In 1853, in Budrio, a town outside Bologna, a seventeen-year-old named Giuseppe Donati was trying to build a cornet out of clay. It broke. He kept what was left. Cut ten holes into it. Named it in Bolognese dialect after the animal it resembled. Ucarèina. Little goose. Clay whistles had existed for thousands of years before him. China, South America, Africa. Beautiful objects. Toys, mostly. None of them could play a proper scale, which means none of them could play a proper song. Donati's...
5 days ago • 2 min read
Jonas is Brazilian, and Jonas is brave. Brave enough to walk into a trattoria alone, in August, in a town where nobody speaks a word of Portuguese, and order in Italian. He had practiced. Word for word, in the mirror, for two days. "Buonasera. Per me, i tortelli di zucca." The waiter stopped writing. Then came the pause. The kind where the pen stays up in the air, the tea towel comes off the shoulder, and a man decides how to break the news to you gently. "Signore… la zucca? Ad agosto?" At...
9 days ago • 2 min read
Yesterday I was writing to a friend of mine in South Africa, Des. (Des, if you're reading this newsletter, I'm not putting your last name so I don't violate privacy normsss.) He's in one of those periods where everything happens at once. And while I was writing to him, I thought about a quote. A quote that stopped me for a solid five minutes in the Formula 1 room of the car museum here in Torino. Five minutes. Standing still. Staring at a wall. People walked around me. I'm fairly sure a...
10 days ago • 1 min read
Open a kitchen cabinet anywhere in Italy. Liguria. Sicilia. Veneto. It does not matter. There is a box in there. Cardboard, usually blue, corners soft from being opened a thousand times. Sale grosso marino. Coarse sea salt, pulled out of the water, dried, and left alone. It keeps what the sea put in it. It goes for less than a caffè at the bar. Now knock some onto the floor. Watch what happens next. Somebody in that kitchen will pinch a few grains and throw them back over the left shoulder....
17 days ago • 1 min read
There's a moment at an Italian table that tourists never see coming. You've finished. You lean back. You leave a little sauce on the plate, the way you were taught — polite, restrained, not greedy. And the room goes quiet. Somebody's nonna is already reading your face. Non ti è piaciuto? Because in Italy, what stays on the plate is a verdict. Not manners. A review. That's why we have a word for the fix: la scarpetta. The little shoe. A torn piece of bread you walk across the plate until it...
24 days ago • 2 min read
If you landed in Italy this morning, you would think something had gone wrong. The pharmacy: closed. The bakery: closed. The little shop with the good tomatoes: closed, with a handwritten sign taped crooked to the glass. Chiuso per ferie. The one bar still open has a man behind the counter who looks at you like you personally wrote his schedule. Welcome to Ferragosto. Emperor Augustus invented this day in 18 BC. Rest after the harvest, by imperial decree. Two thousand years later we still...
27 days ago • 1 min read
Quick follow-up on the guide I sent you from my friend Plinny. If you opened it, you saw that step one is almost absurdly small. Hum your favorite song. Five minutes. Just for you. That is it. I love this, because it is exactly how I teach Italy. Not with grammar charts and pressure, but with one comic page, one song, one small human moment that reminds you what joy feels like. And since Plinny is Italian, why not make that song an Italian one. Try humming Volare in the shower this week and...
28 days ago • 1 min read
A few years ago, a mother from Boston sat at a trattoria table near my home in Sicily and started to cry. Not sad tears. The other kind. She looked at me and said, "I haven't felt this close to my own children in years." She thought she had come to Italy for the food, the language, the views. What she found was herself again. Her laugh. Her presence. The part of her that had gone quiet under years of doing everything right and feeling almost nothing. Here is what twelve years of helping...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
In 1972 an Italian rock star wrote a hit song with no words in it. Not a love song. Not a ballad. A three-minute track sung entirely in gibberish. His name was Adriano Celentano, and the song is called Prisencolinensinainciusol. Say that three times fast. Nobody can, which is part of the joke. Here is what he did. Celentano listened to American rock songs on the radio and noticed something. As an Italian, he could not understand a single word. But he loved them anyway. The sound alone made...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read