It has to be the genetics as well, or some of my uncles wouldn't be so much taller than the others. It's as if there are two strains of people up there: one mid-height, gracile boned, and one very tall, very big boned. Sometimes they show up in the same family. We even have women like that, my nonna included. She towered over her husband. My father used to say that a slap from her would send him flying when he was a boy. She took no prisoners, as they say in the U.S.
I never saw that side of her. The grandchildren saw a different nonna: she was my protector, my ally, my confidant. Of course, by the time I knew her she wasn't being harrassed by being the mother of eleven children and trying to run their properties as well.
They did have a diet very, very high in cream and cheese consumption, however. As my mother used to say, there were more cows than people up there. There was dairy in the form of cheese at almost every meal, and my father remembers drinking milk also when he would go up to see relatives, sometimes right from the cow, which my mother found disgusting.
You're right about polenta at most meals, probably at least two a day. My father said breakfast was polenta up there, with cream or melted cheese and some greens or an egg if there were enough that day. They did grow some grain up there, and so made pasta, with chestnut flour if need be if the wheat flour ran out, and rice did come up from the plain as well, even when it was by mule train. I think some of the girls went down to work in the rice fields as well.
You've inspired me: I'm going to add some of my pictures of meals I've eaten up there to my thread on the cuisine of the parmense. This always happens to me in the spring: I start to get more homesick, even if the Parmense isn't really "home" in the deepest sense. Even my father, born in Sarzana when his parents returned from America, and raised right over the border in the Lunigiana, thought of himself more as a Spezzino than as an Emilian, even if his parents spoke Pramzan to each other and to them.
I'm a bit upset. I typed a long text through smartphone and lost the draft accidentally. In summary:
I forgot to mention that my grandparents used to give wine with water and sugar to their little children. Sounds weird today.
I also forgot to mention a very, very important item of the diet of virtually all Italian immigrants who settled some "plateaus" of South Brazil, as Serra Gaúcha (which in fact is not a "sierra" technically). If my memory serves, I read somewhere that some of them - probably few -, at the beginning, didn't starve to death at winter thanks to it. It's called "pinhão", a seed of the conifer Araucaria angustifolia. Native forests with this species exist mainly in South Brazil, but there are spots also in NE Argentina and high altitude areas in SE Brazil. The gender Araucaria exists just in South hemisphere AFAIK, but not all species of Araucaria have eatable seeds. Here you have an Araucaria angustifolia, its pine cone and seeds:
Time ago I sent seeds to a man in Rome. They grew up, but some of them suffered vandalism. Just one survived, and it was transplanted to a safer place. The process had a negative effect on it, unfortunately. But at least it's there.
As for diet etc., I was the biggest at birth, with 3 cm more than my tallest brother, and also the most "carnivorous" of all, while he used to consume much more milk.
Still, he's 10 cm taller than me, and another one has 5 cm more, while I'm taller than the eldest. Anyway, it exemplifies that height at birth is not exactly a good reference of height at adulthood, as some people may think. The generation of last decade seems even bigger. Some of my nephews and nieces, for instance, are pretty tall (not as much as that bro of mine; still...). My little one, also a "meat eater", is on percentile 95 so far, and his mom has just 168 cm.
Not sure what kind of food is producing this effect, since my generation was pretty well feeded too.
I knew some "Italian" women as your nonna, physically.
My mother-in-law, for example, must be like her more or less. Just 170 cm, but "robust". However, I'm still hoping to know the other side of her, if you know what I mean. je je je Just kidding.
Coinxidently, I tried milk right from the cow this year for the first time in my life. Not bad, but... If you haven't tried it, you didn't lost anything imo.
Well, they say raw milk is healthier, 'cause the enzymes are preserved and the proteins are not denatured. I don't know. Even so, it would pose some risks.
Good to known you were inspired to post pictures of meals, except that they are "torturing", in the good sense.
I checked them. Unfortunately, there is not this kind of food where I live. At leadt not that I know.