Tony Crosariol
Farmer, shoe salesman, voracious reader, raconteur. Born on Nov. 25, 1926, in Pravisdomini, Italy; died on April 1, 2014, in Toronto, of cancer, aged 87.
He was "Tony" on paper but always Tonin – "Little Tony" in the Venetian dialect – to those who knew him from Italy. The diminutive was ironic for a man who stood 6 foot 2 and wore size 13 shoes, even more so because there was nothing less than gigantic about his zeal for life. An Eaton's shoe salesman in his adopted land, Tony cared little for society's preoccupation with professional status. "What did your dad do for a living?" some asked at the funeral home. I can cheerfully say it never mattered.
This is what mattered: He loved to grow things, cook, write letters and read aloud to dinner guests from his voluminous and shamelessly embellished personal diaries typed out on a prized old Olivetti Lettera 22. He was insane about opera and classical music – Wagner, Verdi, Mahler, Bruckner and Shostakovich, the good stuff.
More than anything, he was obsessed with literature. In four languages he inhaled Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Voltaire, more recent icons such as Lorca, Henry Miller and Kerouac, and obscure geniuses, such as Eca de Queiroz. None came by way of a classroom; Tony had grudgingly quit school to work the family farm at 10.
His biggest idol was Marcel Proust, whom he began reading at 12. As a kid, Tony signed up for a church trip to Padua. For kids in the Veneto, in the prewar gloom of 1938, the Padua fair would have been Shangri-la. But after the group arrived, Tony went missing. By sundown, he reappeared at the train station to return to Pravisdomini, his home town. The priest leading the trip was unamused. How dare the kid? Turns out Tony had found his way to the famous Scrovegni Chapel to soak in the magnificence of Giotto's 14th-century frescoes described by Proust in Swann's Way. There's a sweet irony in that vignette. Here was a 12-year-old making the pilgrimage to one of Christianity's precious shrines to view revolutionary art depicting Christ's life. And here was a man of the cloth chastising the boy for abandoning a parish tour of the local equivalent of Disneyland.
Tony loved Canada, too. In the early years, after immigrating to Toronto in 1956, he dragged his wife, Diana, and sons John and Beppi to Lake Superior, Lake Louise and the Athabasca Glacier. He fell in love with Muskoka in the 1960s, when Ontario cottage country was still relatively unspoiled by the jet-boat assault of Toronto's nouveau riche. Back then Tony used to say, "When I retire, stick a big stamp on my backside and mail me to Muskoka."
Dad asked to be buried with a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy, which had kept him warm company in hospital. John and I would often arrive to find him, not in the room, but in the sadly vacant lounge, poring over the book with a pen, still making notes in the margins.
The copy in his casket is a tattered volume, with a dust jacket glued together by John from old newsprint and a protective wooden box made by Dad's late, dear friend Silvio Missio. As Dad handed over the book before he died, he said, "I'm done with it now, take it home and keep it for when the time comes." We knew then that the time would come soon.
Beppi Crosariol is Tony's son.