No, we are not talking about Ducati which would have made an offer to Fabio Quartararo for the coming seasons, this having been denied by Paolo Ciabatti himself live on Canal +, but rather the Italian media which did not fail to highlight the transalpine consonance of the name of the French MotoGP world champion…
“I want to go to Sicily to discover my origins, I don’t know when, but I want to do it” said The Devil, questioned on the subject, to the journalist of Sky Sports Antonio Boselli.
From then on, the Italian equivalent of our Canal+ took charge of tracing not only the family tree of the French champion, but also the origins of his surname going back at least to the Middle Ages, if not to the 'Antiquity, in Sicily.
Do you want to complete your knowledge about the French prodigy? It's this way…
Quarterly represents an ancient profession widespread for a long time in Sicily: the quartara is a terracotta jar or ceramic with two handles, used by farmers to transport wine or water. Over time , the “quartara” has also become a unit of measurement used in Sicily for liquids: a quartare corresponds to 17 liters and 2 deciliters (i.e. less than the quantity of a tank of gasoline in MotoGP). Today it is still possible to find them in some Sicilian homes, for decorative purposes. The quartararo was therefore the one who made the quartares in Sicily and decorated them with splendid designs from the Sicilian tradition. As has already happened for many professions, the profession then became a surname to represent a family. The ancestors of the MotoGP world champion were therefore most likely craftsmen, who made terracotta jars to transport them under the hot Sicilian sun. Among the most famous Quartararo, before Fabio, there was Riccardo Quartararo, a Sicilian painter born in Sciacca (in the province of Agrigento) in 1443.
Fabio's great-grandparents left Calatafimi (town in the province of Trapani) on a boat bound for Tunis, to work in a local branch of the Bank of Italy. Fabio's grandfather, who was a professional turner, in turn fled Tunis for France after the declaration of independence in 1956. Étienne, Fabio's father, was born in Nice in 1960. He too was a motorcycle pilot, although he ran a locksmith shop for a long time in the town on the Côte d'Azur. It was in Nice that he met Martine Adamo, Fabio's mother, who has a very similar story to that of his father Étienne. Martine also has Sicilian parents, who lived in the same neighborhood as the Quartararo family in Tunis. Martine's father (Fabio's maternal grandfather) was an accountant, he happened to live in Tunis in the same building as Étienne's mother (Fabio's paternal grandmother). However, the paths of the parents of “Diablo” only crossed in France. Indeed, his mother Martine arrived in Nice in 1964, at the age of two: initially her family settled in Strasbourg, where one of the uncles lived. Fabio's grandmother, however, could not stand the climate of northern France, so they moved to the south, precisely to Nice, where the climate and way of life were more like those of Tunisia.. Here in Nice, Étienne and Martine met, got married and had two children: Anthony and Fabio. This is the story of the MotoGP world champion. French, but of Sicilian origin.
