June 6, 2000

Dear Ternani #4

"A Little Personal History"

I was born in Manhattan in 1958 and raised on Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of New York City. Staten Island is next to Brooklyn, the landing place for many Irish and Italian immigrants during the last century, and it was very common for the children of those immigrants to move to Staten Island to raise their families as it had more open space and trees than Brooklyn. I grew up with lots of Italian-Americans - I remember sitting in the barbershop listening to the barbers speaking this exotic foreign language that I realize now was Sicilian dialect. I remember how my Italian-American classmates always had the best lunches, huge sandwiches of salami and provolone, or peppers and eggs. They had grandfathers who made wine in their basement and grandmothers who wore black all the time. The Italian kids always dressed better than the Irish kids like me and they were always going to weddings where they got to drink wine like the adults did. I didn't go to my first wedding until I was 21 and my Italian girlfriend brought me there. My Italian friends used strange expressions: "gavone" ("cafone"), "schifooz" ("schifoso") "marone" ("madonna") and, of course, "fongool" ("va fa in . . . ) or its variant, "fahnabla" ("va fa . . . Napoli). And they had their own version of "campanilismo: "He's Sicilian - don't trust him." "She's Calabrese - totally hardheaded." "Of course they are flashy - they're Neopolitans" So growing up I was very conscious of the New York version of southern Italian culture.

After surviving 12 years of Catholic school I drifted in and out of college, in and out of various jobs: printer, construction worker, janitor, Wall Street messenger. After working at a bank for five years, I decided that I would be a better teacher than a banker, so I went back to college, and at age 30 got a degree in English Literature, and became a high school teacher. I taught for ten years and it was during that time that I decided that I wanted to learn how to speak Italian. My initial reason was to be able to understand the words to Don Giovanni but I also think that, going back to my childhood, I had always loved the sound of the language, be it the dialect in the pizzerias or the formal Italian I heard the Pope speak on television. Maybe I also needed some romance and sensuality in my life and Italian was a language abundant in both. So I got some books and tapes and with the help of a close friend who also happened to be an Italian teacher I taught myself the language. It took several years and I'm still not fluent, (especially my pronunciation which I am ashamed of,) but I can get by. Studying Italian opened up a whole new world to me. Eventually I found myself accompanying high school students on the typical Venice - Florence - Rome tours, and in 1997 I spent a month studying in Perugia. By the time I decided to go to Terni I had visited Italy four times and was ready to get off of the tourist route. I also saw Terni as a test: it was easy to love the beautiful Italy I had visited on tours but could I love a place like Terni, a place known for a steel factory rather than for Renaissance art? I was eager to find out.