In its lyrical loveliness, Italian saved me. That innocent statement - not my native grandfather, nor my high school trip to Italy, not even being a fan of Eat Pray Love - changed the course of my days and in this way, Italian unintentionally found me. He burst into the house one day with his signature enthusiasm - thankfully still intact - and made a quick announcement: “Let’s rent that house in Tuscany! Let’s take the kids! We’ll find your family! And we’ll learn Italian!” And that is what we did. So it was that just months after losing my dad, Husband was determined to help me find my spark again, and turned to our bucket list. My mind, in quiet moments of the day, defaulted to anxiety, maybe even depression. My heart felt sad and worried all the time. Thankfully he survived, but traded both feet in the process. Just a few years before my dad’s death and barely after the birth of our third child/only daughter, my husband contracted a life-threatening infection and in the course of one day, we nearly lost him. The first, losing my beloved dad, Grampa Mike’s adored youngest child and textbook grandfather to my three little ones. Unexpected were the bumps in the road.īy the time I reached my 40th birthday, our family had suffered a couple of blows, that, cumulatively, I was finding difficult to bounce back from. A wife, a teacher, a homeowner, a mother. Years and years went by and I gave very little thought to Italy and even less to the Italian language. I’ve had a crush on Florence for decades. I will confess, however, that Florence and Siena had me at ciao. Even though I was thrilled to find 22 families with my Italian surname listed in the Rome phone book, I was relieved to leave the chaos which is Italy in the summer. None of the others had Italian roots like me. From the time I was four years old, I had wanted to take that trip.īut when I did get to Italy for the first time I was 15 (see me in the center there?) and on a whirlwind three-week European tour with a high school group, not Grampa. He would talk about how we would go there one day, together. With his big mustachioed grin and twinkling eyes, during our Sundays together he would tell me how all the roofs in Italy were flat, and that we could sleep on them, outside, underneath the stars. What a missed opportunity.Įven though I had no interest in his language, Grampa did instill in me a yearning to visit his land. Truth be told, the self-conscious, unenlightened teenager in me was, at times, a teensy mortified by his Italian-ness, particularly in public. I never asked him to teach me a single word of Italian. And even though he would live another 70 years in this country, Grampa Mike spoke with a thick accent and those famous Italian hand gestures until the day he died, shortly after my wedding. He was an 18-year-old foreigner, who spoke no English and knew no one here. When he was younger than my own teenage son now, he left his Southern Italian home and all he knew and, like countless other immigrants of the time, sailed into a new life in a new country by way of Ellis Island. It was a wonderful way to grow up, especially being one of the youngers.Īt the center of these weekly gatherings was Grampa Mike, who began my family’s American story. My tiny but plump, fair-skinned, copper-haired grandma endlessly stirring a boiling pot of something. A long table lined with steaming bowls of deliciousness. Lots of talking (yelling) over each other. The following was all quite normal: Sundays at my aunt’s house. Growing up in an Italian-American family, Italy was no big deal. My Italian grandparents: Michelangelo and Anna Until, one day, a fire for learning the language unexpectedly sparked. Growing up, Italian was always part of my history, but never part of my story. The word storia, in Italian, means story.