My Life in Italy, Part 14: He Speaks! & Mirror in the Bathroom

As with every post in this series, if you are jumping in here, it is like jumping into the middle of a movie. Please start with Part 1, or this will make absolutely no sense.

Yikes, it has been a long time since I wrote the last part of this series! This part is going to cover a fair amount of ground because by now I am well-settled in my Italian life (sort of). So here we go:

OK now, admit it… if you are any version of Gen X, you saw that title picture and instantly thought about which of those four characters from The Breakfast Club you were in school. Yep, and I will get to it… But first:

You Spin Me

What would one of my posts in this series be without a music throwback? Well, in Italy during the the winter of 1985, there was one song that you could not escape! Sitting in a bar having espresso? It is playing. Turn on the TV to the Italian version of MTV, there it is. Turn on your radio in the car? Every single time.

ok, he looked pretty ridiculous back then, but that song was everywhere!

If you wanna eat, you better learn Italian!

In the 1980’s, Italians were, for the most part, considering the most important second language to be French. For centuries French had been the international language of diplomacy, and while that really changed in the mid 20th century, Italy was very late to the party. So finding English speaking people outside the tourism sector was pretty difficult.

So I here I am. In the small town of Soriano nel Cimino, and for all intents and purposes, I am “the foreigner”. and learning the language was not an opportunity. It was a requirement. If you are just jumping in, you can read my misadventures of learning Italian in Part 12.

OK. I said learning. Yeah… learning is one thing. But speaking? That is something entirely “else”.

If you learned a second language as an adult, you know what I am talking about. The most difficult thing to do is to get the confidence to speak that languiage you are learning to native speakers. So for 3 months I am learning it, but have not gotten the courage to speak.

And I am having dinner with Paola’s family almost every night. Six people at that table constantly bickering in Italian. And I am just… There, Eating. Listening to noises. Mute.

But every day I understood a little more than yesterday!

Six people: Paola, her sister Carla, her brother Sergio, her mom and dad. Yeah, that is five. Because person #6 needs her own dedicated section.

Watering Motorcycles

Person #6 is Zia Anna. (Aunt Anna). She quickly became my nemesis.

You see, she was the much older sister of Paola’s mom. Many moons ago, her husband who clearly married her for the family money abandoned her… trust me, I would have abandoned her, too!

She was a bitter woman. She was a large, bitter woman. And you may think “of course! She was abandoned”. No. If anything, it is why she was abandoned.

It also turns out that in her youth, she was something of a captain in the “Mussolini Youth”. Let that sit for a second until you go “ah-ha!”

Yep, Fascist through and through. The allies are STILL the enemy, and by the way… when the Allies liberated Italy, the Americans bombarded Soriano and killed a few hundred people while they drove the Nazis out of town. For some people, that was a net good! No more Nazis. For others, that was a Net bad! No more Nazis!

And I am an American. And in her mind, I am the enemy. As if I had personally dropped those bombs on her buddies even though I would not be born for a couple more decades. OK, in all fairness, what she actually did not know is my father was an American on a ship 30 miles away from Soriano as a crow flies at the time. But still…

She HATED me! Simply because I was American. She would mumble stuff at me with that angry look all the time. I didn’t need to understand the language. And she would passive aggressively attack me in her own ways. For example, I rode a motorcycle all over, and when I would come to town, I would park it on a sidewalk right below their house.

It did not matter what time I parked it. Somehow her alarm reminding her to water her flowers went off right after I arrived each day. Imagine that! My timing was incredible! Because two floors up was a window with some flowers NEAR where I parked it.. And somehow she always managed to miss the flowers and soak my motorcycle. Ooops! Yeah, right!

He Speaks!

So about 3 months in, I’m still not speaking, but wow! I am understanding A LOT! And for these three months, as far as anyone at that table is concerned, I am mute.

But then she said something. For the life of me, I cannot remember what she said, but I understood… and it was about me… and it was not nice. Not at all.

In a snap second I pushed myself away from the table, jumped to my feet, and started yelling at her… in Italian! Without my dictionary. Without Paola’s help. And I don’t remember what I said, but I snapped back at her, and by the look of the room, whatever I said put her in her place.

Everyone’s jaws were dropped for what felt like 5 minutes.

HE SPEAKS!

After that, she shut up, and everyone congratulated me. We went back to dinner. And from that moment I had the courage to speak Italian with anyone.

Zia Anna never said a negative word to me again, at least not to my face. She also stopped watering my motorcycle. Yeah, take that, you #%@$@^!

That really opened up the floodgates for me. It wasn’t long before I didn’t need my little dictionary anymore and I would say about 5 months later I had achieved fluency and was starting to think in Italian.

Yes, 5 months. Amazing what a sponge the brain is when you are that young!

Sunday Trips

This entire time, Paola and I developed something of a Sunday trip tradition. Every Sunday we would go somewhere new. But there was a catch. Despite the fact that Paola was 23 years old, her parents would not let her be out late. Yes, seriously! So anything we did needed to be a day trip from Soriano!

And here I am… dude from L.A. was used to clubbing all night back home… seeing a 23 year old woman that has to be home for dinner. It was AWESOME! Really!

And here’s the thing that lasted: It turns out that the number of new things to do in Central Italy on any given Sunday is endless. The tourists would get Amalfi Coast Rome > Florence > Venice. But what we did on any given Sunday was truly amazing. The stuff that should be famous, but isnt because you can only do so much, right?

And a good amount of that stuff is on our trips. In fact, that was the idea with CDV from the beginning. My favorites of those day trips. Much of it is still “undiscovered” – The “other” Colosseum… the one you need to hike to. The Etruscan village, tons of small hill towns, and so much more.

And sadly, some of those things have since been “discovered”

Civita di Bagnoregio – The Dying City. This place was one of my favorites. Years ago it was all but abandoned. One of my favorite places in all of Italy. Even when CDV started, it was a big highlight of the week. We would go there and it was pretty much just us. We met the few people that lived there, and had an amazing afternoon. Then Rick Steves happened… and The Amazing Race… and… and… and… Now they get upwards of 800,000 tourists a year, have a massive tour bus parking lot and charge an entry fee. The place is barely the size of a football fiend, and now it is nothing but AirBnBs, trinket shops and crappy restaurants. Bye Civita. I will always miss you.

Orvieto – Small town that has what is considered one of the 3 most breathtaking cathedrals in Italy. Up there with Milan and Florence. Again, for so long it just sat there… nobody knew about it. It felt like it was ours. Turns out that someone figured out that it is a great place to stop when driving between Rome and Florence. And all of the tour buses did. We dod still go there, and at least it is not crowded in the afternoon when we go. By then the stopovers have left.

It amazes me as I look back. and think how mush we do because of those little Sunday trips! Not just around Soriano, but everywhere we go we look for what those Sunday trips would have looked like there.

And so, between my old American TV show Italian lessons, the WWII vets I would learn with, my frequent scapes to Rome to smell a little pollution… and our Sunday trips… well, that is more or less what living here that first winter boiled down to. And it was amazing!

And then came Spring…

Mirror in the Bathroom

All of this time, my relationship with Paola is getting deeper and deeper. Yes, this is who I want to spend my life with. I’m young, but I know. Time for a ring!

One of Paola’s best friends was a woman that lived in Manchester, England. And she was getting married. And she asked Paola to stand up for her!

We’re going to England! And we will spend some time in London, as well. Cool! That is where I will propose!

And so we made our way to Manchester, enjoyed a lovely wedding, and went to London. This is where I need a little pause.

It’s 1985. We are in London. Downstairs from our hotel there is a movie theater. We walk down, and some new movie is showing. It is called “The Breakfast Club”. We went in and saw it. Wow! It is like they are talking about my own high school! Yep, I know all five of these people. Oh yeah… I was the male counterpart to Molly Ringwald when I was in high school. Check.

We go upstairs to get ready to go out to dinner, and Paola is getting ready. Me, I am about to do the single most corny proposal in the world. I grab her lipstick and write on the mirror:

Paola, will you marry me?

She said yes.

And I can think of about six thousand more interesting ways to have proposed. But there it is. Waiting for the maid to clean it up tomorrow.

What came next was a wonderful dinner. What was the conversation about? No, not that! It was all about her father. You see, Roberto was an interesting man. About 5′ 2″, tiny, and had the voice of an angry grizzly bear. Oh, and a gun collection on his wall.

And he has a temper! A big one! And his little baby girl… the youngest of three, just got engaged…. to an American…. whose home is about 8,000 miles away…. who is four years younger than her. Oh, and she had just recently broken off an engagement with a guy she had been with for years.

Best Laid Plans

So naturally our conversation that night was all about making plans related to exactly how we would elope. And we came up with a solid plan that was foolproof, at least in our minds. Check. But first we were going to have to go back to Italy.

We get back to Italy, and I go back to my apartment. Paola? She is walking straight into the lion’s den. She gets home and picks a soft target.

Mom.

She shows the ring to her and instead of congratulations, all she hears is “have you told your father?”

Later on she sees dad, and apparently mom softened the blow. All he says is that she told him, and “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

OK, so not a ringing endorsement of me, for sure. But hey, the plans to elope are off, right? I’ll take the win!

And so we went on to plan our wedding. Next year. May, 2026… right here in Soriano! We’re doing it. But wait! This is not Las Vegas… this is Italy. And getting married in Italy? An American and an Italian?

SLOW DOWN COWBOY!

We have about 126,000 pieces of documentation you are going to need to provide first!

Of course.

The Takeaway

Not much in life lessons from this one, but there is some of this that carried forward to when we started CDV more than 20 years later, right? And don’t piss off you future father-in-law is always a good one!

Next in the series (when I get some time) will be all about heading back to Los Angeles to prepare for the wedding:  “Part 16: Race Against the Clock”

Until then, please leave your comments below. I love reading them!