The F-Word

Italy used to be mythical to me. As a child, my afternoons were spent in Nana’s kitchen eating biscotti, drawing pictures on the back of stationery from Uncle Sonny’s office, and listening to stories of life back in her small village town of Capaccio. She had a regular litany of tales and tragedies from the days before she sailed unwillingly through New York harbor, to live with her sister in the Bronx, and eventually marry a nice Calabrese tailor.

Mostly she told me stories of the convent school she attended after losing her mother in the 1918 outbreak of Spanish influenza. She described riding a donkey from her father’s house to the school where the stern nuns taught them how to read and how to crochet their own stockings. She recalled stories of the more unfortunate children who had lost both parents and wondered what eventually became of them. She recollected receiving a single orange for Christmas and the task of waking up early to walk barefoot across cold stone to unlock the church for the priests and ring the bells for the day’s first mass.

From her teenage years she told me tales of working in her father’s restaurant. Her favorite and most frequent story was that of the young man who loved her so much, that in spite of her father’s strong disapproval of him, hid beneath the porch and pleaded with her through the slats for a lock of her dark, curly hair. “And you know,” she would say with her voice lowered as if this information was just between the two of us, “that man is now a judge in the supreme court in all of Italy.”

Again, that place—Italy. Nana’s stories rendered my conception of the country as a fragment fixed in time, on the other side of the wardrobe and half-imagined. Other shreds of Italy in my world were letters that took two months to arrive in feather-light envelopes, 18-karat-gold crucifixes that were sent as gifts for births and baptisms, and statues of Saint Anthony.

Then one average suburban Saturday afternoon visitors arrived...from Italy! They were shockingly modern. Our cugine from Rome didn’t fit the images that I had in my head from Nana’s stories. Cugina Carmella didn’t look like Sofia from “The Golden Girls”—she had red hair, manicured fingernails and sexy sandals. She arrived on an Alitalia jet, not on a ship, and drove a rental car, not a donkey. She was a single mom who brought along her son and her fidanzato. He was a quiet man from Milan, a little too much cologne as I remember, but nice enough. All the relatives that had converged to host the cugine seemed to be rolling their eyes during furtive darts into the kitchen to un-cork things.

“They’re engaged to be married?” I asked. “Fidanzato is a fiance, right?”

“No, anyone can have a fidanzato in Italy. She has a new one all the time,” I was told.

Precisely then, I was shushed off to play with Carmella’s son. Suddenly another reality lay gaping before me. This kid spoke Italian. The intimacies of a second language within a family don’t always translate to conversation with strangers. And worst of all, he was dressed like such a dork...like such a European! His shorts were way to short and he wore these awful tube socks pulled all the way up to his knees, paired with slip-in canvas shoes. (Uh, like, this is the 80’s and we, like, scrunch our socks now.) Thankfully, my brother, ever the Ernie to my Bert, took over and overcame the language barrier with a game of collecting and smashing sticks in the backyard.

But I was still curious about the F-word. I hung around the kitchen trying to piece the story together. I gathered that there may have been a divorce that wasn’t quite final, another fidanzato with a broken heart somewhere, and much disgust over the fact that Carmella was known to speak to her mother with a fresh mouth. But at least I had figured out that a fidanzato in Italy could be just a serious boyfriend.

When I first arrived in Florence as a college student, fidanzato was the first Italian word that I understood and to which I could excitedly respond. The taxi driver that picked me up at the airport twisted around in his seat and said, “Welcome to Italy, Bellina! Do you have a fidanzato?”

“Nope. No fidanzato for me,” I answered smiling.

“Ah. Well, maybe for you in Italy, you will find one.”

About the Author: Danielle Oteri shares her experiences navigating Southern Italy with all of its linguistic and cultural quirks.