In my youth I was never a cat lover. Dogs yes but cats never. My father was of the same ilk: whenever he saw a feline straying into our garden he would furiously shoo it away.
However, after my marriage cats became more and more important in our lives and we never got a dog.
In the first year at our house in Longoio we discovered a litter of feral kittens huddled underneath a wood-pile. We became quite devoted to them and started feeding them: always a bad idea if you don’t want cats to start taking over your life.
The queen (mummy cat) had in fact produced a litter of five kittens and, harking back to our walk along the wonderful Cinque Terre footpath we decided to call each of them by the names of the five towns:
Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore.
The queen did not last too long but the remaining five kittens accepted our residence for many years. One by one, however, they disappeared leaving behind only Cornelia. She was the most feral of the kittens and would never allow herself to be touched until one day, three years ago, when she suddenly changed her mind about humans.
Cornelia has since become a much friendlier cat.
She loves to sleep on our bed and follow us round on our walks with our other, more recent, cats. They are:
Carlotta (2012),
Cheeky (2014),
Nerina (2008)
and, youngest and only tom, Archie (2019).
They are all rescue cats which we ‘saved’, apart from Nerina who just foisted herself on us.
(Many thanks to our neighbour for taking these photos).
Can you recognize Cornelia in the original photos taken fifteen years ago?
Here’s a useful cat calculator which converts the age of a cat into human years. This means that Cornelia is even older than we are!
| Age of cat (years) | Age in human years |
| 1 | 15 |
| 2 | 24 |
| 3 | 28 |
| 4 | 32 |
| 5 | 36 |
| 6 | 40 |
| 7 | 44 |
| 8 | 48 |
| 9 | 52 |
| 10 | 56 |
| 11 | 60 |
| 12 | 64 |
| 13 | 68 |
| 14 | 72 |
| 15 | 76 |
| 16 | 80 |
| 17 | 84 |
| 18 | 88 |
| 19 | 92 |
| 20 | 96 |
I just hope we can return to our feline family as soon as possible. We miss them badly but know that they are in good hands thanks to our cat minders.
In fact we were asked by a neighbour to feed this cat who then brought one kitten at a time to our doorstep. Carlotta we rescued from a noisy beer festival from Piccole Cucce so we returned home with this pint sized kitten instead! Cheeky is the sister of Sam’s cat that we found for him she too is tortoiseshell or calico and was collected from Del Giudice. Nerina imposed herself upon us but belonged to a neighbour who moved and she made her way back in our direction she is kind of Manx as her tail is partly missing quite common in this area. Mr Archie is our latest neutered tomcat quite typically mischievous but a great companion of Cornelia who greatly misses Mr Napoleon he too was an orphaned kitten that chose us and came from a riding school.
Thank you for taking care of them!