Today’s vocab word is “torno.”  It means “I return.”  Here it is in a sentence:

“Torno a casa dopo grandi avventure.”

Happy translating!

Today’s vocab word is “tubo.” It means “pipe“I learned it yesterday morning.  By the end of the day I’d heard it about 100 times.  Here it is in a sentence:

“Il tubo è esploso e l’acqua spruzzata ovunque.”

True story.  More to come…

Happy translating!

The duomo in Barga sits atop the hill.  The stone paved roads wind up and around the hill, through brightly colored buildings, past rotting doors and gated gardens.  If you walk up amost any path, eventually you will reach the duomo.  Every 15 minutes it gently announces its primacy with the ringing of its bells.

I spend time there, sitting in silence, observing the mountains, the workers repairing its walls, the tourists who come for the view.  The view.  The view is fantastic.

Looking out you see the alps.  Jagged, expansive and beautiful.  You can see other towns nestled in the valleys, and perched on the ridges.  Maybe it sounds cliché, but it’s a majestic view, one that makes you feel the grandness of the landscape.

Looking down, you see a beautiful, well maintained, piazza, children playing, and Frank’s house.  I’ve been sitting in the piazza for the past week, writing, talking with my family and just enjoying the beautiful fall air.

—

A couple of days ago, when walking up the hill to the studio with Deb, we were hailed.  A couple of men were talking and called us over.  They had a familiar look and feel about them, but I wasn’t sure if I knew them or just felt like I knew them.  (I’ve had this happen several times here, and so far it’s been more the feeling of knowing that washes over me.)

“I think I’ve just been reading your blog.”

“What?  My blog?  Really.  How?  I mean that’s great!”

The surprise of being addressed immediately and directly in English was enough to throw me off a bit, let alone being addressed about my blog, in a foreign country, by a stranger.  I’m afraid I wasn’t at my most eloquent.

Keane, immediately recognizable by his full, graying beard, boldly colored cardigan and paint-stained Birkenstocks , is, like many, an import to Barga:  An artist who, among other things, manages the online magazine, “barga news”.  My instinct that I recognized him was correct.  It turns out that I had seen pictures of Keane on the site, and that he, in a funny way, was partly responsible for my trip to Barga.  Keane was instrumental in the gnome liberation movement.  A misread article led my family to visit Barga in search of the nani.  It was that visit that turned my world upside down.  Cheers Keane.

Standing in the street with Keane was another man.  “Oh, so you’re a bloggist?”  Frank presented a stark contrast to Keane.  Dressed in a button down shirt, with a neat, dark beard, Frank’s gaze was incisive and matter-of-fact.  And he had the most excellent glasses.  I’ve long made it a practice to compliment often, and immediately if I am struck by someone.  Why save it?  “I love your glasses. They’re really great.”

His modest discomfort with the compliment was charming.  Or maybe it was that he really didn’t buy it.  Or maybe pretty girls make him nervous.  It happens to the best of us – believe me.

I left the brief conversation hoping that our paths would cross again, and sure that they probably would.  It’s a nice feeling to know that I’m here for a while.  It changes the dynamics of conversations.  There’s no sense of hyper-immediacy that comes when you know you might not see someone again, and that you need to pack as much in to an interaction as you possibly can.  You can let things unfold.

Yesterday, after my second cappuccino of the day, I was making my way up to the duomo when I saw some friends of Deb’s sister sitting outside a cafe.  I went over to sit with them and chat a bit.  After a while, another friendly face appeared.  Frank!  “That’s a terrible book.”

I had just been telling the others how helpful I found the Rick Steves guide book when travelling to places like Florence and even Lucca, the walled city.  We were heading to Lucca that evening, and we were discussing museums and gelato shops.  “It’s really awful.”

I had a feeling I knew what Frank’s beef might be with the book.  While at Caffe Lucchesi for my second cappu, I had opened up my atlas and guidebook to put together the itinerary for the rest of my time in Italy.  When I opened to the map in the front of the Rick Steves book to locate Calabria (way in the toe of the boot), I saw that southern Italy and Sicily were cut off.  My family is from Southern Italy, so I found this mildly irksome, but had had good luck with the book, so I soldiered on, noting that I’d need to consult a friend in Calabria anyway, so it would be alright.

Frank’s family is from Sicily.  He took the book from me, “see, this is his all Italy book, right?  Well, look at this map…”  Bingo.  This book, along with being a touristy flag waiving for all to see, was a direct assault on his heritage.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s a fair point.

The party broke up, and talk turned to mushrooms.  I enjoy collecting mushrooms, and have been hoping to find someone to take me into the hills.  Only I don’t want to get lost or shot, and nobody really wants to share their secret mushroom beds with anyone.  As we stood there, talking about how Frank, who grew up in Detroit, came to be in Barga, another of his friends walked in.  By the sound of him, a Scotsman.  After a bit of friendly banter, we all headed over to another restaurant where we found Keane.

I love sitting and listening to others speaking Italian.  I’m beginning to understand a little better the patterns of speech.  The ebb and flow of the words.  I can’t fully understand, but I am beginning to hear and catalogue the frequency of certain words; to hear fillers that are used often, and to begin to understand the why and how of each of them – at least sometimes.

Realizing that I had someone who might be able to explain the usage of filler words in the context of American English, I seized the opportunity and started peppering Frank with questions.  “how is allora different from ecco?” “ and if ecco means then and poi means then, which is temporal?” “and to look and to look for?  Which is which?”  Patiently, Frank went through his paces, answering the questions that have answers and explaining that much what I was asking is dictated by loose rules that give way to regional idioms.  Great.  Super-helpful.

Frank, it turns out, is quite an interesting guy.  He spent his career as a correspondent in war zones.  A journalist of fantastic pedigree, Frank has a tidy (not to be read as simple), well-rounded view of much of the world.  (Of course, this is my assessment after spending a couple of hours, so take it for what it’s worth.  In reality, the guy could be a psychopath.  Which is funny, because Sandra and Deb and I joke every so often about how any of us could be murderous thieves, but after meeting for one day, we were willing to merge our lives – even if briefly – with virtually no concern.  Crazy.  And beautiful.)

Frank also wrote a book (well more than one, actually).  Great!  My first question was “what is it about?”  I really couldn’t have anticipated the answer.  As Frank explained it, his grandfather had always said that the family moved from Sicily because his great-great-grandfather (I think) had been assassinated.  Before his death, his grandfather whispered the name of the assassin to Frank.  So Frank returned to Sicily to find out what happened.  Seriously.  I’ll be putting the book on my sidebar so that you can purchase it from Amazon.  I know I’m going to.

As the shops closed down yesterday and people headed home for lunch, Frank invited me to see his place.  Like so many others, Frank fell in love with Barga when he visited.  He ended up buying his house, which sits atop a 900 year old nunnery directly below the duomo.  (I’ll let you know if he rents rooms.)  We walked around the corner, and he pointed it out.  Stacked on top of each other, the houses on that side of Barga are layered like an archeological dig, newer on top of older, dug into the side of the hill.

“Come on up and I’ll show you around the place.”  Yes, yes, I think I’ll follow a strange man into his home in a village in Italy where nobody knows where I am.  Brilliant idea.  Mom would totally approve.  But, he had the stamp of approval from Deb and Sandra, so I accompanied Frank into his beautiful home to see the view of the mountains.

The view, says Frank, is the same as that from the Duomo.  It’s about 50 yards away from the duomo’s steps, but I found the view about 3 times more beautiful.  While the view from the top of the hill, shared with the stark face of the impersonal marble is expansive and striking, the view from Frank’s terrace was warm, welcoming and friendly.

Frank went to the kitchen to make a sandwich, and I stayed to join him.  While he prepared bread, cheese and fruit, I wandered through the ancient garden of olives, grapes and herbs.  Over lunch, Frank taught me to eat sheep’s milk cheese with honey, and brought out the most amazing persimmons that dissolved into spoonfuls of marmalade.

While we ate we talked about Frank’s time in China, Italy and elsewhere, and considered my Italian itinerary.  The conversation skipped from the cultural and sociological differences between China and India to the importance of social dialogue and the raw sensuality that lies just above the surface of nearly every Italian interaction.

I sat in shirtsleeves in 80 degree weather on frank’s terrace for an hour and a half and I felt something I have felt very rarely in my life.  While I really enjoy learning, I rarely am able to learn from others.  My ego gets in the way, and I charge forward, knowing I’ll blunder along, wanting to make my own mistakes.  But, I would have sat for the whole day, asking questions, and learning from this man I had just met.  I’m interested to see what this might mean – whether it’s a new time in my life where I will be able to better accept contrary opinions as proffered rather than wielded, or whether it’s a mentoring friendship that can be built.  Or whether it was a beautiful day on a hillside with a stranger.  Either way, it feels a beautiful gift.

And makes me wonder what tomorrow will bring.

There’s a comfort in not knowing the language that’s spoken around me.  A liberation of sorts.  When I’m in a room of English speakers, I have a compulsion to know as much as possible about what is going on, about what is being said.  It’s like pieces of my brain are assigned specific tasks, gathering, analyzing, condensing and reporting back so that I can make an assessment of everyone else’s lives and actions in comparison to my own.  What a trap.  It’s quite exhausting really.

When I came to Italy in May, I noticed that my mind was more at ease.  In a room of rapidly speaking Italians, what I heard was a lullaby.  Stripped from the need, or even the ability to understand the conversations around me, I was able to relax, bathed in the emotion of the experience.  I came to regard the random English conversations of tourists and ex-pats as intrusions into the place I had found for myself.

During that trip, I had the experience that people would often speak to me directly when my family had Italian language interactions.  It was probably because I was the youngest in the group, and there was an assumption that if anyone knew Italian, it would be me.  But that was misguided, as my dad had spent a fair amount of time studying the language before the trip.

As these experiences happened, I found that trying to understand the words – to take apart the sounds and make sense of them – was not that useful, even with the college conversational Spanish I had.  What worked much better is what I call the “magic ear” method.  You remember those books “Magic Eye” from the 90’s?  The ones where you look at a seemingly random image of blurred dots, and by unfocusing your eyes, a 3-D image pops out?  I was never really able to make them work, but when it comes to understanding the conversations around me, I find that unfocusing the ear, and just feeling the experience leads me to a much more accurate understanding than trying to understand the words.

Of course, it’s not an exact science.  I met a lovely woman last night whose energy was gentle and powerful at the same time.  I just wanted to sit near her as she spoke with Sandra and Deb.  When I met her, I introduced myself and told her it was a pleasure to meet her.  Then she said a number of animated things, followed by a smile and “va bene.”  I know those words!  So I repeated, “si, va bene.”  She chuckled a bit and Sandra interjected to let her know I didn’t understand what I was responding to.  We all laughed and went to sit down.

Later that night, in a conversation about how Puritan Americans can be, Sandra told me that Fabiana had told me it was nice to meet me, but I needed not to be so uptight.  Within 30 seconds of meeting me.  Funny.  I guess it’s true.  If I’d been practicing “magic ear” I might have gathered as much.  The beginnings of conversations with new people, just the act of meeting them can be full of tension for me, full of potential, yes, but full of judgment as well.  Adding the element of a new language is a whole different thing.  There’s a twinge of the old tension, but it’s mostly overridden by the twinges of fear that I might say the wrong thing, or hear the wrong thing, or make someone else uncomfortable with my slow ability to communicate.

I guess maybe it’s time to practice “magic brain” or “magic heart” and let some of that go.  Okay, maybe all of it.  Eventually, I will understand the language, and the bliss of being able to hear the language around me as a beautiful song and to experience the emotions of the people in conversation as more pure, without the labels that speech brings, that will change.  I’m hoping that maybe, just maybe, when that happens, I will find that I have changed a bit too.