The Genius of Language by Wendy Lesser

Author:Wendy Lesser [Lesser, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48539-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2004-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

ITALIAN

Limpid, Blue, Poppy

M. J. Fitzgerald

In early 1959, while we were living in a small seaside town along the Ligurian coast, Italian television made a documentary of us. The documentary was called Una famiglia Americana in Italia— An American family in Italy.

The decision by the fledgling RAI to make such a documentary may have had a lot to do with the reversal: an American family in Italy rather than the thousands of Italian families forced to emigrate to America. But I imagine that one of the reasons they chose our family from what was not an insignificant population of Americans in Italy was that we were not in fact living an expatriate life in Milan, Florence, or Rome, among larger or smaller clusters of other Americans, but were living integrated in the small-town life of Levanto, the only Americans there year round.

A second irresistible reason in that children-loving country must surely have been the presence of a clutch of six duckling children, three boys and three girls, all more or less the same age (there is a mere seven years between the oldest of us and the youngest), all pale and freckly all fair-haired and, like all children, all absolutely deserving of the bruising pinch on the cheek and the exclamation “bella!” Of the four of us who were in school, three went to the local elementary school: the two boys in the boys’ section, I across the green-and-white-tiled corridor in the girls’ section. My older sister was at boarding school at Trinità de’ Monti in Rome, an exclusive enough place run by French nuns, where the student population consisted of fewer than a hundred daughters of the higher middle classes, mostly from the poorer south—Calabria, Puglia, Basilicata, Campania, Sicilia—but with a sprinkling from the more northern regions and from Lazio itself. By the time I joined her briefly in 1963, there were a couple of Americans with whom I walked in irrepressible sobs to the American Consulate to sign the condolence book following the 22nd of November. But there were none when she went in the fall of 1958.

A third consideration may have been my father's status as Il Professore who seemed not to have a job—he made a poem of my brother's famous boast among his peers that the reason why il babbo was at home all day was that at night he was a burglar— even though the study where he spent his days translating the allocated lines of Homer's Odyssey was an inviolate place we were rarely privileged to visit. The running of the household was squarely on my mother's shoulders, with the help of two live-in maids, Maria and Alice. Each went home once a month to villages high in the Ligurian mountains, with ten dollars for their families.

For months, it seemed, a television crew came and went, stayed days or perhaps it was weeks, then left and then returned. I remember having to walk again and again down the brick and stone stairway that led up to the olive and vine grove behind the house.

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