Tracy and I wondered what prompted the young Giovanni Cattani to
leave his family and his beautiful hometown. Perhaps he was driven to
see more of the world and make his own way in it. If so, he succeeded by
rising to be the chief executive of a major mining and steel
manufacturing company in Luxembourg. We wondered if he ever made the
long trek back to the remote village of Dimaro later in life.
He spent the first years of his career in Metz, France, where he was
known as Jean (French for Giovanni, of course) Baptiste Cattani, and
that was the name by which he was called for the rest of his life. There
he married Elisabeth Melchior, but she died childless when the couple
were both in their thirties. After relocating to nearby Luxembourg, the
widower Cattani married for the second time. He and his new bride were
both thirty-eight years old. She was a widow named Anna Hollerich Krau,
the daughter of the owner of a large mining and steel company—the same
company that employed her new husband. The Cattanis had three daughters
of their own, including my grandmother, Josephine Elisa Christine
Cattani, who was born on 15 September 1896.
Jean Baptiste Cattani died in Rumelange, Luxembourg on 24 November
1903 at the age of fifty-five. Anna Krau Cattani, died during a 1920
visit to the United States to see my grandmother. She may have been a
victim of the Spanish flu. Buried in Waterbury, CN, her headstone has
the simple inscription “Anna Krau, wife of Jean Cattani”.
Although we were disappointed to find no Cattani burials in the cemetery of Dimaro’s San Lorenzo Catholic church,
we found it illuminating to see the village where he was raised, the
glorious Dolomites shrouded in morning mist, and to walk alongside the
river rapids raging just outside of town.
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