Rule Number one -Always drink Spumante instead of Champagne. As Dago puts it "Those French think they are so smart, saying that true Champagne can only come from a certain region. Spumante is the same thing, same grape, same process. And far better in my humble, albeit Italian opinion.
When I am just sixteen, I meet 50,000 very pleasant Italians. They live in the small mosquito-laden town of Vercelli, located way north in Piedmont. I am an exchange-student here and I am about to be given one of the most enthusiastic introductions to the Italian culinary experience that anyone can receive. Everyone here seems to play a part in this – the restaurant owners, the vendors at the market, my exchange-father and especially a shy, unassuming boy named Dago who acts as my own, personal food tour guide.
I meet my personal food tour guide when I am only hours off the plane from America. I am sitting on the steps outside a drab-colored, post-war building which is home to my exchange parents’ apartment, when he and a friend pull up in a grey fiat uno. He flashes me a toothy grin as he gets out of the car, all faded blue jeans and button-down shirt on an athletic frame. He looks so gorgeous that I immediately know the boyfriend back at home in Colorado is toast.
Temporarily, in my jet-lagged delirium, I gawk. I take him all in. This boy has the most delicious pair of huge brown eyes –the kind that draw you in, making you feel as if you have known the person forever. And he has this amazing Roman nose - a nose bent at just such an angle that it pays direct homage to his heritage….and the most beautiful burnt copper colored hair, not a shade of red that is loud or showy, but just simply head turning….
He says something to me. It sounds cheerful enough. I smile like the idiot that I am. I have no clue what he is saying. Unbothered by my lack of communication, he sits down on the pavement by my feet and seems content to while away the evening in silence. Occasionally he flicks lazily at a passing mosquito, and we both listen to my exchange sister Arianna who is engaged in a conversation with Dago’s friend Marco. But while Dago seems nonplussed about meeting someone who can’t speak English, Marco seems genuinely spooked that somebody might show up in this remote part of Italy and not speak a word of the language.
“E bello” Marco says to me.
I blink. How many hours has it been since I last slept?
“E bello” he repeats himself louder with wide sweeping hands.
I blink again.
Finally he shrugs his shoulder –an act which says ‘unbelievable, she can’t even understand two words of the language’. Defeated, Marco translates for me. “It’s nice!” he booms.
‘Ah.. okay… ” I think to myself. Now if I can just get through the rest of my five-month stay knowing only these two Italian words, I’ll be fine.
Marco decides this is all way too much work. He wants to go home - trying to communicate with the American exchange student has ceased to be fun. Maybe Marco is right, I am thinking to myself at this point, maybe somebody shouldn’t just move to another country half way around the world without learning something about the language first.
But that of course is not my fault. I wanted to go to France.
“Do you speak French?” The exchange student company asked me when I rang them up, several months before all of this.
“No.” I answered optimistically. “Not exactly, but I have been taking it for a year in high school.”
“You have to have four years of French to go to France you know?”
The lady at the other end of the line says to me, she has the deep, throaty voice of a cigarette smoker. I imagine her there, in a grey dingy room, surrounded by rings of smoke answering an equally grey telephone and wondering why she had chosen such a silly career that requires her to explain these things over and over to teenagers.
“Where can I go?” I ask.
Italy, she responds. They have no language requirement. And thank god for that. Because as I look around me - out passed Marco who has decided that it is not only necessary to speak loudly to me but also to be right up in my face, and out past the gorgeous boy sitting at my feet distracting me with his mesmerizing smile – I realize that I have never had such a fabulous view. There stretching before me is a beautifully proportioned boulevard. And in the middle of that boulevard is a pedestrian area, shaded by cool plane trees that reach overhead forming an arcade. And from this view I can watch the world go by, or at least many of the citizens of Vercelli as the walk tiny dogs, gather to discuss the day’s trial and tribulations, or stroll together arm-in-arm to the closest gelateria. And it all seems so new to me, so energizing. What are their lives like, I wonder. I am suddenly very curious. Back home there is no people watching on this scale, no place to even do it. The town I grew up is a sprawling metropolis where everybody drives and nobody walks. Thank god that Italy does not have a language requirement, I think to myself again, or I would never have been able to see any of this.
Grand view notwithstanding, I am about to fall over from lack of sleep. I simply have to go to bed. My first day in Italy ends without my taste buds even being taken for a test drive. But that is about to end because tomorrow I will be introduced to Italian food in the way on a real Italian family can do it. Tomorrow, in fact, is starting off with an intimate lesson about the food chain as I am invited to go fishing for frogs.
