How do you relive the memories of your childhood Shore house? Buy it back.

VENTNOR, N.J. — It just may be that when Salvatore Camino abruptly sold the family’s Ventnor beach house in 1999, it mattered more to his grandson Christopher, 15, than to any other member of the family.

His wife, Giuseppina, now 91, recalls the house had become an aggravation with the upstairs tenants, and they felt the money was better spent on a down payment for their son, Christopher’s father, to buy a house in Wilmington.

So Salvatore and Giuseppina, Italian-born tailors, parted ways with the three-story Shore house three blocks from the ocean, packed up memories of spaghetti and crabs on the back patio, the flag of Italy flying out front, all the cousins squeezed into the 900-square-foot first floor and made peace with their home in Packer Park in South Philadelphia, where Giuseppina still grows vegetables out back.

But that’s not what Christopher felt about it then, or now, at age 34. He only knew that the things he’d come to treasure were suddenly not there anymore: the backyard with the fig trees, the BBQ fired up, pasta cooking on the stove, the little wooden box TV, the soothingly exuberant chords of Italian and South Philly voices transported intact into Ventnor’s salt air, the long walks along the boardwalk to Atlantic City, even the seagulls.

It was the place where he decided one summer to make everyone call him by his middle name, Vincent. It was perfect. “It was magical,” Camino says.

And then it was gone.

In one summer, the beloved Rosborough Avenue Shore house was no more, and he, his brother, and his parents moved from their cozy South Philadelphia home near his grandparents to what felt like another world: Wilmington, Delaware.

“I come to Delaware, nobody spoke Italian," he said. "The culture shock was just dramatic.”

For years, Chris stewed. And he schemed.

“I would walk around saying, ‘How can I get this house back?’ ” Camino said recently. “ ‘Those were the happiest times of your life growing up as a kid, going to the beach.’ ”

For years, every trip to the Shore included an inevitable detour to the 100 block of North Rosborough Avenue with his girlfriend, Hilaria Zamora-Sauce, now his wife and the mother of his two young children, Christopher, 2½, and Elizabeth, 1. He couldn’t shake it.

It felt like something that could not be put back together.

Unless maybe it could.

Then one day, a “for sale” sign.

In late 2017, with his 90-year-old grandfather near death, Christopher pulled off the impossible. He did put it back together. Since his grandfather had sold it, the house had passed through a number of owners, gone into foreclosure, taken on a foot of water during Hurricane Sandy. The white clapboard was replaced with beige siding. The wall-length front windows were all but eliminated to accommodate two entrances required by the city.

It wasn’t as beachy-looking, objectively speaking, but try telling that to Camino.

Although the house was initially listed at $330,000, he found a Realtor who felt his passion, and somehow, with the house now bank-owned, talked down the price to $227,500.

“I talked to the Realtor and said, ‘I’m going to buy this house,’ ” Camino said. A union electrician, he put together the down payment and $20,000 for renovations. He pulled the trigger.

Camino then went to his grandfather’s bedside and told him.

“He knew for about two weeks,” Camino said. “He died the end of November. He said, ‘I’m very happy for you.’ He told me he regretted it. He wished he had given it to us. But he was tired of maintaining it and my parents needed the 20 percent to buy the [Delaware] house."

The first summer Camino owned it, his father, Michael, and his grandmother, Giuseppina Mezzacappa Camino, made the trip down. She was 90 and stayed only a couple of hours.

“It’s beautiful,” she said in a recent interview at her kitchen table, her answers mostly in Italian translated by her son, Michael (but obvious from facial expressions). “When we were there, the house was old.”

She clasped her hand together and to her heart when asked about having the house back in the family.

“I happy,” she said. She was ready to sell back in 1999, her son said, even if Christopher didn’t understand. “Everybody came to the house, all the neighbors used to come once a week. She was getting tired of everybody coming over. She had to work there, too.”

Getting the tenants to pay, Michael recalled, “It was World War III.”

She has not been down again since last summer. Too difficult. In Packer Park, she tends to the garden, where there are, of course, fig trees.

The ones in Ventnor were replaced by a border of rocks. Chris says he’s working on that.

Truth be told, the whole re-creation of the Caminos at the Shore is still a work in progress. What seemed so natural as a child — loading up the car, heading for the Shore, squeezing into the first floor, heading for the beach — seems much more complicated as an adult.

With their children so young, and finicky sleepers, Hilaria and Christopher are hesitant about committing to more than a day trip or two, a side visit for funnel cake. He knows he was their age when his Ventnor memories began to form, but still. Anyway, they’ve got their beach tags.

“They won’t sleep, they won’t sleep. I feel like I’m two or there years away because they’re so young,” Camino says. “I can’t wait until they’re 5 and 6. It’s going to be the best.”

On a recent visit, they reunited with the neighbors up the street, the Yaffas of Cherry Hill, whose beach house never left the family. Eileen Yaffa recalls her sons playing with Christopher and his brother. She showed off the garage “with three thousand bikes” to illustrate the enduring family flavor of the block.

“It all came full cycle,” Yaffa said. “When I saw him, I said, ‘Do you remember me?’ He told me he bought this place. It’s nice. It’s keeping family on the street.”

“A couple doors down is a woman named Rita,” Yaffa said. “I don’t know Rita’s last name. Rita’s been here forever. Her children, and now her grandchildren. There’s just a lot of people that stay.”

But here’s the thing:

With two year-round tenants, Camino says he’s clearing $600 a month.

And then there’s Airbnb, where his grandparents’ house is marketed as Camino Cove. Chris says he’s getting hundreds of dollars a night for the first-floor space, where what used to be three bedrooms (he recalls being on the top bunk staring a few inches up to the ceiling) is now a roomier two bedrooms.

That makes the tentativeness he and Hilaria feel about going all in on the sand-and-salt-water routine with their two stroller-mates a bit more palatable.

A house that his grandfather sacrificed to buy, sacrificed to sell, that Camino himself sacrificed to buy, is now, well, kind of a bonanza.

His grandfather would be grateful, he says — and proud. “That house for me was you can have your cake and eat it too,” he said. “You can have your summer house with its sentimental value and it will also make you a ton of money. I always had a feeling I would get it back.”