypt and Palestine.

Alberto holds photographs of his parents, Rena and Giusppe in downtown, his Greek grandparents and Yugoslav grandmothers, in Syria

Rena Cheropoulos, Alberto's mother, recalls the sweeping Arab society that in the 1940s she had also welcomed her Orthodox Christian parents from Greece, first as refugees in Beirut and later Damascus.

“Europe and Syria were not so different at the time”, she says with sadness.

A 69-year-old woman with a youthful spirit and the appearance of a Lebanese singer of the 1960s, Rena is the bearer of faded memories of her family.

Her late husband and father of Alberto, Giuseppe Livadiotti, once told her that when World War II ended, Alfonso fell in love with a refugee woman from Yugoslavia of Christian-Hebrew descent.

Their romance has returned to the beginning of a new life in the Middle East.

When their child, Alberto, was born, he enrolled in Italian nationality, and his family eventually became an integral part of Syria's ethnic mosaic.

Rena was just a teenager in 1967 when she married Giuseppe, the son of the Italian - rooted neighborhood in Syria.

But their love story was short - lived because he died of heart disease just months after Alberto was born, leaving Rene a widow at the age of 19.

Alberto was their only child.

A Call That Saved Them

Giusppe Livadiotti could not have known that his legacy would be salvation for his future grandchildren until nearly 40 years later.

When civil unrest became an armed conflict in 2012, Alberto received a call from the Italian Embassy in Damascus before suspending operations.

The embassy staff told him they were making preparations to evacuate Italian citizens and asked whether he and his family wanted to leave the country.

All those registered as Italian received that call; but for many others it meant going home, for their departure it would mean going as refugees.

“Syria had been our only home”, Alberto says.

Rashi, Farah and Fayer in Catania, Sicily, where they live now

He gets a last sip of his coffee before he sits on the bed. He joins his girls who want to sit on the lap.

We didn't want to go to a place we've never been. So we thought attitude was the best decision”.

As the months passed, however, the war began to take a more serious approach, causing problems in the family's mental health, along with Telegrafi.

The children were standing up crying all night, we were afraid of any noise”, says Rasa Hamed, Alberto's second wife, who in 2013 discovered that she was pregnant while listening to bombs around their home, right outside the capital.

“As a father and husband, my priority became their defence at any cost”, says Livadiotti.

Six months after Rashi carried second birth, and two years after the embassy called, Alberto sold everything he could, borrowed money from relatives, and took his family by bus to Lebanon.

His mother, wife, and children were with him, including all three of his marriage to his first wife who had died.

They spent several months in Beirut, while the Italian embassy there approved travel documents for Rasha, the only member of the family without Italian citizenship.

After tracking the family's origin in Catania in Sicily, the embassy suggested that they go there.

We've never heard of this town”, Rasa says. We didn't even know for sure which city Alfonso was from, because many of the family's historical details were buried with the time of”.

“But apparently it was in the embassy data”, her husband adds by taking her hand. “was an unusual way to discover my origin. But we got the embassy information and we went back where our family's history began”.

Everything from scratch

It was a cloudy day of August 13, 2014, when the Livadiot family landed at the Catania International Airport through Rome.

While most Syrians were heading north toward Germany or Scandinavian that year, they were among the few who went south.

With their arrival, the city seemed desolate, since mid - August is a vacation time for most Italians.

Alberto Livadiotti with his team members at his restaurant

We weren't familiar with Italian culture, so the first impression was we finished?

Alberto explains that he did not have relatives to contact or know Italian felt that he learned to walk again.

When they started looking for an apartment, no one would give them a lease because they were viewed as foreigners and unemployed.

It was when Rashi realized the paradox of their status.

We were Italian, yes, on paper. But in practice, we were perceived as refugees from the Middle East”.

After a week going from door to door, they finally found a three-bedroom apartment in the western suburbs of the city, and Telegram follows.

As a newcomer and without references, they had to pay the rent for a year - a payment covered by Rene's savings.

The weight of years that lived through conflict, the stressful expectation in Lebanon, and the uncertainty about their future in Sicily began to show the consequences to Alberto.

Soon after their arrival, he had a heart attack.

The family sought help from an Arabic - speaking population.

“While we did not speak the language or understand the health care system, we were grateful for those few people who offered help at such a difficult time for us”, Rashi says.

Today, however, all members of the family speak Italian perfectly.

As Italians, they were entitled to support from the state when they arrived, but they also found help from the Muslim community.

Although he had a Christian education, Alberto became Muslim 20 years ago before marrying Rasha.

Since the beginning of the refugee crisis in 2012, the Catania mosque has acted as a center for many land and sea refugees, including the Livadiotti family.

Just three weeks before Livadiottis's arrival, some 180 refugees and migrants had died trying to reach Sicily.

Among them, many Syrian troops were found on the coast of Lampedusa in southern Italy.

After recovering, Alberto invested the latter part of his savings in a food business with a Tunisian in early 2015.

In Damascus, Alberto had worked as an automobile salesman, selling Italian cars to the Syrians.

He thought that offering Syrian food to a Sicilian audience, whose kitchen tradition is often considered a bridge between Europe and the Middle East, would be a “pleasant overlap”.

Today, his restaurant “A thousand and a net” is a prosperous business, located in the city's historic centre and maintaining the entire family.

The specialised restaurant today offers fast Syrian food, such as sandwiches, and “shawarma” on the mat.

Its staff is made up of immigrants from Africa and Southeast Asia, who, like Albertos, have had to start life again in a foreign land.

It's a small but comfortable room, decorated with colorful Arabics and mosaics that remind of Middle Eastern architecture.

Their Present Life

Almost six years after their arrival, Livadiottis has finally regained control of their lives.

They eventually created a network of locals who care for them and who are no longer called refugees but friends and neighbors.

There is no reason to return to Syria now. We've cut off our lives there, now we're going to continue our path here”, Rashi says.

Italy may be their new home, but Syria remains their constant memory.

The cadres of Koran inscriptions and photographs made in Damascus, five decades ago, are hanging on walls, the only objects they managed to bring, along with some clothes and documents.

Alberto and Rashi with Farah and Fajer at their apartment in Catania, Sicily

We want our children not to forget their origin, so we always tell them stories about Syria. But only positive ones, for now”, says Rashi.

She thinks it's her mother's duty to heal their traumatic memories.

When they remember the bombs, I remember those Ramadan food traditions, or the big Christmas tree that is lit in Damascus's main square every December”.

Unlike her husband, Rashi was unable to bring her parents; they remained in Syria.

When children started going to school here, I learned Italian while trying to help them with homework. They encouraged every little progress I would make, showing me that I could deal with all of this”, says Rasa, relieved that they are found in a place where they can continue their schooling.

New photos of life were added to the album in Sicily, those of the birthdays of Farah and Fajer, near those recorded photographs in Syria, Alberto understands that his family has been completed.

I prefer to see our family's journey as a return story than exile. This shows that history and migration are cycles, and similar experiences can happen with anyone at different times and places”.