Happy chaos in Rome as families — 1 Ukrainian, 1 Italian — wait out the war together

On a spring evening in Rome, the wisteria blooming for the first time outside, 13-year-old Eva Giulia Cadeddu sat at the piano in the open, light-filled living room of her family’s apartment and played Chopin’s. Waltz No. 19 in A Minor.

As the notes floated through the air, the scene around her was a joyful chaos: Sofia, 2, leaned against the piano bench, holding a small plastic toy, listening intently. Clara, 10, and Veronica, 6, sit on the floor near Lego toys.

The mother of Veronica and Sofia, the Ukrainian Iryna Tselep, cleaned the other toys, because the mother of the older girls, the Canadian Charlotta Jull, put the pizza in the kitchen in the kitchen with the help of her husband, the Italian Simone Cadeddu.

For more than a year, the two families – minus Tselep’s husband, Yuri, who is still in Ukraine – have been living together, sharing childcare, cooking and chores – with Jull helping Tselep deal with Italian bureaucracy and enrolling her children in school.

Eight years ago, it was Tselep who provided important help to Jull and Cadeddu as Eva Giulia and Clara’s nanny. Tselep was in Rome to be close to Yuri when he completed his ordination training for the Greek Orthodox Church, which allows priests to marry.

Jull, who is from Vancouver, works full time as a lawyer for the UN food agency in Rome, and Cadeddu is a lawyer for a British company.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, Jull reached out to offer an elderly nanny and her family. At first Tsepel refused, but after a week of missile attacks, constant sirens and sleeping in a garage in his hometown of Ternopil, he texted Jull in the middle of the night desperate for an offer.

‘We all thought it would be a few weeks’

The Roma couple went into action.

“I woke up Simone at 5 o’clock, we booked a ticket for her and arranged for her to come,” said Jull. “We all thought it would be a few weeks because it looked hopeless for the Ukrainians. We thought, maybe once. [the invasion] it’s over, let’s go back.”

But more than a year later, the seven are still living together, with no clear end in sight. The resulting experience, the two families say, had a profound effect on how they saw the world, their family lives and themselves.

For Jull, who had been planning to return to work after a break during COVID, this meant not only delaying her return to work to better support Tselep, but also re-visioning her professional future. When Jull returned to work, she wanted to switch her career to supporting refugee women in the workplace, so she wouldn’t be permanently out of work.

“With war, you always think of soldiers fighting, but there’s another side to it,” he said. “So many female refugees are all alone with their children here and I know… how much your help is needed.”

The lives of his daughters have also changed; enriched, they say.

“I study piano at school and Veronica has expressed an interest, so I teach her some notes and scales and stuff. And Sofia also likes to listen to the piano,” said Eva Giulia. She beamed as she described learning to make traditional Ukrainian Easter sweet bread Easter.

WATCH | Ukrainians living in Canada describe the war years:

Eva Giulia took a babysitting course while visiting her grandparents in Vancouver the summer before the war. She added to those skills with a first aid course last summer after spending a lot of time looking after her Ukrainian sister. The fact that she had to postpone plans to convert the guest bedroom into her own was an easy sacrifice, she said.

“My children have learned many things,” said Tselep. “How to show, how to communicate with others. Also Italian and English.”

The two older girls have also learned to understand Ukrainian, and proudly name dozens of things in the language.

Jull, Cadeddu and Tselep realize how unusual it is for a mixed family to work well, admit to an extra room in the apartment and be able to give Jull no paid work for a while.

‘The girl misses her father very much’

Before the Russian invasion, Italy had among the highest number of Ukrainian immigrants of any European Union country, about 250,000, most of them working women caring for parents or children. Since the Russian invasion, 173,000 more Ukrainians, this time as refugees, have arrived in Italy, according to the Italian Interior Ministry.

About 80 percent of Ukrainian refugees have chosen to organize their own accommodation, usually with Ukrainian friends, either family or friends, and receive several hundred dollars a month for support from the Italian government, according to the ministry. The remaining 20 percent stay with families screened by NGOs, or in reception centers.

But with jobs hard to find in Italy and living in close quarters, Tselep said many Ukrainians know who came to Italy at the same time they returned to Ukraine or neighboring countries.

For months after Tselep and her children arrived, she would be terrified if a plane passed overhead or a police or ambulance siren sounded. Jull and Cadeddu are quick to turn off television news if violent images from Ukraine are broadcast, and choose not to buy newspapers every day if gruesome images appear on the front page.

Often, after an evening phone call between Tselep and her husband, who works as a Greek Catholic priest caring for elderly Ukrainians isolated on the eastern front, a sense of helplessness creeps into the household.

“I know the girls really miss their dad,” Cadeddu said. “I’ve never tried to change her, but sometimes she needs a hug. It’s tender and sweet, but you know how much she misses him.”

Sofia, two, has now spent more time with the Roma family than with her father, a small tragedy in itself, Jull and Cadeddu said.

Local politics cast a shadow

Local politics also cast a shadow. Polls show almost half of Italians do not take a position for or against Russia or Ukraine, and many are against sending arms to Ukraine.

While Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been a strong supporter of Ukraine, members of her right-wing coalition have expressed pro-Putin sentiment, an opinion that has sometimes been literally written on the streets of Rome, angering Tselep and his colleagues.

“Someone sprayed Russian propaganda on the building,” said Tselep, “so I got detergent from the kitchen and went out with Sofia in the stroller and scrubbed, which was not easy. The other Ukrainian women cheered me on, saying, ‘You are braver than us.

Tselep and her children have returned home to stay with their parents several times for short stays – for Easter this year, and during the heat wave in Italy at the end of August – each time choosing to return to Rome, where they feel safer .

Jull and Cadeddu said their families feel lucky.

“It was unexpected and a tragedy for him, of course,” he said. “But for us it’s a blessing. I didn’t say that [perfect]seven people under the same roof, but this world opens up the world to all of us and shows children what it means to run away from war.”

Cadeddu grew up with stories of World War II from his father, his family in northern Italy forced to live with the Nazis.

He said before Tselep and the children arrived, he should not have thought of himself as the type of person who would take in a refugee family. But he said he believed Ukrainians were fighting for the West and needed no convincing.

“We can say that in a small, small and limited way, we did something. And it was worthwhile.”