Today we were all home, Giulio's school is still closed as is mine, they won't open until Wednesday here in Italy. We kept Livia home too since we planned to go and see the horse show going on in the center of town but an unexpected thunder storm kept us inside. With the darkening clouds, Lorenzo's mood darkened too. He has to do patrol tonight, from 7pm to 1 am, a part of the job that he really hates. He doesn't do patrol everyday, but once a week he usually gets assigned to it, and worse yet, he got assigned to the evening shift which means beligerent drunk people and fisticuffs. Although in Italy the police always patrol with two officers in the car, Lorenzo hates it, especially because in a small town like ours backup could be kilometers away. And if they end bringing someone in, it's worse for him because he ends being stuck with all the paperwork and arranging the arrest. I alway send him off with a prayer that all will go well at that by 1:30 he will be at home and in bed. I started getting dinner ready early, around 5:30, while he started getting ready for work. At 5:55 I had three things going on the stove, Giulio was in the bathroom trying to go poop and Lorenzo had finished shaving and was about to get into the shower. Livia was sitting in her high chair watching me rush around, waiting for her own dinner to finish cooking. Suddenly the doorbell rang. I went to get it, thinking it was probably Vanda asking to borrow an egg or requesting to have their DVD of "Cars" back. I peered through the peep-hole and saw Signora Pala, the sweet elderly lady who lives below me standing outside the door. Sig.ra Pala is decidedly low-maintanence and I wondered what she could possibly want, in two and half years here she has never asked so much for a glass of water. I didn't think anything of the old t-shirt and baby food stained shorts I was wearing but quickly unlocked the door and opened it to find not only Sig.ra Pala but also Don Vincenzo complete with surplice and cassock and carrying a black bag with what looked like a jar of Holy water. "Hello!" called Don Vincenzo, "We've come to bless the house!" "Oh," I said, slapping a big smile on my face, "Come in, please, come in." All the while I'm thinking, 'Bless the house? I never ordered any house blessing. And man, does this guy know how to time it!"
"Excuse me just a moment, " I say, big smile still in place. I whip round and closing the door that seperates the living room and the hallway behind me, I knock on the bathroom door and say cheerily, "Lorenzo, Don Vincenzo and Sig.ra Pala are here!" Meaning: watch what you say, you grump. "Oh," he says. There's a pause. "Just a minute." I go to the bedroom and close the wardrobe doors which were wide open as I had been in the middle of hanging up drycleaning when the door bell had rung. House blessing? Did this mean the priest was going to go from room to room, blessing as he went? I hoped not, slamming shut the wardrobe doors but leaving the clothes on the bed. I go back into the living room where our guests have just discovered Livia, who has remained quietly in her high chair, Sig.ra Pala cooes over her. "How beautiful! What a beautiful baby!" I squeeze past Sig.ra Pala and turn off the three stove top burners so we are no longer being assaulted by the smell of veal with mushrooms, and take Livia from her chair and bring her out into the living room where Don Vincenzo gets in on the act and starts cooing too. I tell him that Livia's baptism had gone really well, that we really liked Don Giovanni (yes, that's his name) who performed the service. I also tell him about a baptism we went to in Rome where the priest banished all the crying babies to the sacristy so he could give his sermon undisturbed, and told the rest of the congregation to "Be quiet." As I talk I keep glancing desperately towards the bathroom waiting for Lorenzo to appear, I can't hold them off forever. Finally he comes out, nicely dressed in a polo shirt and khakis, making me look even more slovenly than ever, and Giulio gives up trying to poop and comes out too.
After a few moments of small talk, mostly asking Giulio if he is nice to his sister and Giulio holding forth on the fact that is was raining, we get down to business. We are both given prayer cards with the blessing rites on one side and a prayer from Saint Ambrogio on the other. With Sig. Pala taking the lead, we respond to the priest's prayer as indicated on the card. I'm following along when suddenly drops of water hit my arm. Good Lord the man is waving holy water around the house, liberally at that. "It's raining again!" Giulio calls, touching his head where some of drops had fallen. I shoot him the hairy eyeball, but luckily we were at the end of the prayers by then, and it seemed that blessing the living room was enough to consider the house sufficiently blessed. The dry cleaning was safe. We chatted a few more minutes, mostly about The State of the World Today, and then with many hearty farewells they were on their way, on to bless the next house. Gosh, my (extremely devout Catholic) grandmother would have been so proud! I was suprisingly happy about having our house blessed, though completely blindsided. While it was not something I would have sought out myself, it was a nice thing to do, and hey we can use all the help we can get, be it divine or otherwise. It's just the kind of thing that Sig.ra Pala would be involved in, and her bringing the priest to our house after he had blessed her home and before they went on to bless many others was her way of doing something nice for us. A house blessing is just the kind of thing that she likes and therefore kindly assumed it was just the thing we would want for our home.
Signora Pala, like Terry and Eugenio, is one of life's good people. She brings me candles that have been blessed in church by the priest to hold against the children's throats to protect them from sore throats, church bulletins, and olive branches from Palm Sunday. The fact that I have yet to go to Mass here is no problem. She understands that for obvious reasons I can't take my children yet, assuming that my lack of involvement is simply a question of having other time commitments. While she asks nothing of me, I often go downstairs to her, to have her patch Giuio's jeans, or iron Livia's christening gown. Twice I have gone begging to see if she can sit with the kids for 10 minutes until Lorenzo gets home. She is always smiling, rushing off on her blue bicycle to help with the Mass or administer communion to some invalid. Every morning she rides into the center of town to put flowers on her husband's grave, and while she hates cooking, will happily sew anything that needs sewing. During many of Giulio's early morning meltdowns on the stairs she will come out and hold him while I go and get the car out of the garage, and he will be smiling, the whole crisis forgotten by the time she brings him out to the car. She also never complains about the noise going on directly over her head, be it Giulio running back and forth or Livia crying in the dead of night. Whenever I apologize for some late night goings on she always laughs and tells me she is just sorry that she can't come up and take care of the baby and let me and Lorenzo sleep. Believe me, it took all my restraint not to hand her my keys and with a hearty slap on the back say, "Come whenever you want, don't feel you have to knock first!" She suffers from insomnia and likes to hear us overhead so she doesn't feel so alone, her two sons are married and moved out years ago.
Sig.ra Pala has lived in this building since it was built, she moved here as a newly-wed, after living with her mother in the apartment building next to our. Apparently it was another priest who convinced her to buy her apartment on the west side of the building, instead of the one on the east side. "I wanted the other one, because the bedrooms get direct sun in the morning, while ours get the afternoon sun, so I thought they would be cooler. And also that way I could see my mother's apartment from my window. But he told me that by afternoon all apartments are hot anyway, at least on the west side they would be cool in the morning. And having an apartment farther from my mother's meant I could argue with my husband in peace!" Downstairs in her little plot of land, she has put down flat stones in lieu of a vegetable garden and a statue of the Virgin Mary that has a little light on top that she turns on every night.
And then there's Piero, but I will get to him next time.
As a sort of p.s. that has nothing to do with anything, Giulio when he comes and gives me a big hug and kisses now says "You're my donkey." It's his new way of expressing affection. I have no idea where it comes from.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Home Sweet Home Part 1
Today, April 25, is a holiday here, it's to celebrate the liberation of Italy after WWII. Usually there are veterans parades and some towns roll out old American army tanks and jeeps for people to admire. The mayor usually gives a speech. Most people use this day to do what is called here a bridge, using the holiday and all the days between it and the nearest weekend to do a kind of five or six day vacation. Imagine if Martin Luther King Day was not observed on the Monday but on whatever day it happened to fall, like a Wednesday. Then you would have the holiday off, and then take off the Thursday and Friday and then head straight into the weekend for a nice 5 day break. It varies from year to year, some years if the holiday happens to fall on a Saturday or Sunday there is nothing you can do about it, but some years, like this year, we hit the jackpot. Today, Wednesday is a holiay, but then, so is next Tuesday, May 1st, as it is Labour Day. Therefore some schools are closed from today until next Wednesday, and a lot of people are taking advantage of that and going away to the beach for a pre-summer getaway. Since it is already hot it's not a bad idea.
Lorenzo worked. Police don't get holidays, and seeing that tomorrow I do have to work, (before getting Monday and Tuesday off) I asked him to work today so that tomorrow he could be home with Giulio who is for the above mentioned reasons off from school. No beach getaway for us. We instead went to my friend Theresa's parents' house for a cookout, though it was not your typical American cookout. We ate ribs and bread with truffle oil on top, tomatoes with basil, and red and yellow peppers. Due to the large amounts of meat we gave the pasta course a miss, though we did eat a lot of bread. Our contribution was fresh canoli, that Sicilian pastry filled with ricotta cream that I drove 10 kilometers to get from the real Sicilian pastry shop. The guy filled the shells right in front of me, so I knew they hadn't been sitting in the case all morning. All of this food was washed down with copious amounts of wine and water. I mentioned that it was an Italian bbq, but there is no reason why it couldn't have been an American one. Theresa, though Italian and with Italian parents, was born and lived the first 15 years of her life in Pittburgh and has the accent to prove it. She also has two boys, Christian five and Luca almost three years old who get along like a house on fire with Giulio. Giulio never hesitates for a second when I say we are going to see Christian and Luca. He puts his shoes on and heads for the door. To see the three of them play together makes me realize why I don't want three children, least of all three boys. I don't think my house could survive the damage. How poor Livia is going to fit into their play when she is older I don't know. Theresa at times doesn't seem to know either, she finds her two children as tiring as I find mine. What I like about Theresa is that she gets it, she gets both cultures and I don't have to explain to her about what it's like in America versus Italy because she knows. She isn't shocked that Giulio drinks cold milk throughout the day. She gets why I miss Oreo cookies and Target stores. She knows the difference between American birthday cake and Italian birthday cake. She realizes back copies of People Magazine are worth their weight in gold. I also like her parents because they remind me of my old next door neighboors, kind, welcoming, good with kids. Lorenzo likes them because they came from Southern Italy and remind him, in a good way, of his family; good food, large servings, insistence on seconds. After lunch we went back with Theresa and her husband Ermano to their house so the boys could play in their yard and we could hang out some more. Theresa and Ermano have a very nice house, it's big, four floors, with a large grassy yard on three sides because it's the last one on the end of a row of attached houses. It's much bigger than the average Italian home.
When we came back Lorenzo was saying how nice it would be to have a house like that, big, with a yard, and a home that was actually a house and not an apartment like where we live. While it is true that I would love a bigger space I have to say that I am very happy where we live. Our building, or condominio as they say in Italian, was built in 1962, so no, it is not some gracious palazzo with wooden shutters and large elaborate oak doors leading into a quaint courtyard. I have lived in several buildings like that and they are nice, however none were for sale at a price or a size that we wanted when we were looking. I was suprised that I liked this apartment so much the first time I saw it, because it wasn't how I imagined my house would look like. As I said, it is not new, and new is very "in" now. The hallway needs a facelift and the facade could use some work too, but I fell in love with large sunny rooms, the parquet floors, as well as beautiful oak doors, door frames and windows. I was pregnant at the time with Giulio and what I loved the most was the yard, a huge yard for everyone, and where everyone also has their own small patch of land to have a vegetable garden. Ours has beautiful rose bushes, thanks to the gardening skill of the previous owner, and in the summer we grow vegetables and I am also trying to grow four lavender plants. Best of all, the yard is enclosed by a fence on all sides so Giulio can play soccer, ride his bike, dig, run around whatever, without me having to worry about cars though it is also nice that the building is on a dead end street. It was one of the first apartment buildings built in this part of town, though now it has become extrememly popular and there are buildings going up all over, though not next to us, as all the plots around us have been built on and we are nicely spaced. Nowadays they would put three buildings on the space they left for our one, so in some ways old is not bad. We saw it the first time, and then I went to America, and then after a week there I called Lorenzo and told him that I couldn't stop thinking about the apartment, he said he couldn't either and that was it. It's a two bedroom, one bathroom, with a living room, kitchen, a balcony that has been enclosed so we use it like a study, and an open balcony off the master bedroom. There is also a basement storage area and a garage. That's it, nothing special, sort of the typical Italian sized apartment, here two bedrooms are the norm.
Three of the original owners still live here, another original owner rents his out, and another is rented as well, though the owner stays in close contact with the rest of us. We are the newcomers, buying from an elderly widower named Signore Agosti who had come to live here with his family in the early eighties, and was now going to live with his daughter and her family in a villa they were building. Seeing as we are a bit new to the neighborhood not everyone around here knows us but when I start to talking to any elderly neighbors all I have to say is that "we live in the Agosti's apartment" and they immediately understand who we are and where we live. The best thing about my building though are my neighbors. I won't go into the people who rent, cause they are nice but it's not quite the same with them, they aren't tied up with this place the way we are. On the ground floor is Terry and Eugenio and their three children Stefano, Vanda, and Alessandro. Eugenio was born here and has lived in that apartment all his life. His father, in what would turn out to be one of the greatest real estates moves of the 20th century, bought the land next to this building and built himself a villa to live out his old age, where he lives with his unmarried daughter, Eugenio's sister Candida. The house and the land must be worth about 4 times what he paid for it over 20 years ago, though it is a bit strange how Eugenio's dad is living in this large house with only his daughter and Eugenio and his family are crammed into the apartment next door, but I don't want to ask about it. I get the impression it has something to with Eugenio's wife, Terry and how she never got along with Candida. Terry came to live here when she got married to Eugenio, she grew up in Milan and is the oldest of 6 children. She is tall and large, not your typical size zero Italian, and she has a heart of gold.
Terry is our patron saint, the woman who has saved us so many times when Lorenzo has to work or I have to work and he hasn't come home yet. She willingly takes the children, cuddles them, feeds them, talks to them, reprimands them, and treats them like her own. Giulio loves being at their house, the cookies are kept on the bottom shelf where he can get them, and cartoons are on the TV, and there is Vanda to play with. Vanda (spelled Wanda, but pronounced Vanda) is almost 11 and is patient and sweet with Giulio. She will play with him, read books outloud to him, do puzzles, play hide-and-seek, and tell him stories. Up until fairly recently she used to come up here and play with Giulio without being asked to and he loved that. She is growing up a bit now and has friends and dance and school, so she is busy, but if Giulio is at her house she keeps him close by. Stefano is their son, he is 14 and in his first year of high school. He used to come up here too and play with Giulio but now he is "big" he rides his bike around the neighborhood or plays on the computer. I buy him jeans when I go back to the States as they have the fit that he likes. I used to sometimes envy Terry on Sunday mornings when it was clear that it was after 10 and they were still all asleep, though as she had her children young like I did, I consoled myself thinking that my day of sleeping in again would one day return. But then about two summers ago Terry started saying that she wanted to have another baby, something I couldn't understand. Why have a baby when you already have two children who can feed themselves and put themselves to bed and can be counted on to stay there all night? It seems that that didn't matter to Terry and now they have Alessandro who was born May 30, just about two months before Livia was born. At the time I thought, selfishly, I will admit, that this was the end of ever being able to ask Terry to watch my children, one toddler was one thing, one toddler plus two small babies plus two adolescents was something else. But in the end, perhaps because she is the eldest of 6, having 3 more children around didn't seem any harder for her than having one. She also has Vanda to help her. Poor Vanda, she has gone from being the baby of the family to being mother's helper, something I know she didn't sign up for. Stefano also finds himself babysitting more than he had planned, but then Eugenio also helps, at least with the children. Eugenio is great, nice, funny, and helpful, the kind of guy you ask to help carry your new couch up the stairs, or pick you up late at night from the airport and he will. He loves to grab Giulio and throw him in the air and make him laugh and Giulio for some reason calls him Jack. In the two and a half years we have been here our two families have become friends, we might have pizza together, or Lorenzo and Eugenio will watch the pay-per-view soccer game together. I stop in and say hello to Terry whenever I have a few minutes just to say hi and have a coffee. I know if I need an egg I can ask them for one, just like they know if they need olive oil it's not problem to come and ask me. I gave Terry all of Giulio's hand-me-downs for Alessandro, she will take Livia for an hour while I am trying to clean the house. Once when Lorenzo and I came back from Milan after registering Livia's birth at the American consulate we walked in and found she had a made pasta with ragu for us to take upstairs and eat, instead of me having to rush around, starving, trying to throw together lunch. Lorenzo is non-negotiable about having pasta for lunch. It is a must. Lorenzo was able to sort out a problem they had in getting a passport for Vanda in time for her to go away on a cruise with her grandparents. I don't know if we would neccesarily be friends if we met through other circumstances, it is the fact that we live in the same building that we have had time to build up this friendship, and we are able to sustain it with one of us stopping by to ask about painting the gate and staying for an hour chatting. Terry and I don't actually have that much in common as far as interests and background, but I enjoy seeing her and Eugenio and I enjoy their company. It also makes me happy to see how much Giulio loves them, and they are always present at birthday parties and christenings. They are good people and we are lucky to have found them.
Now about the other neighbors.............I will have to get to them next time.
Lorenzo worked. Police don't get holidays, and seeing that tomorrow I do have to work, (before getting Monday and Tuesday off) I asked him to work today so that tomorrow he could be home with Giulio who is for the above mentioned reasons off from school. No beach getaway for us. We instead went to my friend Theresa's parents' house for a cookout, though it was not your typical American cookout. We ate ribs and bread with truffle oil on top, tomatoes with basil, and red and yellow peppers. Due to the large amounts of meat we gave the pasta course a miss, though we did eat a lot of bread. Our contribution was fresh canoli, that Sicilian pastry filled with ricotta cream that I drove 10 kilometers to get from the real Sicilian pastry shop. The guy filled the shells right in front of me, so I knew they hadn't been sitting in the case all morning. All of this food was washed down with copious amounts of wine and water. I mentioned that it was an Italian bbq, but there is no reason why it couldn't have been an American one. Theresa, though Italian and with Italian parents, was born and lived the first 15 years of her life in Pittburgh and has the accent to prove it. She also has two boys, Christian five and Luca almost three years old who get along like a house on fire with Giulio. Giulio never hesitates for a second when I say we are going to see Christian and Luca. He puts his shoes on and heads for the door. To see the three of them play together makes me realize why I don't want three children, least of all three boys. I don't think my house could survive the damage. How poor Livia is going to fit into their play when she is older I don't know. Theresa at times doesn't seem to know either, she finds her two children as tiring as I find mine. What I like about Theresa is that she gets it, she gets both cultures and I don't have to explain to her about what it's like in America versus Italy because she knows. She isn't shocked that Giulio drinks cold milk throughout the day. She gets why I miss Oreo cookies and Target stores. She knows the difference between American birthday cake and Italian birthday cake. She realizes back copies of People Magazine are worth their weight in gold. I also like her parents because they remind me of my old next door neighboors, kind, welcoming, good with kids. Lorenzo likes them because they came from Southern Italy and remind him, in a good way, of his family; good food, large servings, insistence on seconds. After lunch we went back with Theresa and her husband Ermano to their house so the boys could play in their yard and we could hang out some more. Theresa and Ermano have a very nice house, it's big, four floors, with a large grassy yard on three sides because it's the last one on the end of a row of attached houses. It's much bigger than the average Italian home.
When we came back Lorenzo was saying how nice it would be to have a house like that, big, with a yard, and a home that was actually a house and not an apartment like where we live. While it is true that I would love a bigger space I have to say that I am very happy where we live. Our building, or condominio as they say in Italian, was built in 1962, so no, it is not some gracious palazzo with wooden shutters and large elaborate oak doors leading into a quaint courtyard. I have lived in several buildings like that and they are nice, however none were for sale at a price or a size that we wanted when we were looking. I was suprised that I liked this apartment so much the first time I saw it, because it wasn't how I imagined my house would look like. As I said, it is not new, and new is very "in" now. The hallway needs a facelift and the facade could use some work too, but I fell in love with large sunny rooms, the parquet floors, as well as beautiful oak doors, door frames and windows. I was pregnant at the time with Giulio and what I loved the most was the yard, a huge yard for everyone, and where everyone also has their own small patch of land to have a vegetable garden. Ours has beautiful rose bushes, thanks to the gardening skill of the previous owner, and in the summer we grow vegetables and I am also trying to grow four lavender plants. Best of all, the yard is enclosed by a fence on all sides so Giulio can play soccer, ride his bike, dig, run around whatever, without me having to worry about cars though it is also nice that the building is on a dead end street. It was one of the first apartment buildings built in this part of town, though now it has become extrememly popular and there are buildings going up all over, though not next to us, as all the plots around us have been built on and we are nicely spaced. Nowadays they would put three buildings on the space they left for our one, so in some ways old is not bad. We saw it the first time, and then I went to America, and then after a week there I called Lorenzo and told him that I couldn't stop thinking about the apartment, he said he couldn't either and that was it. It's a two bedroom, one bathroom, with a living room, kitchen, a balcony that has been enclosed so we use it like a study, and an open balcony off the master bedroom. There is also a basement storage area and a garage. That's it, nothing special, sort of the typical Italian sized apartment, here two bedrooms are the norm.
Three of the original owners still live here, another original owner rents his out, and another is rented as well, though the owner stays in close contact with the rest of us. We are the newcomers, buying from an elderly widower named Signore Agosti who had come to live here with his family in the early eighties, and was now going to live with his daughter and her family in a villa they were building. Seeing as we are a bit new to the neighborhood not everyone around here knows us but when I start to talking to any elderly neighbors all I have to say is that "we live in the Agosti's apartment" and they immediately understand who we are and where we live. The best thing about my building though are my neighbors. I won't go into the people who rent, cause they are nice but it's not quite the same with them, they aren't tied up with this place the way we are. On the ground floor is Terry and Eugenio and their three children Stefano, Vanda, and Alessandro. Eugenio was born here and has lived in that apartment all his life. His father, in what would turn out to be one of the greatest real estates moves of the 20th century, bought the land next to this building and built himself a villa to live out his old age, where he lives with his unmarried daughter, Eugenio's sister Candida. The house and the land must be worth about 4 times what he paid for it over 20 years ago, though it is a bit strange how Eugenio's dad is living in this large house with only his daughter and Eugenio and his family are crammed into the apartment next door, but I don't want to ask about it. I get the impression it has something to with Eugenio's wife, Terry and how she never got along with Candida. Terry came to live here when she got married to Eugenio, she grew up in Milan and is the oldest of 6 children. She is tall and large, not your typical size zero Italian, and she has a heart of gold.
Terry is our patron saint, the woman who has saved us so many times when Lorenzo has to work or I have to work and he hasn't come home yet. She willingly takes the children, cuddles them, feeds them, talks to them, reprimands them, and treats them like her own. Giulio loves being at their house, the cookies are kept on the bottom shelf where he can get them, and cartoons are on the TV, and there is Vanda to play with. Vanda (spelled Wanda, but pronounced Vanda) is almost 11 and is patient and sweet with Giulio. She will play with him, read books outloud to him, do puzzles, play hide-and-seek, and tell him stories. Up until fairly recently she used to come up here and play with Giulio without being asked to and he loved that. She is growing up a bit now and has friends and dance and school, so she is busy, but if Giulio is at her house she keeps him close by. Stefano is their son, he is 14 and in his first year of high school. He used to come up here too and play with Giulio but now he is "big" he rides his bike around the neighborhood or plays on the computer. I buy him jeans when I go back to the States as they have the fit that he likes. I used to sometimes envy Terry on Sunday mornings when it was clear that it was after 10 and they were still all asleep, though as she had her children young like I did, I consoled myself thinking that my day of sleeping in again would one day return. But then about two summers ago Terry started saying that she wanted to have another baby, something I couldn't understand. Why have a baby when you already have two children who can feed themselves and put themselves to bed and can be counted on to stay there all night? It seems that that didn't matter to Terry and now they have Alessandro who was born May 30, just about two months before Livia was born. At the time I thought, selfishly, I will admit, that this was the end of ever being able to ask Terry to watch my children, one toddler was one thing, one toddler plus two small babies plus two adolescents was something else. But in the end, perhaps because she is the eldest of 6, having 3 more children around didn't seem any harder for her than having one. She also has Vanda to help her. Poor Vanda, she has gone from being the baby of the family to being mother's helper, something I know she didn't sign up for. Stefano also finds himself babysitting more than he had planned, but then Eugenio also helps, at least with the children. Eugenio is great, nice, funny, and helpful, the kind of guy you ask to help carry your new couch up the stairs, or pick you up late at night from the airport and he will. He loves to grab Giulio and throw him in the air and make him laugh and Giulio for some reason calls him Jack. In the two and a half years we have been here our two families have become friends, we might have pizza together, or Lorenzo and Eugenio will watch the pay-per-view soccer game together. I stop in and say hello to Terry whenever I have a few minutes just to say hi and have a coffee. I know if I need an egg I can ask them for one, just like they know if they need olive oil it's not problem to come and ask me. I gave Terry all of Giulio's hand-me-downs for Alessandro, she will take Livia for an hour while I am trying to clean the house. Once when Lorenzo and I came back from Milan after registering Livia's birth at the American consulate we walked in and found she had a made pasta with ragu for us to take upstairs and eat, instead of me having to rush around, starving, trying to throw together lunch. Lorenzo is non-negotiable about having pasta for lunch. It is a must. Lorenzo was able to sort out a problem they had in getting a passport for Vanda in time for her to go away on a cruise with her grandparents. I don't know if we would neccesarily be friends if we met through other circumstances, it is the fact that we live in the same building that we have had time to build up this friendship, and we are able to sustain it with one of us stopping by to ask about painting the gate and staying for an hour chatting. Terry and I don't actually have that much in common as far as interests and background, but I enjoy seeing her and Eugenio and I enjoy their company. It also makes me happy to see how much Giulio loves them, and they are always present at birthday parties and christenings. They are good people and we are lucky to have found them.
Now about the other neighbors.............I will have to get to them next time.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Under the Tuscan Smog
We left for Rome at dawn. Actually no we didn't we left more around noon, due to Giulio having an appointment with the ear doctor. We got up early, loaded the car, shut up the house and drove to the appointment with the car all set for the trip, but due to a back up on the highway we decided after Giulio's appointment to drive back down and get on the interstate further along. In the end we practically drove by our front door to get to the highway, and added another hour and a half to our journey. It was hot, well, very warm at any rate, and rather alarming considering that we are only in the first half of April and one already has to worry about the heat. Within minutes of getting on the highway we opt to turn the air conditioner on and roll the windows up. I turn it on, cupping my hand over the vent, waiting for the warm air to turn cool. Nothing happens. I turn the air on and off and then back on again. Nothing, we will have to make the trip with the windows down. Which you really can't do on the highway with cars zooming past at eighty miles an hour, so in the end we leave the windows closed but crank up the fans, letting hot air blow through the car. I can't take my eyes off the thermostat that we have inside the car, it gauges the temperature inside and outside. Apparently outside it is a pleasant 72, inside it's an uncomfortable 82. I keep staring at the rising numbers, as the temperature slowly goes up, and then, like in one of those prison movies where the guy decides to make a break for it and runs to the fence, even though he knows he's a goner even before he touches the wall, I turn to Lorenzo. "I'm sorry, I can't take it any more!" and roll down my window, letting the wind come roaring into the car. We drive the whole way to Rome with the front two windows rolled down about four inches, the only part of us feeling better are our hands when we stick them outside.
The first part of the trip is uneventful. The DVD player is a huge success, Giulio is glued to "Babe" and then later on"The Curse of the Were-Rabbit." I don't make any suggestions that he do anything but watch movies. He is quiet and occupied. Livia sleeps. I do my usual flight attendent bit of serving drinks and sandwiches around the cabin, then settle back to watch the ride. The roar from the windows makes any conversations seem like we are two eighty year olds who have left our hearing aides at home, lots of huh? and whats?? Lorenzo is also prone to want to concentrate on the road when he drives rather than gossip and rip large chunks out of the people we know, making me wish at times that during our road trips he would get more in touch with his femine side, the side that makes him want to discuss how much weight our friend has gained since she had her last baby. Perhaps driving on the Italian autostrada, playing leapfrog with the trucks and moving in and out of the passing lane leaves little room for anything but the most brutal testosterone.
For me the trip is always divided into three stages, from Milan to Bologna which is flat, open highway, Bologna to Florence, which is nail biting twisting highway that goes through the mountains, and then from Florence to Rome, when the drivers become more agressive and risk taking.
For many Florence is the art capital of the world, the cherry atop their long awaited trip to Italy. For me it is the halfway mark between my home and Rome, a place where I can really figure out how long it is actually going to take us to get to my in-laws. The trip is supposed to take 6 hours from start to finish, if there is no traffic and we have no children it can be done in under 6, however all we need is two trucks to have a fender bender somewhere south of Bologna and we are looking at eight hours. Throw in Giulio being car sick and throwing up, or a wailing baby for unidentified reasons and then you could be looking at 10 hours. My mother did the trip with us once. "God," she said, as the Tuscon countryside whipped past our windows, "This trip takes FOREVER." We make it to Florence in the usual three hours and find the usual backed up traffic. Florence sits in a kind of basin, someone told me that they have their own micro-climate. When it's cold in Italy, it's freezing in Florence, and when it's hot everywhere else, it's boiling there. We come flying down the hill and into the long lines of backed up traffic, the outside temperature shooting up from a pleasant 68 while in the mountains to 82 the moment we are in the vicinity of the city. If I lean all the way over to the left I can just make out the dome on top of the Duomo. We lower the windows all the way down and creep along. Once when Giulio was really small we found ourselves completely stopped there for a good half hour there on the highway so in the end I decided to nurse him. I wasn't the pro I am now about nursing in public so I snuck a look around to make sure that no one was watching, but seeing that there was only an empty tour bus on my right, I had him latch on. It was only later that I realized that the bus was not only full, but that I had accidentally flashed the whole left side of it.
We finally push through Florence but it is here on the other side the Livia starts to lose it. She wails, her head soaked with sweat, the bottle of water I manage to get into her mouth doing no good. It is times like these I wish I had a Mr. Gumpy type breast that I could just stretch around to the back seat so she could nurse without us stopping the car. In the end we get off at the nearest rest stop and I go around and free her from her carseat. The minute she is out of the car she is cooing and smiling again as if nothing had happened, she was just sick of sitting in the car seat, that's all.
One advantage to Italy are the rest stops called Autogrill. Here you find cafes loaded with fantastic sandwiches, snacks, ice cream, coffee, cappucinos, water and soda. In addition to these well stocked bars there is always a store which sells all kinds of salami, cheese, mortadella, crackers, cookies, candy, magazines, CDs, t-shirts, and cigarettes. There is also an enormous gas station and of course, bathrooms. It takes the word "rest stop" to a whole new level, a far cry from the American version with a bathroom, a pop machine, and map of the interstate pinned up on the wall.
We get ice cream and Livia gets a jar of meat. We also try and convince Giulio that he really does need to go to the bathroom. He insists "I just fine!", and while it is really tempting to say that if he announces in 10 minutes time when we are back on the road that he needs to go it will be his problem. Except that it won't be just his problem, but ours as well. And it will be completely and truly our problem to clean up the pee aftewards and try and remove the smell of urine from the car. So we keep trying. Giulio keeps saying no, finally when Lorenzo goes into the bathroom alone Giulio waits just long enough for Lorenzo to be possibly out of sight to go tearing in after him. I start to follow, Livia in my arms, but some strange looks from the men coming out of the bathroom stop me. Lorenzo and Giulio are back in a moment, Giulio beaming. He has gone pee. The next battle is to get him to wash his hands, which we make him do by force, and then the hand dryer which he finds fascinating and stands below it, extending both arms up into the air stream, his eyes closed. We have to eventually tear him away from that and head back out to the car. I try and nurse Livia who doesn't seem all that interested and after a few minutes I stop and announce that we can go. It is pointless to tell Livia that is she doesn't nurse now it will be her problem once we are back on the road. I start "Babe" up again on the DVD player and the next 45 minutes are quiet as Giulio watches his movie and Livia dozes. However about two hours north of Rome, and Christ is it really 6 o'clock?!! Livia starts wailing, an ear piercing-we're-not-gonna-take-it-anymore kind of cry, which from the my place in the front seat, I can do little about. The sun has shifted, so at least the car is not as hot, Lorenzo has that concentrated look as he expertly passes a truck loaded with cows and is barely able to give more than one word answers to any questions I ask. Livia keeps wailing, Giulio remains oblivious, fascinated by the world of pig sheep dog trials. I eye the back seat, seeing how little room there is between the two car seats, then start to clear out a little space for more possible leg room. Lorenzo has the car in the slow lane again, his eyes are glued to the road. "I'm going over." I say, now in a cold-war era movie about the Berlin wall. I take a deep breath, unfasten my seatbelt and vault over into the back seat, squeezing in between the two carseats. The middle seat belt is suprisingly easy to find and fasten and in a moment I am in place. I have done it! Livia is so suprised to see me back there next to her that she stops crying for a moment. I rummage around and dig out from under my leg a baby yoghurt. Upon seeing the yoghut Giulio announces that he wants a baby yoghurt too. I deny his request, as I only have a limited number of these babies, and ignore his whining as I start spooning up the yoghurt with a slightly sticky spoon I found in the bag along with the baby food. After awhile I find myself drawn to Giulio's movie, wow, this DVD is a good idea, I can't look away from a movie I must have already seen 50 times over. With Livia chewing on my left hand and Giulio clutching my right, Lorenzo still mono-syllbic in the front seat, we complete our driving to Rome in the dusk. "God," I thought as we got off the exit for Roma Nord, "This trip takes @#@! forever!"
The first part of the trip is uneventful. The DVD player is a huge success, Giulio is glued to "Babe" and then later on"The Curse of the Were-Rabbit." I don't make any suggestions that he do anything but watch movies. He is quiet and occupied. Livia sleeps. I do my usual flight attendent bit of serving drinks and sandwiches around the cabin, then settle back to watch the ride. The roar from the windows makes any conversations seem like we are two eighty year olds who have left our hearing aides at home, lots of huh? and whats?? Lorenzo is also prone to want to concentrate on the road when he drives rather than gossip and rip large chunks out of the people we know, making me wish at times that during our road trips he would get more in touch with his femine side, the side that makes him want to discuss how much weight our friend has gained since she had her last baby. Perhaps driving on the Italian autostrada, playing leapfrog with the trucks and moving in and out of the passing lane leaves little room for anything but the most brutal testosterone.
For me the trip is always divided into three stages, from Milan to Bologna which is flat, open highway, Bologna to Florence, which is nail biting twisting highway that goes through the mountains, and then from Florence to Rome, when the drivers become more agressive and risk taking.
For many Florence is the art capital of the world, the cherry atop their long awaited trip to Italy. For me it is the halfway mark between my home and Rome, a place where I can really figure out how long it is actually going to take us to get to my in-laws. The trip is supposed to take 6 hours from start to finish, if there is no traffic and we have no children it can be done in under 6, however all we need is two trucks to have a fender bender somewhere south of Bologna and we are looking at eight hours. Throw in Giulio being car sick and throwing up, or a wailing baby for unidentified reasons and then you could be looking at 10 hours. My mother did the trip with us once. "God," she said, as the Tuscon countryside whipped past our windows, "This trip takes FOREVER." We make it to Florence in the usual three hours and find the usual backed up traffic. Florence sits in a kind of basin, someone told me that they have their own micro-climate. When it's cold in Italy, it's freezing in Florence, and when it's hot everywhere else, it's boiling there. We come flying down the hill and into the long lines of backed up traffic, the outside temperature shooting up from a pleasant 68 while in the mountains to 82 the moment we are in the vicinity of the city. If I lean all the way over to the left I can just make out the dome on top of the Duomo. We lower the windows all the way down and creep along. Once when Giulio was really small we found ourselves completely stopped there for a good half hour there on the highway so in the end I decided to nurse him. I wasn't the pro I am now about nursing in public so I snuck a look around to make sure that no one was watching, but seeing that there was only an empty tour bus on my right, I had him latch on. It was only later that I realized that the bus was not only full, but that I had accidentally flashed the whole left side of it.
We finally push through Florence but it is here on the other side the Livia starts to lose it. She wails, her head soaked with sweat, the bottle of water I manage to get into her mouth doing no good. It is times like these I wish I had a Mr. Gumpy type breast that I could just stretch around to the back seat so she could nurse without us stopping the car. In the end we get off at the nearest rest stop and I go around and free her from her carseat. The minute she is out of the car she is cooing and smiling again as if nothing had happened, she was just sick of sitting in the car seat, that's all.
One advantage to Italy are the rest stops called Autogrill. Here you find cafes loaded with fantastic sandwiches, snacks, ice cream, coffee, cappucinos, water and soda. In addition to these well stocked bars there is always a store which sells all kinds of salami, cheese, mortadella, crackers, cookies, candy, magazines, CDs, t-shirts, and cigarettes. There is also an enormous gas station and of course, bathrooms. It takes the word "rest stop" to a whole new level, a far cry from the American version with a bathroom, a pop machine, and map of the interstate pinned up on the wall.
We get ice cream and Livia gets a jar of meat. We also try and convince Giulio that he really does need to go to the bathroom. He insists "I just fine!", and while it is really tempting to say that if he announces in 10 minutes time when we are back on the road that he needs to go it will be his problem. Except that it won't be just his problem, but ours as well. And it will be completely and truly our problem to clean up the pee aftewards and try and remove the smell of urine from the car. So we keep trying. Giulio keeps saying no, finally when Lorenzo goes into the bathroom alone Giulio waits just long enough for Lorenzo to be possibly out of sight to go tearing in after him. I start to follow, Livia in my arms, but some strange looks from the men coming out of the bathroom stop me. Lorenzo and Giulio are back in a moment, Giulio beaming. He has gone pee. The next battle is to get him to wash his hands, which we make him do by force, and then the hand dryer which he finds fascinating and stands below it, extending both arms up into the air stream, his eyes closed. We have to eventually tear him away from that and head back out to the car. I try and nurse Livia who doesn't seem all that interested and after a few minutes I stop and announce that we can go. It is pointless to tell Livia that is she doesn't nurse now it will be her problem once we are back on the road. I start "Babe" up again on the DVD player and the next 45 minutes are quiet as Giulio watches his movie and Livia dozes. However about two hours north of Rome, and Christ is it really 6 o'clock?!! Livia starts wailing, an ear piercing-we're-not-gonna-take-it-anymore kind of cry, which from the my place in the front seat, I can do little about. The sun has shifted, so at least the car is not as hot, Lorenzo has that concentrated look as he expertly passes a truck loaded with cows and is barely able to give more than one word answers to any questions I ask. Livia keeps wailing, Giulio remains oblivious, fascinated by the world of pig sheep dog trials. I eye the back seat, seeing how little room there is between the two car seats, then start to clear out a little space for more possible leg room. Lorenzo has the car in the slow lane again, his eyes are glued to the road. "I'm going over." I say, now in a cold-war era movie about the Berlin wall. I take a deep breath, unfasten my seatbelt and vault over into the back seat, squeezing in between the two carseats. The middle seat belt is suprisingly easy to find and fasten and in a moment I am in place. I have done it! Livia is so suprised to see me back there next to her that she stops crying for a moment. I rummage around and dig out from under my leg a baby yoghurt. Upon seeing the yoghut Giulio announces that he wants a baby yoghurt too. I deny his request, as I only have a limited number of these babies, and ignore his whining as I start spooning up the yoghurt with a slightly sticky spoon I found in the bag along with the baby food. After awhile I find myself drawn to Giulio's movie, wow, this DVD is a good idea, I can't look away from a movie I must have already seen 50 times over. With Livia chewing on my left hand and Giulio clutching my right, Lorenzo still mono-syllbic in the front seat, we complete our driving to Rome in the dusk. "God," I thought as we got off the exit for Roma Nord, "This trip takes @#@! forever!"
Thursday, April 12, 2007
It's Wabbit Season
It is still baptism season here in Italy. This weekend we are headed to Rome for not one but two baptisms, both just a few hours apart. Rome is the reason why I came to Italy, it is also were I met my husband and where we were married. We spent our first few years in Northern Italy trying to get back to Rome as much as we could. A small baby didn't really slow down our passion for going. Though we sometimes stayed at my in-laws, we often stayed with my husband's best friend who would give up his bedroom whever we were in town. Then the longer we were here up North and the bigger Giulio got, the less I wanted to go. It's one thing to go for an action packed weekend of planning a wedding or sightseeing when it's just you and your significant other, quite another when it involves an active three year old, a small baby, and sleeping on my in-laws 20+ year old sofa bed. The more nights you sleep there, the more uncomfortable it gets. Their apartment in small, not my in-laws fault, and Giulio finding himself in The Land Where the Word "NO" Is Never Uttered gets more and more crazy the longer he is there (my in-laws fault.) In that regard my in-laws revert completely to form, allowing Giulio to do whatever he wants, eat whatever he wants, and by the end I have a kid who won't sit still for a moment and is also constipated to boot, having eaten nothing but cookies, pastries, and the occasional mouthful of pasta since he got there. This time however we are leaving on Friday, so we won't be there until Friday evening, and we are going back on Sunday so the I.L. efffect will be greatly minimized, though I am bringing a suppository just in case. My friend Theresa is also lending me her portable DVD player for the minimum six hour ride down. How I used to mock parents who said they used DVDs for long journeys! What, they couldn't find a way to keep their child seated for a few hours? Their kid lacked the capacity to sit still for more than half an hour? Hah! MINE would be different! Now I am just wondering how long the player can be used before it starts to put a drain on the car battery. Are there any 3 hour length versions of Bob the Builder on DVD?
I started packing last night, just cause today there really won't be time. In theory I could leave it to Lorenzo to do this afternoon when he is here with the kids, but the last time I let him pack he only brought two pairs of socks for Giulio for a 5 day trip and three pairs of underwear. Ok, fine, but one pair of socks Giulio had last worn when he was 18 months old, and I still don't know where Lorenzo dug them out from under the huge pile of clean 3T socks in the kids' room . The underwear was a pair someone gave me when Giulio wet himself when we were at their house, and had told me not to bother with giving them back. The frayed elastic was giving way and wouldn't stay up around my son's slender waist, so I ended up having to hand wash laundry in the hotel sink. I have learned my lesson and will handle all the packing from now on.
Packing for small children always worries me. Pack too few clothes and they will fall in a mud puddle, wet themselves, have diarrhea, or dump an entire plate of pasta down their front within an hour of arriving at the location, leaving you with one pair of jeans to last four days. Pack too much and you resemble a Borghese Pope transferring from the Vatican to his summer residence. I know if pack three pairs of pyjamas for Livia she will only need one for the entire trip. Pack one pair and she will have wet herself in them before midnight. Speaking of wetting oneself, I gave in on Tuesday night and let Giulio sleep sans diaper, which went well, he woke up dry at almost 8 am without having got up once in the night to go. Last night feeling full of hubris I let Giulio go to bed without a diaper, though he refused to go before getting into bed insisting "I just fine!" Around 10 pm, as I root around in the darkness through their drawers for clothes to pack, I decide to check just to make sure that Giulio is still dry. He isn't. He's soaked, his pyjamas are soaked, the sheets are wet, the mattress pad is wet, the mattress is wet because in a cruel twist of fate, the rubber sheet that is supposed to keep it dry for times like these has moved slightly and it has soaked the area around it. Even the rubber sheet is feeling a bit damp. I undress a comatose Giulio, put a diaper on him and clean pjs, and then dump him on our bed so I can flip the mattress and change all the sheets without bothering him. In the middle of this my brother calls long distance from New York City. My brother is 24, single, no kids. He doesn't seem to fully grasp how much mess one small child's urine can make.
Later, after I have flipped, changed, and Fabreez-ed the bed, got Giulio into it, loaded and turned on the washer, and taken a shower, I stand in the bathroom blow drying my hair and flipping through a back issue of SELF magazine. I have been avoiding SELF lately. I know it's supposed to be about empowerment and encouraging you to exercise and be strong, but lately to me it feels like it's nagging and a reminder of all the things I am doing wrong. I'm not eating enough green leafy vegetables and fiber, I am not saying enough positive mantras throughout the day, nor am I eating brain energy boosting fruits. I flip to the article of Rebecca Romijn, talking about how she got herself back in shape to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuite Issue in 2006. Apparently her energy level is much better now that when she was younger. I think of myself in college, not all that long ago. I did crew and rugby, I got out of bed at 5 am and ran to practise. I worked out 4 hours a day, doing double workouts and in all kinds of weather. Of course I did, I didn't have two small children, a husband, and a job to tire me out at the end of the day. Back then it was just me. You can be sure as hell that Rebecca Romijn isn't flipping pee soaked mattresses at 11 o'clock at night. I slam the magazine shut in disgust and finish drying my hair. I keep telling myself that I shouldn't put myself last, that next week I am going to get it together, be the best mommy with the hot body, eating all the right energy boosting foods. Then when I finally find myself with a free 30 minutes I am so happy just to sit down that it doesn't cross my mind that I should be out running instead. Like today, I found myself with a free hour so I came home and blogged. I am still that girl, that girl who likes to run and be physical and take care of herself, but I am going to have to wait til next week before I can get back to her.
I started packing last night, just cause today there really won't be time. In theory I could leave it to Lorenzo to do this afternoon when he is here with the kids, but the last time I let him pack he only brought two pairs of socks for Giulio for a 5 day trip and three pairs of underwear. Ok, fine, but one pair of socks Giulio had last worn when he was 18 months old, and I still don't know where Lorenzo dug them out from under the huge pile of clean 3T socks in the kids' room . The underwear was a pair someone gave me when Giulio wet himself when we were at their house, and had told me not to bother with giving them back. The frayed elastic was giving way and wouldn't stay up around my son's slender waist, so I ended up having to hand wash laundry in the hotel sink. I have learned my lesson and will handle all the packing from now on.
Packing for small children always worries me. Pack too few clothes and they will fall in a mud puddle, wet themselves, have diarrhea, or dump an entire plate of pasta down their front within an hour of arriving at the location, leaving you with one pair of jeans to last four days. Pack too much and you resemble a Borghese Pope transferring from the Vatican to his summer residence. I know if pack three pairs of pyjamas for Livia she will only need one for the entire trip. Pack one pair and she will have wet herself in them before midnight. Speaking of wetting oneself, I gave in on Tuesday night and let Giulio sleep sans diaper, which went well, he woke up dry at almost 8 am without having got up once in the night to go. Last night feeling full of hubris I let Giulio go to bed without a diaper, though he refused to go before getting into bed insisting "I just fine!" Around 10 pm, as I root around in the darkness through their drawers for clothes to pack, I decide to check just to make sure that Giulio is still dry. He isn't. He's soaked, his pyjamas are soaked, the sheets are wet, the mattress pad is wet, the mattress is wet because in a cruel twist of fate, the rubber sheet that is supposed to keep it dry for times like these has moved slightly and it has soaked the area around it. Even the rubber sheet is feeling a bit damp. I undress a comatose Giulio, put a diaper on him and clean pjs, and then dump him on our bed so I can flip the mattress and change all the sheets without bothering him. In the middle of this my brother calls long distance from New York City. My brother is 24, single, no kids. He doesn't seem to fully grasp how much mess one small child's urine can make.
Later, after I have flipped, changed, and Fabreez-ed the bed, got Giulio into it, loaded and turned on the washer, and taken a shower, I stand in the bathroom blow drying my hair and flipping through a back issue of SELF magazine. I have been avoiding SELF lately. I know it's supposed to be about empowerment and encouraging you to exercise and be strong, but lately to me it feels like it's nagging and a reminder of all the things I am doing wrong. I'm not eating enough green leafy vegetables and fiber, I am not saying enough positive mantras throughout the day, nor am I eating brain energy boosting fruits. I flip to the article of Rebecca Romijn, talking about how she got herself back in shape to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuite Issue in 2006. Apparently her energy level is much better now that when she was younger. I think of myself in college, not all that long ago. I did crew and rugby, I got out of bed at 5 am and ran to practise. I worked out 4 hours a day, doing double workouts and in all kinds of weather. Of course I did, I didn't have two small children, a husband, and a job to tire me out at the end of the day. Back then it was just me. You can be sure as hell that Rebecca Romijn isn't flipping pee soaked mattresses at 11 o'clock at night. I slam the magazine shut in disgust and finish drying my hair. I keep telling myself that I shouldn't put myself last, that next week I am going to get it together, be the best mommy with the hot body, eating all the right energy boosting foods. Then when I finally find myself with a free 30 minutes I am so happy just to sit down that it doesn't cross my mind that I should be out running instead. Like today, I found myself with a free hour so I came home and blogged. I am still that girl, that girl who likes to run and be physical and take care of herself, but I am going to have to wait til next week before I can get back to her.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
All God's Children got....
I have decided that the perfect adult to three year old ratio is 4 to 1. My mother thinks so too. My parents were just here in Italy for three weeks and we all found that handling Giulio and Livia is so much easier when there are four able bodied adults around. One to hustle Giulio out of a restaurant when he starts to pitch a fit while the other sits and swills white wine. Another adult to get up in the night with the baby while the other, in this case me, sleeps on and on in the next room too tired to hear anything. We only had one bad run in with too many adults around, Livia rolled off the couch during a chaotic moment when we all assumed that another person was watching her.
Otherwise she was the star of this trip as it was for her baptism that my parents decided to come. The whole thing had been planned months in advanced, as things often are when there are airline tickets involved. We came back from the US at the end of December and I think January 2nd I had my husband on the phone to handle the details with the priest. As are so many other things in our lives, the intial organzation proved to be a bit complicated. First of all it seems, we were planning too far ahead. No one, least of all a parish priest, still recovering from Christmas wants to plan a baptism in January set for April. Plus, I didn't want to have the baptism at the church in our neighborhood, but at the basilica in the historic center where Giulio was baptized, so we were going to need permission from "our" priest (I have yet to set foot in our neighborhood church during mass) to do it at the basilica. Why, you may ask, was this so important? I'm not even Catholic, I grew up in a Jewish-Episcopal household where the menorah rubbed shoulders with the Christmas tree ornaments, and the Passover sedar sometimes came on the heels of Easter dinner. However we live in Italy where being Catholic is part of the Italian national identity, you do it not so much out of strong personal belief but because it is what everyone does. Children do one hour of religion in school a week in the public schools(though they can opt out of it if their parents don't want them too), and all classrooms have a crusafix hanging over the blackboard. The church youth clubs called Oratorio are where many kids go after school and on weekends to hang out or play sports. In the summer they organize day camps and also go on week-long trips to the beach, and each oratorio has its own feast day where they set up a huge tent and sell food and organize a band to come and play music and people dance.
So no, I wasn't going to keep my children from partaking in all this fun, all this stuff that makes living in Italy worthwhile. They will be good little Catholics, though how good depends on their father, I have left their religious upbringing up to him. Giulio is already learning about Gesu' at school and brought home at Easter break a little book that told the story of Easter. The best part was when we came to the page about Palm Sunday and he started waving his arms and yelling "Yay Gesu'!" as his religion teacher had obviously taught them in class.
So while we have a very active church right here in our neigborhood, it has one drawback. It is terribly ugly. Yes, I know, how shallow can you get? But somehow I felt that asking people to come thousands of miles to Italy for a baptism, it should be in a place that looks like how you think churches in Italy should look like, i.e. elaborate Baroque design with an ornante baptismal font and not a little concrete building with a grey cement ceiling. I was an Art History major in college, though I have come to term with the post Vatican II architecture that one finds here, other people new to Italy may not be ready for it.
In the end though our priest gave the OK to our doing the baptism at the main church. The nun and personal attack dog of the Basilica gave her OK too and we were able to book the date for April 1st. All we had to do was meet with "our" priest beforehand, and make a contribution to the church. I was fine with meeting with Don Vincenzo, say in the parish office some afternoon after school. Instead he decided to come over to explain the whole service to us right as we were sitting down to eat. The phone rings just asI have sat down to eat and I am raising my first spoonful of soup to my mouth and I hear Lorenzo tell someone on the other end that now is a great time to come over. Giulio is still in various stages of undress (read:naked from the waist down), Livia is still wailing from the next room, and I have to be at work in less than 90 minutes. Lorenzo hangs up and throws the phone down on the table. "That was the priest, he's coming over now." and takes our uneaten dinners back into the kitchen, and starts straightening the cushions on the couch. I wrestle Giulio into some pajamas while Lorenzo starts cleaning as though Don Vincenzo upon his arrival will start inspecting our closet and bathroom drawers to determine if we are worthy enough to baptize our daughter. I just hope she stops wailing before Don Vincenzo gets here or he is going to think that we neglect her by leaving her to cry it out in the next room. She has just settled down when Lorenzo goes into the bedroom and carries the baby out, rubbing her eyes and blinking. "What are you doing??!!" I yell "She was finally asleep."
"He is going to want to see the baby who is getting baptized!'
I'm about to say something back when the buzzer goes.
"Whatever you do," I say before opening the door, "Don't mention that I am not Catholic or we will be here all night." Don Vincenzo is a young for a priest, in his mid forties and rather sloppily dressed, a t-shirt visible through the top of his black sweater, white tube socks on his feet. He comes and takes the seat offered to him on the couch, not seeming to notice how tidy our house (now) is. All is smooth sailing until we mention that Giulio, who has been sitting on my lap opposite the priest, has been really enjoying religion at school. The teacher is young, blonde, and pretty, and it's the one class that Giulio is always well behaved in, perhaps already appreciating pretty blondes at the age of 3. "Oh, well then," says Don Vincenzo "Can you show me the drawing you did of the Madonna in class?' What drawing the Madonna? Shit, I don't remember seeing anything like that, though it would be hard to tell. Giulio's art work is mostly scribbles and I am suprisingly unsentimental about it. I usually empty his backpack at the end of the day, look at it, and then throw most of it away. I certainly did not see, or save, any drawings of the Madonna. Lorenzo gets up and starts looking around, going through folders where we keep his 'good" art work, and the priest waits, long after most people would have said to just forget about it. In the end we have to admit defeat. Don Vincenzo leaves, but not before saying the Lord's prayer over us. Lorenzo joins in with him and afterwards asks why I wasn't praying as well. Hey, I tell him, I may speak Italian well, but I don't know the Lord's prayer in Italian. This whole Religion thing in Italy, I remind him, is your department.
Otherwise she was the star of this trip as it was for her baptism that my parents decided to come. The whole thing had been planned months in advanced, as things often are when there are airline tickets involved. We came back from the US at the end of December and I think January 2nd I had my husband on the phone to handle the details with the priest. As are so many other things in our lives, the intial organzation proved to be a bit complicated. First of all it seems, we were planning too far ahead. No one, least of all a parish priest, still recovering from Christmas wants to plan a baptism in January set for April. Plus, I didn't want to have the baptism at the church in our neighborhood, but at the basilica in the historic center where Giulio was baptized, so we were going to need permission from "our" priest (I have yet to set foot in our neighborhood church during mass) to do it at the basilica. Why, you may ask, was this so important? I'm not even Catholic, I grew up in a Jewish-Episcopal household where the menorah rubbed shoulders with the Christmas tree ornaments, and the Passover sedar sometimes came on the heels of Easter dinner. However we live in Italy where being Catholic is part of the Italian national identity, you do it not so much out of strong personal belief but because it is what everyone does. Children do one hour of religion in school a week in the public schools(though they can opt out of it if their parents don't want them too), and all classrooms have a crusafix hanging over the blackboard. The church youth clubs called Oratorio are where many kids go after school and on weekends to hang out or play sports. In the summer they organize day camps and also go on week-long trips to the beach, and each oratorio has its own feast day where they set up a huge tent and sell food and organize a band to come and play music and people dance.
So no, I wasn't going to keep my children from partaking in all this fun, all this stuff that makes living in Italy worthwhile. They will be good little Catholics, though how good depends on their father, I have left their religious upbringing up to him. Giulio is already learning about Gesu' at school and brought home at Easter break a little book that told the story of Easter. The best part was when we came to the page about Palm Sunday and he started waving his arms and yelling "Yay Gesu'!" as his religion teacher had obviously taught them in class.
So while we have a very active church right here in our neigborhood, it has one drawback. It is terribly ugly. Yes, I know, how shallow can you get? But somehow I felt that asking people to come thousands of miles to Italy for a baptism, it should be in a place that looks like how you think churches in Italy should look like, i.e. elaborate Baroque design with an ornante baptismal font and not a little concrete building with a grey cement ceiling. I was an Art History major in college, though I have come to term with the post Vatican II architecture that one finds here, other people new to Italy may not be ready for it.
In the end though our priest gave the OK to our doing the baptism at the main church. The nun and personal attack dog of the Basilica gave her OK too and we were able to book the date for April 1st. All we had to do was meet with "our" priest beforehand, and make a contribution to the church. I was fine with meeting with Don Vincenzo, say in the parish office some afternoon after school. Instead he decided to come over to explain the whole service to us right as we were sitting down to eat. The phone rings just asI have sat down to eat and I am raising my first spoonful of soup to my mouth and I hear Lorenzo tell someone on the other end that now is a great time to come over. Giulio is still in various stages of undress (read:naked from the waist down), Livia is still wailing from the next room, and I have to be at work in less than 90 minutes. Lorenzo hangs up and throws the phone down on the table. "That was the priest, he's coming over now." and takes our uneaten dinners back into the kitchen, and starts straightening the cushions on the couch. I wrestle Giulio into some pajamas while Lorenzo starts cleaning as though Don Vincenzo upon his arrival will start inspecting our closet and bathroom drawers to determine if we are worthy enough to baptize our daughter. I just hope she stops wailing before Don Vincenzo gets here or he is going to think that we neglect her by leaving her to cry it out in the next room. She has just settled down when Lorenzo goes into the bedroom and carries the baby out, rubbing her eyes and blinking. "What are you doing??!!" I yell "She was finally asleep."
"He is going to want to see the baby who is getting baptized!'
I'm about to say something back when the buzzer goes.
"Whatever you do," I say before opening the door, "Don't mention that I am not Catholic or we will be here all night." Don Vincenzo is a young for a priest, in his mid forties and rather sloppily dressed, a t-shirt visible through the top of his black sweater, white tube socks on his feet. He comes and takes the seat offered to him on the couch, not seeming to notice how tidy our house (now) is. All is smooth sailing until we mention that Giulio, who has been sitting on my lap opposite the priest, has been really enjoying religion at school. The teacher is young, blonde, and pretty, and it's the one class that Giulio is always well behaved in, perhaps already appreciating pretty blondes at the age of 3. "Oh, well then," says Don Vincenzo "Can you show me the drawing you did of the Madonna in class?' What drawing the Madonna? Shit, I don't remember seeing anything like that, though it would be hard to tell. Giulio's art work is mostly scribbles and I am suprisingly unsentimental about it. I usually empty his backpack at the end of the day, look at it, and then throw most of it away. I certainly did not see, or save, any drawings of the Madonna. Lorenzo gets up and starts looking around, going through folders where we keep his 'good" art work, and the priest waits, long after most people would have said to just forget about it. In the end we have to admit defeat. Don Vincenzo leaves, but not before saying the Lord's prayer over us. Lorenzo joins in with him and afterwards asks why I wasn't praying as well. Hey, I tell him, I may speak Italian well, but I don't know the Lord's prayer in Italian. This whole Religion thing in Italy, I remind him, is your department.
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