When my brother Andrea and I were boys, it was our mother who handled all the behaviour matters. Our father ran a small olive farm in the north east of Italy and was out of the house all day long, so the last thing he wanted to be bothered about was naughty little children!
Mama was a firm believer in spankings, and from as young as I can remember getting them (probably about three or four years old, though I’m not sure), she used a piece of olive wood roughly in the shape of a ruler, though probably a little wider, maybe about four or five centimetres wide and a few millimetres thick. This was always referred to in our house as ‘La Disciplina’, in English literally ‘The Discipline’.