Us and Our House

Historical Backgrounds

Raute/Coloncovez, ’20th Century

Country House “Le Lavandere” is located in the Raute/Coloncovez (in Slovenian Rovte/Kolonkovec) district, once considered the “vegetable garden of Trieste,” and still characterized in part by fruit trees, olive trees and vegetable gardens.

In this area on the outskirts of Trieste, historically inhabited by the Slovenian population and characterized by numerous streams of water, that of the laundress was once a widespread trade among local women. It enabled them to contribute to the family economy by rounding out the (usually meager) family income from the work done by the men, who were often employed in construction in parallel with agriculture.

Local laundresses would walk into town to pick up customers’ laundry on Mondays and bring it back in characteristic “bundles” on Thursdays or Fridays, after it had been boiled and washed with “smooth,” rinsed in the “caluse” of the streams and dried on tree branches.

The pre-existing house, a rustic sandstone cottage, was built in the late 1800s by master mason Valentin Daneu known as Tinko. Here he went to live with his wife Giovanna (“Vanza”) and numerous daughters (the locals called them “tinkoke” that is, Tinko’s daughters). Vanza, like her mother before her, was a laundress and passed on the trade to her daughters as well. All the sisters, although at different times, helped their mother in the work of laundress and some of them later continued on their own.

The house therefore was immediately equipped with a large room intended as a smoothie shop, and Tinko himself, alongside his trade as a mason, specialized in repairing the tubs and various tools needed for the laundresses’ work, so much so that other laundresses in the ward often brought their tubs here to repair as well.

Some of the daughters stopped the business when they left home to get married, while others continued even when married in their new home and into old age, that is, until the advent of the electric washing machine put an end to this ancient trade.

The washerwomen were sisters-Maria (“Ik’za”), Ivanka, Antonia (“Tonza”), Giustina, Giuseppina (“Pep’ka”), Emilia (“Milka”) and Paolina.