Some random images

The mix of photos and words that comes so effortlessly to other bloggers (yes, Barbara, I mean you) continues to elude me. I take pictures of things I don't have much to say about, and neglect to take any of the things I feel deserve to be written up.

Here, then, are some photos of Fidenza, just to show what it looks like around here.

This is what a lot of the streets look like.

The piazza on Saturday night--hopping!

Daytime street

\Dog in window, apparently not for sale.

I can't get enough of these little streets with their shoulder-to-shoulder houses. Bello!

This is the entrance to the town library, which looks like it hasn't been touched in centuries. Pam and I went there today to get some reading and writing done. Inside it is very modern and architecturally ingenious.

Slow learner

Danny and I have been taking Italian lessons—more properly, engaging in Italian conversation—with our endlessly patient teacher, Franca, for a few days now, and it is dawning on me that I should probably just spend my time memorizing a few stock phrases (“I'm very pleased to meet you,” “This is a lovely town,” “Where is the bathroom, please?”) and give up on the idea that I will actually be able to speak this language any time soon, at least not with any degree of fluency.

Franca is in many ways the perfect teacher. She manages never to betray any irritation about spending 90 minutes talking to a functional moron, and then spending the next 90 minutes talking with another one. She has a sense of humor and a knack for explicating the workings of the Italian language in a way that I can more or less understand, if not remember. She speaks enough English to explain things that baffle me, but not so much that she is tempted to slide into speaking to me in my mother tongue. She is good about forcing me “parlare italiano,” even when the effort of trying to explain what I mean seems insuperably difficult to me and, no doubt, rather tedious to her.

Of course I keep launching into conversations that veer far from the present-tense verbs and simple vocabulary with which I actually have some small facility. What possesses me to want to discuss the passato-imperfetto details of how I caught the cold that I fear I've been spreading all over town, or the future of self-driving trucks and their likely effect on the Italian economy?

I also realize that by putting so much energy into learning this language, I am committing myself to coming back here on more than an occasional basis, even though I remain very ambivalent about that idea up here in my conscious mind.

At least my cold seems to be winding down. Soon I will be able to stop exclaiming, “Ho un raffreddore!” to avoid shaking hands. Doesn't that sound vaguely like I'm both raffish and adored? Italian makes even having a cold seem glamorous.

A night in Bologna

Yesterday we stopped off in the wonderful Latteria 55 in Fidenza (at right) and bought enough sandwiches to (in Danny's words) feed the Red Army. I got some kind of ham with creamy strachino cheese on foccacia. It was approximately the size of a ceiling tile.











Then we climbed on a bus with Pam and Romano and about forty or so members of Pam's choir, their friends and family, for the trip through rush-hour traffic to Bologna, one of my favorite Italian cities because it feels both ancient and relatively uninterested in tourism. It's full of Italians going about their lives.

The choir gave a beautiful concert in the Church of the Trinity, with a program that ranged from Gregorian chant to Bach to Saint-Saens to jazz. The audience was appropriately enthusiastic (two encores). After the concert everyone unpacked the food we'd brought and we ate our late supper in what I guess is the vestry. We did an alarmingly efficient job of dispatching our sandwiches. Then we got back on the bus and rode home to Fidenza.

I would have enjoyed the whole evening even more if my cold hadn't taken a turn for the worse. I spent most of today in bed but hope to be better tomorrow.

Quick lunch at Pam's house

Pasta with anchovy sauce, ripe cantaloupe, prosciutto, salame, salad, a little Barbaresco,

Suddenly the idea of living in Italy doesn't seem quite so crazy.

We're arrived

We flew in to Milan yesterday morning and arrived in Fidenza in the afternoon. It's a lovely little town near Parma, and a place we've been visiting for almost thirty years because our friends Pam and Romano live here and they are some of our favorite people. In particular, they share our obsessive interest in food.

Yesterday evening, while Danny took a restorative nap, Pam and I strolled over to Fidenza's 12th-century cathedral and had an aperitivo in a bar across the piazza. Of course I had an Aperol spritz. It came with a bowl of potato chips and a plate of mortadella and fried bread. We are going to have to do a lot of walking on this trip...





Fidenza is changing--there are new buildings going up, some of them hideous, and more varied stores, including a halal butcher and a good kebab shop on Pam and Romano's street. But to us it seems mostly timeless and very Italian.

There's the Duomo, whose outside was recently cleaned, and all the unself-consciously picturesque row houses. You see lots of older people zipping around on bicycles, in street clothes rather than spandex outfits, and everyone on the street seems to know everyone else.

Here is the main square, which fills up in the evening during the passeggiata, or evening stroll, when people come out for a drink or a gelato and socialize, but this morning it was relatively empty.

This morning we had coffee with Pam and her friend Franca, who has agreed to give both Danny and me daily conversational Italian lessons while we're here. We walked over to a small park near our hotel, a quiet place where Danny had his first lesson.


I spent the next hour with Franca. Topics included getting a cold (because I currently have one--thanks, Mom!), the polite way to say that someone is old, and phone scams. I had a great time but I understand why Danny is now taking a nap...even one hour spent speaking and listening to another language is exhausting.

If only it used up a lot of calories! Because now we are on our way to lunch with Pam. Spaghetti with anchovies and prosciutto with melon are on the menu.

Off topic

I am back in New York after a five-day sojourn in Manchester, Vermont, with my mom attending the Greater Manchester and the Mountains Chamber Music Workshop. Despite my mother's wracking cough (just a cold, the doctor assures her), we had a good time playing music and shopping. (Manchester is an outlet center, as well as a very pretty place.) I had an especially good time because I got to play a Beethoven piano quartet, the first movement of the Debussy piano trio in G, and two movements of the Ravel quartet, all with excellent groups and excellent coaches (who, in two of the groups, actually played with us). Heaven!

We were staying at the Inn at Manchester, a lovely place. Here's their "celebration barn," where various among us performed on the last night of the workshop, an evening that included Mozart on the harmonica and Delibes' "flower duet" arranged for flute and musical saw.














The lilacs were blooming all over and powerfully scenting the air. That is one of the things I truly miss about the East Coast.







Danny arrived from California last night and tomorrow we head for Italy. Which is when this blog will get down to business.

Ciao da Vermont!

Dot and I have arrived in Vermont for our chamber music workshop. En route we stopped for lunch and I had her take this photo--an idea I stole from a clever family member. (He didn't give me permission to use the one of him.)

I am huddled in the empty bar of the sweet little inn where we're staying, hoping no one hears me yawping in bad Italian at my DuoLingo app.

Imparando italiano

(That is, learning Italian.)

Once we embarked on this Italian adventure, it occurred to several of us that we needed to bestir ourselves to learn at least some rudimentary Italian. Luckily my Italophile friend Valerie recommended DuoLingo to me, and soon the whole family was using it. It is a free on-line language learning system that plays like a game, and I love it!

You can use it to learn other languages, including not only English, Spanish, French, and German, but Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Hebrew, Vietnamese, Welsh, Swahili, and Romanian--and that is far from a complete list of DuoLingo's offerings. In addition, they're currently developing courses in Czech, Hindi, Japanese, Yiddish,  and five other languages, including High Valyrian (which I've never heard of before).

Not only is the program free and fun to use, but it seems rather noble in its aspirations.

At the same time, I took in-person Italian lessons from Nando Gonzaga, whom I heartily recommend. Much as I love DuoLingo, I also really enjoyed sitting across from an actual flesh-and-blood Italian speaker who was able to push me further along the learning curve with all kinds of games, charts, and other aids. His blog has a number of entertaining entries for those interested in "la bella lingua," including the song that gave this blog its name.

Of course I won't really know how well any of this is working until we get to Italy and try to actually speak and understand Italian in situ. But I am hopeful. At least I know how to say such handy DuoLingo phrases as "Lei ha troppi fidanzati" (She has too many boyfriends) and "Quasi tutte le mucche sono morte" (Almost all the cows are dead).   

Italian enough?

My claim to an Italian identity is pretty slim. My father's father was born in Italy in 1892, but emigrated to the United States nine years later with his family. He changed his name from Pasquale di Carlo to Charles DeCarlo and married an Irish-American girl (to the horror of both families). I don't remember ever hearing him speak Italian or talk about where he came from, which might only mean that I wasn't paying much attention.

However, since my grandfather didn't become a naturalized U.S. citizen until after my father was born, my father was, per Italian law, an Italian, even if he didn't know it. And so, therefore, am I, and so are my children. At least that's what we are hoping to convince the Italian authorities.

A few months ago, in the midst of our family hoo-ha about this Italian venture, I coincidentally made contact with a cousin whose existence was news to me, the granddaughter of one of my grandfather's five sisters (whom I also didn't know about). Sometimes Facebook really is amazing. She sent me this photograph of my great-grandmother, Concetta.

From things my father said, I gather that Concetta was the ambitious one in the family, the one who pushed her husband to bring her and her children halfway across the world to a strange new country and a whole new life. I see that in her face in this photo.

They settled in the outskirts of Pittsburgh. After her husband became disabled and couldn't work, she opened one of the first movie theaters in town, or so my dad said. The theater showed whatever footage of marching soldiers and whooping cavalry she could get hold of, spliced together by her young son, my grandfather, and billed as exciting scenes from the Italian campaign in Ethiopia of some years before. My grandfather told my dad that the theater attracted lots of customers, who cheered on the Italian heroes (even the ones wearing cowboy hats and shooting Indians). But the audience wouldn't leave after the show, staying to watch the same movies over and over. Before too long the theater went bust.

I have no idea how true any of this really is. My father's family were storytellers, a trait that has been passed down, and I often discover that a shapely narrative I've enjoyed telling and retelling is more or less a figment of my imagination. But I've always loved this story about the movie theater, so I'm happy to keep spreading it around.

The itinerary

I've made it to New York, the first leg of this rather ambitious trip. Here, in outline, is the plan:
May 9-16: Staying with my mom on the Upper West Side, visiting sibs and friends in the city
May 17-21: Music workshop in Manchester VT with Dot (my mom).
May 22: Danny arrives in NY; we're staying at my brother Dean's place on W 81st while he and his wife are off in Normandy
May 24: Danny and I fly to Milan.

I realize I'm actually a bit vague on the dates from this point on. We're spending a week or so visiting friends in a small town outside of Parma, eating and trying to learn some more Italian, then visiting another friend in Orvieto.

On June 9 we meet up with our kids in Rome and head to Campobasso, capital of Molise, the province where they and I will be applying to be recognized as Italian (dual) citizens. We'll spend the next two weeks in an as-yet-to-be-named village there. We're hoping it will be Cantalupo ("cantaloupe"), the town where my grandfather was raised before he came to the States at age 9, but we won't know for sure until closer to the day.

On June 25, citizenship recognition hopefully accomplished, the family disperses and Danny and I head to the Adriatic coast, including Bari, Brindisi, and Lecce, in search of warm weather and low-price real estate. I am extremely dubious about getting involved with the latter, but maybe Danny will win me over.

And so we begin

My plan is to record my family's trip to our ancestral homeland (or, more correctly, to one of them) so that all my friends and relations can come along with us. Or, more likely, dip in now and then as they like.

I am mostly packed--amazing how much can fit into a suitcase--and ready to leave in a few hours for New York and the first leg of this two-month sojourn.