“Tell me about your life,” “I envy you,” or “How romantic,” people often say when they learn I live in Italy. Tell about my life? There is no romance in it. The enviable parts — economic stability, good health, lovely children — have nothing to do with Italy. Our old cleaning lady said it best: “Life is just so daily.” It’s daily wherever you are — … Continue reading Romance? Please…

My son has finished his first semester at boarding school. When Italian friends ask me how he’s doing, they barely disguise their hope that I’ve confirmed their predictions and become the “Unnatural Anglo-Saxon Mother from Hell.” I think they hoped I’d have a nervous breakdown, or at least start wearing black like the mother of a Camorra pentito who betrayed his own. No such luck. Not only … Continue reading What is “Italian-ness?”

Just when you think that you have read everything on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany and think there is nothing more to say on the matter or no new approach to take to it, “One Life” by Tom Lampert came along. Actually it is eight lives; eight “normal” — as in not well-known — lives under Hitler. There is a mentally unstable, female Jewish delinquent, … Continue reading One Life

I wonder if other readers have been in similar situations: At a recent dinner, a friend teased me about a man he had seen me skiing with. His comments were vulgar and silly and I responded by unostentatiously taking my plate into the other room for a second helping. Ignoring the other guests excoriating his bad taste, he followed me to the buffet table. “Dai, … Continue reading No Joke

I was disoriented this fall. Even with Halloween just around the corner, there was still no nip in the air to urge on certain autumn rites. When arriving cold sharpens time’s passing, small rituals can work their reassuring magic. In Italy, the rites consist of wearing stockings for the first time or doing my closet’s cambio di stagione. The rites of a Midwestern childhood were more … Continue reading Conga Line

It’s dangerous dinner party season again. It happens any time that a U.S. story is the headliner. Some Italian fellow guest asks you what, as an American, you think about the current big news item — Iraq, Columbine, November’s election outcome. So you tell them. And then they tell you not only what they know — as an objective Italian — but also that you … Continue reading The America Manual

I covered a lot of ground last summer: N.H., Wis., W. Va., N.C., Ill., Iowa (I cling to the more colorful pre-computer abbreviations). Two themes always strike me during my U.S. travels: How not-American I’ve become and the contrast between my energy and effectiveness levels in America and in Italy. In Italy, I never feel Italian. But going home doesn’t make me feel entirely American, … Continue reading Orario Continuato

I should have been writing this column, but instead, after a long day of cleaning seven decades of dirt and detritus out of my great-grandmother’s summer cottage, I paused for a drink on the deck of Beer n’Bratz in McGregor, Iowa. The Mississippi flowed at my feet. A towboat, sunk low under black mounds of its coal cargo, slid by, its lights aglow like a … Continue reading McGregor, Iowa