The Magic of Missives

25 years and 25 missives marks a turning point in my life connected to Italy.

The place where it all started 25 years ago on the Pincio, over-looking the Piazza del Popolo.

A year ago, I started writing this newsletter from Rome. This is my 24th missive to date. This means that I’ve posted roughly two missives per month for one whole year (even though close readers know that it has been a little more erratic than that).

Together with my book, I have written approximately 50 essays since last September. It’s ironic to think that I’ve been procrastinating on writing my book by typing this newsletter.

Writing these missives has done more than made me feel prolific. It has made me feel heard. It has given my voice a space which I’m not always able to find in my own tongue-tied moments of conversation in Italian. As a result, many Italians who read my work in English now seem to know me better due to all that I write or, some might say, overshare, in expressing myself on the page.

One Italian friend recently wrote me this:

“In reading your pieces, I realize that we probably take easily for granted your presence here in Italy without realizing you bear the weight (and pleasure, too) of two countries, two cultures, two senses of humor, two kinds of food.”

Yes, it’s all that. And more. Even though I may not always convey it in conversation, I often let it all hang out on the page in feeling both enriched and drained in my double life between two worlds.

There are moments where I know I lose my audience in telling a story at a dinner party because I can’t speak fast enough or the right narrative flair isn’t flowing in Italian the way I aspire for it to in English. But, I now know that I can make up for it here on the page. And, those Italian audience members, in reading me later, will eventually get it. Maybe they’ll even laugh with me (which I always hope for) rather than at me (which I always fear).

Over the weekend, I saw the Italian friend, Francesco, who introduced me to my husband 25 years ago. We caught up at a fabulous party that felt like a second wedding to honor his sister’s 20th wedding anniversary. The party went from mid-day to beyond midnight. Friends and family of all generations gathered on a beautiful stretch of land in the Roman countryside where my friend cohabits with her husband, their three kids, her two siblings plus their spouses and kids, and her two parents on an idyllic, pastoral family compound.

The party lasted all day and included multiple meals — delicious local sausages wrapped in pizza bianca, homemade, warm ricotta cheese made on the spot, a hearty amatriciana, and local wines. Wild boar occasionally darted across the field filled with picnic tables, and colorful parrots stared down at us from olive trees and Roman umbrella pines.

Everyone had that after-summer glow, sun-kissed from a beach or boat holiday with their skin tone the color of butterscotch. Almost everyone wore an Indian cotton shirt or scarf, a purchase made from Fabindia, the beautiful store across the bridge from Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo that is owned and run by the hostess of the party and her sister.

Friends had come from all over in a celebratory bonfire spirit of love. Her father played the piano, her brother played and sang the guitar, her sister had manicured the verdant lawn with tractors while managing the delicious catering, and a son was the deejay of the rocking dance floor. With Italian kids heading back to school this week, it felt like a Labor Day Weekend party, where everyone recounted their summer tales and rolled their eyes at the idea of Monday’s roll call.

My husband and son couldn’t make it because they were traveling but my daughter and I went together. I would have been too shy to attend a Roman party years ago without the aid of my Italian husband.

But this time, years later, it felt different. I felt older, nearing 20 years of marriage myself. I felt more confident, in my knowledge of the Italian language and its culture. I knew I’d find old friends there. And I drove with one of my sister-in-laws and her husband, both of whom feel like siblings to me by now. I knew the road reasonably well, having visited these friends there for years since my husband and I were first introduced. I’d seen the back roads transform from dirt to asphalt, scoffed at the newer houses mushrooming next to older farmhouses, and always observed how the Lazio fall foliage makes me nostalgic for my childhood autumns in New York’s Hudson Valley.

At the party, as I bounced around from one familiar face to another (many of whom I hadn’t seen in years), I realized that I’d been connected to Italy for exactly half my life. And I wouldn’t have been where I was that night (and am now today) if it hadn’t been for all that this matchmaker friend did in introducing me to my husband long ago.

So, I hunted down this dear friend at his sister’s party, and pulled him aside to thank him.

Francesco, in Campagnano, 1998.

“You changed my life,” I told him as I raised my wine glass to his, in celebration of his sister’s marriage and also my own.

My husband, in Campagnano, in 1998.

In that clink of a glass, I thought all this: he and his family offered me a friendship that gave me confidence to meet my husband, find a job in Italy, and dare to stay in Rome for more than three months. One December night in 1997, this friend had persuaded me to join him and friends (among whom was my future husband) to ice-skate at the Pincio above the Piazza del Popolo (on a makeshift rink set up for winter months). I didn’t speak much Italian then. I could get by, but, I was stronger at ordering a meal than telling a story. But, that night, there was something in my future husband, and in our mutual friend, that felt familiar, warm, and close to home. I had a feeling my encounter with my husband might last beyond a face-plant on the skating rink. And, twenty-five years later, standing in front of the friend who had schemed up a plan to unite us, I was right. He had known it, too.

A 2020 reenactment of the night we met on ice-skates at the Villa Borghese’s Pincio.

“You are generous, open to the world, and always looking ahead for the best in things and in life,” our matchmaker wrote me in Italian in a text message the day after his sister’s party.

His words rewarded me for being myself. Oh, how I have tried to be generous in my patience, forward-thinking and positivism all these years when I’ve been tested to go the other way while living overseas. His words made me feel seen, and struck me for their acceptance of me as the American I am and the Italian I’ve become. It felt like a triumph of language — that I’ve finally managed to convey who I am to others in two different languages. Whether it’s in conversation or on the page, I now feel understood, and the writing of this newsletter has validated just that.

The Matchmaker and my husband 25 years ago in Rome.

Later that evening, I sat under a pergola with an Italian friend whom I’ve gotten to know over Instagram. We both love dogs and movies, and we got chatting and laughing about both in Italian. I don’t know her very well but it certainly felt as if she knew me because she has been reading my missives this past year. She started brainstorming with me about how I should look for a publisher in Italy and not limit myself to American publishing houses. I know that my world is now two-fold, split between two nations, and richer because of it. But she encouraged me to believe in myself and in an audience not only in America but also in Italy.

Under the pergola with Chiara, a friend and missive reader.

Please allow this missive to serve as a thank-you note the size of an American diner’s menu: to my matchmaker and to his family, to his sister and her husband for celebrating love and friendship, to my husband, to my parents who introduced me to Italy, and to all of you, my dear readers, for whom I choose to write. Help me publish my book one day, and spread the word that I’m working on it.

I may write in English but I think, read, speak, and sometimes write in Italian, too. Thank you for listening to my medley of both languages and contributing to the magic of missives.