I’ll admit I was worried.  The whole driving in Italy thing had me so preoccupied before I left on my trip that I scarcely had time for my usual panic about my plane crashing.  I landed in Roma last Saturday to the tune of Slip Sliding Away playing on the American Airlines speakers and all of a sudden my fears about the drive were renewed with vigor.

In the end, it was fine.  I didn’t stall the car once and I made it out of Rome without getting lost.  By the end of my week, I wasn’t exactly driving like an Italian–in other words crazily like my friend Laura–but I was able to take the winding roads with a respectable amount of speed.  This was of course helped because the weather turned out to be sunny and wonderful.

I knew going into this trip that I would either be moving to Italy when I came back, or I would be giving in to my fears and staying put in New York.  The first day pretty much made the decision for me.

I went into Montepulciano to walk around and get my bearings.  I’d forgotten just how steep the climb through the town was.  The old stone streets worn smooth by hundreds of years of use beckoned me higher and higher as I tried to reconnect with the town.  Unfortunately, it was Sunday and everything was closed.  The streets were barren and except for a tasting of the first Vino Nobile of the season going on in Piazza Grande, it felt like a ghost town.  I walked by my favorite restaurant and noticed it had gone out of business.  In fact, there seemed to be quite a few stores no longer there.  I began to panic.  What was I thinking?  Could I really make a living in this country with my limited Italian.  Knowing my resources were even more limited than my speech, I felt a weight descending upon me.  The few Italians who passed me looked at the strange American without returning my smiles.  By the time I made it back to Laura’s agriturismo, I was talking myself out of moving.  I wouldn’t have friends, it was too big a step, etc…

I went to my room and the quiet loneliness of traveling by myself, no doubt exacerbated by jet lag, made me feel quite sad, so I decided to go down to the agriturismo’s kitchen and ask Laura’s mom, Marisa, if I could watch her cook.  Marisa doesn’t speak a word of English, but she took one look at my face when I came in and asked me what was wrong.  I began to cry.  And then I told her in my halting Italian about my fears and my doubts.  Within fifteen minutes she had me cooking.  It was almost as if she’d intuited that cooking is the one task that always makes me feel at peace.  She gave me porcini mushrooms to chop (frozen because they weren’t in season) and by the end of the afternoon, I was at home.  I helped cook the meal for the party that was planned for that evening.  Laura is getting married this week and so I wanted to help with all of the preparations for the wedding.  And I did.  I cooked, cleaned, made favors for the rice to be thrown, and ate with the family.  Marisa took me under her wing and within a day, I was over my fears and certain I was making the right decision.

I met the entire family, and was happy to learn that my sense of humor translated into Italian.  Of course, I did have my moments of Italian embarrassments, but I was growing more confident with my speech so I didn’t care.  We ordered flowers for the church, the weddding cake, organized the table seating–basically all of the wedding things that would take a year in the US, Laura was attempting to do in a week.  The stress was palpable and I was glad I was there to lend a hand.  In between lots of cries of “Maddona Mia” and “Porca Miseria” and my favorite “Vaffanculo,”  everything was getting accomplished.  I was in charge of the list to keep us on track, and we happily ticked things off as the week went on.  On Wednesday, after Laura had had her own breakdown because she hadn’t liked the way the gifts for the guests had turned out, Marisa got involved and we all trouped over to speak to the owner of the shop where the bomboniere were made.  While we waiting, Laura’s mom commented that the favors with the candied almonds were moscia.  I’d never heard that word before so I looked it up.  It meant limp.  Laura whose English is good, but also wants to improve, added limp to her vocabulary.  Then I said, “Non bene per il uomo.” (limp isn’t good for the man).  Laura and her mom cracked up and we had another nice bonding moment.  Unfortunately to my utter mortification, Laura regaled her father and brother with my comment over dinner that evening.  And that was how the week went.  I was treated as part of the family.  Laura delighted in repeating my comments in a nightly wrap up for everyone’s enjoyment, sometimes because the comments themselves were funny, or because the way I expressed myself in Italian was.  I felt comfortable and at home.

With the help of Laura and Marisa, I was able to open a bank account, find an apartment to rent, buy an Italian cell phone, and have several leads on employment to follow up on when I return.  Marisa has decided that she will work on finding me a husband, a job and a car in the intervening months.  Apparently my husband is a man named Lucca whom I haven’t met!

The week was wonderful.  Not a vacation for sure as I think I worked harder there than I do here in New York, but I realized that with a little support, it is possible to take those big leaps forward.  When I left on Saturday, laden with olive oil from the recent harvest, Marisa, Laura and I all cried.  I will see Laura in New York while she’s here on her honeymoon, and I’ve promised Marisa that I will text her regularly.  I will see her in a few months.  Laura’s dad joked that they’ll be waiting for me at the airport upon my return.

I have a lot to accomplish in the next couple of months, but I feel confident that I’m heading down the right path…up the mountain to Montepulciano.

the view from my new apartment

I’m heading to Italy in two weeks for my scouting mission.  I’m hoping to find an apartment to rent for Cinder and me.  I also want to get acclimated in the town I’ve chosen, put in my application for Italian Citizenship and, in my down time, drink lots of vino rosso.   Sounds lovely, right?  A week off in Tuscany.  No dogs, no work.  What could be better?

Well, I am a little stressed out about driving.  On my last two trips, my travel companions have done the bulk of the driving.  And by bulk, I mean all but maybe five minutes.  I haven’t really driven since I moved to New York.  Even on weekends away, I’ve managed not to drive.  So how rusty do you get in eight years?  I hope not too.  Because first I have to get myself out of Rome successfully.  My friend Will and I did not manage this well on our last trip, ending up driving in circles around the fringes of Rome.  It was a stressful start to our trip.  So I don’t even have the knowledge of having done that much right to visualize as I do deep breathing and give pep talks to myself.  The next piece of stress happened last week when I went to rent the car.  First, the stress of having to use my debit card instead of a credit card for the rental, which everyone online warns is a nightmare.  And then realizing that I have to rent a stick shift because the price of an automatic is $500 more.  Aiuta!!!  (Help is actually one of the words I learned early on, so if I do run into trouble I hope I remember it.)  My first and last cars were stick shifts so I’m just praying that it is like riding a bike and that it all comes back to me…preferably before I get out of the rental car garage as I don’t want to stall on the Autostrada.

Then today, flush with the sense of accomplishment that comes from ticking things off your checklist, I decided to peruse the long range forecast for my trip.  In the town where I’m staying, they are calling for SNOW!  Almost every day.

All of sudden getting lost in Rome seems much more manageable compared with sliding off a cliff in Tuscany.

The walls of my new town

My friend Laura's agriturismo

Laura's grapes

When moving to another country it’s generally helpful to have a grasp on the language.  My move is to Italy and it’s gone from being a remote, tantalizing dream to a soon-to-be reality.  To this end, I’ve been taking Italian lessons.  Actually, I’ve been taking them for four years.  I’m not fluent.  Nowhere near.  I do have a grasp on the language but mine is more of a slippery, sweaty-palmed, hanging-from-the-edge-of-a-building-with-no-sign-of-Superman-in-sight kind of grasp.  In other words, I’m screwed.

My Italian tutor, Alessandro, isn’t too be faulted for this.  He does his part, engaging me in conversation, trying to coax the words out of me.   Usually, I answer him in English.  I understand his Italian well, I watch tons of Italian programming on the RAI network, my written Italian is exemplary, but when it comes to speaking, I sound like a two year old.

I’m planning a scouting trip in February to find a place for me and Cinder to live so I had the bright idea to have Alessandro do some role playing with me.  (If this was two years ago when I first started lessons with Ale, my idea of role playing would have been very different as I had quite the crush!)  So for our lessons over the next few weeks, he will pretend to be a realtor, a bank, a store owner, the Comune, and I will be me.  I will be forced to speak in Italian and we will see how prepared I am.

I’m filing this experiment in a category I like to call: “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”  It will have plenty of company with such past winning ideas as offering to help a friend fix her resume, only to have it become a project on the scale of War and Peace;  a singing audition for a musical in order to impress a boy when I can’t sing a note; and, perhaps the worst fashion idea of all time, my wearing a beret through most of my sophomore year of high school.

I approached this morning’s lesson with my usual preparation…a cup of espresso and an hour watching the latest Italian miniseries Raccontami!   I thought it an appropriate title for a show since it means “Tell me,” which is what Alessandro always asks me to do.  By the time Alessandro arrived I  was ready to go.  I would speak solely in Italian and he would be impressed beyond reason.

I blew this in the first two minutes.  Usually greetings are my strong suit, but I was so nervous about the exercise that I switched into English after the first Come stai?  Not an auspicious beginning.

My next plan was to stall by offering coffee.  I’m pretty good with commentary related to food, cooking or wine.   We then caught up on our week.  Ale spoke solely in Italian and I spoke solely in English.  I felt my confidence drain away.  “This is ridiculous,” I tried telling myself.  “You’re paying for an Italian lesson and yet you refuse to speak Italian.  You’re going to wind up only speaking to English speakers when you move and you’ll never fit in with the Italians.”  Of course since I was having a conversation in my head, I lost the thread of what Ale was talking about and then had to resort to my backup plan, nodding intelligently.  I glanced over at Cinder and saw her look of disgust.  She seemed to be echoing my earlier thought:  “We’re screwed.”

Alessandro, determined to at last get me to speak, started by pretending that he was an employee at the town hall or Comune and my job was to let him know I was applying for Italian Citizenship.  “Parla Inglese?” I asked as a joke.  He was not amused.  I then proceeded with a halting, rambling attempt at letting him know I was moving to the town and that the Italian Consulate in New York had told me to put in my application when I arrived there.  It took me ten minutes, by which time I was sure a real employee of the Comune would have lost all patience with me, or have put up the Chiuso sign and gone for a coffee break.  “Brava,”  Alessandro told me, knowing that I need constant encouragement.

We proceeded this way for the rest of the lesson; I pretended to be at the bank, a used-car dealership, a cell phone store, a real estate agency, etc.  It was grueling for me and no doubt equally painful for my patient professore, but I did it.  As long as I didn’t try anything too fancy, I was able to communicate.

My words weren’t pretty, or always correct, but I was understood and, more importantly, I was understood in Italian.  We have two more weeks to practice and then with any luck I’ll be able get by on my trip without resorting to English.  SPERIAMO!!!