FROM RAGU TO RICHES
This is a story about two cities, one woman and tomato sauce. The story began nearly one hundred years ago in the kitchen of a small house in the ancient city of Melfi in southern Italy. It ended with one of the USA’s best-selling sauces.
In July 1892, a baby girl was born in Melfi. She was called Assunta Gala. Her father, Michelangelo, and his wife Amelia had ten children altogether. Four of them died.
In those days life in southern Italy was very hard. One way of escape was a ticket to the USA. The whole family emigrated and Assunta arrived in New York on 15th May, 1914. They went straight to “Little Italy” in New York State and settled in the city of Rochester. Assunta had no skills except cooking and she worked in her brother’s restaurant for several years. In 1927 she married Giovanni Cantisano and started a family.
To earn a little extra money, Assunta began to make spaghetti sauce. She used her mother’s old recipe, made the sauce in her kitchen and sold it locally. Soon everyone wanted the sauce and the Cantisanos moved the “kitchen” to a factory. They put the sauce into cans, called it “Ragu” and sold it throughout the northeastern states.
In 1969, an American food company bought the “golden recipe” for over forty million dollars! Assunta began her life in poverty and died a millionairess. Her sauce was the best-selling spaghetti sauce in the whole of the USA.
BORN TO DANCE
Nina Ananiashvili is a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Ballet, the greatest ballet company in the world. She lives with her husband Guya, a diplomat , in an apartment in Moscow. The apartment is very small. The bedroom and the sitting room are in one room and there is only a very small bathroom and kitchen.
Every morning Guya and Nina have breakfast at half past seven. Then Nina prepares her ballet shoes. She uses three new pairs of ballet shoes for every performance. Nina usually walks to her classes at the theater. “I love the city”, she says, “It opens my eyes”.
But on performance days, she takes a taxi to class and back. “I like to save my energy”, she says. She arrives at the theater at about five o’clock in the evening. The performance starts at seven thirty.
Dancing is very tiring and some ballerinas lose three kilos during a performance. Nina is always very thirsty after a performance. “I drink and drink: water, tea, lemonade, anything. Usually I can’t sleep until three or four o’clock in the morning.”
Bolshoi dancers earn quite a lot of money and there are other rewards. Girls stand in shopping queues to buy food for her. “Men just leave flowers outside my apartment and then run away!” says Nina, and laughs.
A LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO WORK
Do you think you have a long and boring journey to work? Well, David Ross takes over seven hours every day to get to and from work. That’s 1,610 hours a year!
David Ross, a 32-year-old accountant, lives with his wife and two children in Leeming, a small country village near York in the north of England. But his job is in the center of London, 400 miles (640 km) away in the south.
Every day David leaves home at five o’clock in the morning, drives three miles to his local railway station and catches the 5:30 train to York. At York he takes the 6:12 InterCity Express to King’s Cross in London. From there he goes by underground to Liverpool Street Station and the walks to his office.
The whole journey takes three hours and fifty minutes. He gets home at nine o’clock in the evening. What a life!
Why does he do it? David smiles: “Because I like my job in London but I like living in the north and I like travelling by train!”
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