"We came from Malta..."

When I was a kid, family tales seemed to belong to an ancient era. I did not listen much, I was more intrigued by my father's job, and more interested in banging hammers.
Once grown up, and become a carpenter, from those family stories heard as background chatting, I recalled some talks making sense.
The Cafieros were silk merchants, living in Malta. But they still owned buildings in Meta.
After the fall of Napoleon, they chose to leave the island, and to return to their native land.
Probably, Malta under British custom was not a convenient base anymore.
Several years later, they had abandoned the silk business, and had become carpenters and shipwright, like my father and me: towards the half of the XIXth century, Sorrento's mulberries were all but supplanted by orange grooves, and this was the end of local silk production, or maybe, orange were just more proitable cultures. Rebuilding a classic boat (with mulberry wooden framework), child's memories must help the reconstruction of family history.
The sculpture on the prow of the wooden gozzo boat we are building, the "St. Maria del Lauro", on the blueprint of my father's grandpa's boat, will be dedicated to the Madonna from which she was named. But in the inside of it, the builder symbol will be a cross of Malta.