﻿In 1973 my family moved from our home in Katonah to Italy for a year as my father had taken a sabbatical to study drawing, sculpture, and bronze casting at the renowned Accademia di Belle Arti, situated in the heart of Florence. My mother, my sisters, and I had never been north of Vermont or south of Manhattan, nor had we ever been on a plane, so the prospect of flying halfway across the world to live in a completely different country, and in a city no less (as opposed to the suburbs), was thrilling and of course a little nervous-making.
When we arrived in Rome, we stayed in a pensione for a couple of nights in order to do some sightseeing before taking a train to Florence. We visited the usual places of significance, the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, etc., which were overwhelming for eyes that had never seen anything older than Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building, or a few relatives. At the end of each day we ate in a restaurant just a few doors down from where we were staying, and if truth be told, it was the first actual restaurant I had ever eaten in. Even though I was almost thirteen years of age, as far as I can recollect, basically the only eatery I had been to was a pizza joint a couple of miles from our house called the Muscoot Tavern.
The Muscoot was named after the reservoir it was adjacent to, one of many reservoirs in upstate New York that supply the drinking water for New York City. Built in the 1920s, it was a narrow, dilapidated shack of a building with a floor that sloped like a perpetually keeling ship. It was dark and dingy, with a battered wooden bar and about twenty checkered tablecloth–covered tables. Cold beer on tap, Miller High Life or the like, was served in scratched glass pitchers for about $2 each. Iceberg lettuce salads were served in those small flimsy "wooden" patchwork bowls that still grace tables in certain diners all over America. However, regardless of the crumbling surroundings and I believe a multitude of health violations, the place did a hearty business, because the thin-crust pizza was delicious. (Many other pizza places opened over the years as that area of upper Westchester became more and more populated, yet none of them ever made pizza that was nearly as good.) My family would go to the Muscoot maybe two or three times a year as a special treat, and besides a hamburger at the Mount Kisco Friendly's after our annual doctor's checkup, that was my experience of dining out. (I recently discovered that Massimo Bottura's wife, Lara Gilmore, waited tables at this very same Friendly's, as she comes from Bedford, New York, next to my hometown of Katonah. I just thought you'd want to know that information and it allowed me to drop Massimo's name, which I will now continue to drop, among others.)
Anyway, fifty years ago there were very few restaurants in that part of Westchester, and those that existed were either diners or very high-end places serving duck à l'orange or other French classics that were all the rage in 1970s America. Public school teachers' salaries being what they were, and frankly still are, dining out for a family of five was cost-prohibitive, so logically, we ate in. Also the fact that my mother was such a good cook made it certain that we never would have gotten anything nearly as delicious as what she was serving on any given night even in the upscale restaurants, and surely not at any of the diners.
So eating in a restaurant, but especially eating in a restaurant in Rome!!, was a whole new world for my sisters and me. Do I remember what we ate those two evenings? No, I do not. Most likely, it was just a simple pasta dish that would hopefully satisfy three children aged twelve, nine, and six enough to make them sleep through the night and not awaken their exhausted and anxious parents. However, what I do remember is the tidiness and cleanliness of the place and that, like most Italian restaurants to this day, it was very brightly lit. I remember how precisely the place settings were laid, that the glasses were turned upside down and then deftly set right by the waiter as we were seated. I remember the starched white tablecloths and how the waiters' jackets were equally starched and white, and I remember how kind they were to us as my father explained with pride, in his then-slightly-broken Italian, that we were to be living here for a year. All that surrounded me was completely alien, and I loved it. I loved the taut readiness of the dining room, the preparedness of the staff, and the sense of expectation that sat invisibly at the empty tables. Who knew what might happen here on this or any given evening?
I don't know why, but I have always been fascinated by and taken great comfort in watching a restaurant being prepped for opening by the staff, their vests or jackets still unbuttoned, bow ties dangling from pockets or draped around necks. I particularly like the moment when the dining room is finally ready and the maître d' unlocks the door, swings it open invitingly, then steps back inside and waits for the first customer to enter as the waiters do up the last buttons on clean and freshly pressed uniforms.
When we returned to Rome many months later, we visited the same restaurant, as my father must have felt a certain loyalty to the place because they had been so welcoming to us as new arrivals. As we sat down he reminded the waiter that we were the same family that had visited some time before. Without missing a beat, the waiter threw up his hands and with a huge smile welcomed us back and even called my sisters by name. How this man, who was no spring chicken, had that kind of memory given the number of people he had waited on since our first visit and over a lifetime, we may never know. All I can say is that he was a testament to the professionalism and innate graciousness of the precious figure that is the Italian waiter.
When we settled in Florence, I did not speak a single word of Italian, so I was enrolled in an Italian school but placed in the year behind where I would have normally been at my age in order to learn proper grammar along with the other students. This proved to be a very wise choice, because within two months I was speaking fluently, and by the end of our stay I was correcting any correspondence that my father had to write in Italian. (Unfortunately, today my Italian is hardly fluent, a result of not speaking it every day. But I have been taking lessons, and frequent trips to Italy have given me opportunities to practice, although I pity the very patient natives with whom I converse.)
Unlike in America, there were no school lunches. School started at around eight thirty and finished at one p.m., at which time everyone went home for the midday meal and an afternoon rest. To compensate for these short hours, we did however have classes on Saturday mornings from nine a.m. to twelve p.m. I loved these hours, as they gave me much more free time in the afternoons. Of course, this schedule was conceived with the assumption there would always be an adult at home to care for the children when they arrived for lunch. Today things have changed distinctly, but in the Italy of the early seventies there was always someone, usually a mother or a grandparent, in the household at any given time of the day.
Having an adult present at home consistently was of even greater importance when spring brought warm weather as, purely by coincidence I am sure, during this time teachers' strikes became more frequent. We had experienced a few strikes by the faculty throughout the year, but we were usually told in advance if and when one was pending. What exactly these sudden walkouts pertained to we never knew, but as kids we welcomed them. By the time spring had fully arrived—the trees were in blossom, the blue Italian sky floated overhead, and summer was just around the corner—the strikes were even more frequent and came without any forewarning. I remember walking to school a number of times and entering halls that were empty of staff, with the exception of some administrator who would tell those of us milling about looking for some kind of guidance, "Ragazzi! Non c'è' scuola oggi. C'è' un sciopero. Tornate a casa!" ("Kids! There is no school today. There is a strike. Go home!")
And so we would go home. Happily.
When the strikes first began, my mother of course questioned my unexpected return, and I would cheerily explain that there was a strike. At first she and my father were shocked. They both worked in an American high school, where nothing like this would ever happen. But eventually, as the teachers absented themselves with more frequency and I regularly reappeared in the apartment a mere half hour after having just left, she would roll her eyes and shake her head.
My sisters were enrolled in a Catholic school, and because nuns are not inclined to protest for better wages or shorter hours, they were schooled consistently. However, for me, although I did learn proper Italian, my schooling in Italy was the best education I almost had.
At this point in the chapter I would write about all of the food I ate in Italy over the course of that year, but I am afraid that, unless we were traveling to another city to sightsee or visiting relatives in Calabria, we ate at home. The sabbatical required that my father's salary be reduced for his year abroad, and even though the bygone Italian lira was very weak compared to the American dollar, it still made no sense for our family to dine out. Even when we traveled through the country by train, my parents always bought all the ingredients to make sandwiches as opposed to paying extra to buy them premade. This means that not until I began to travel to Italy on my own many years later would I begin to experience the wonder and diversity of native Italian cooking.
Yet, there is one meal I remember having during the trip to Calabria. We were in the city of Cittanova, deep inside the toe of the Italian boot, where both my maternal grandparents were born, but only my grandfather still had relatives there. He and my grandmother had come to visit us in Florence, and we all made the pilgrimage to their hometown. Like most of the cities in Calabria and throughout the south, Cittanova was still a very poor place then. My first impression was that I had gone far back in time. Compared to Florence, there were significantly fewer cars, the buildings were crumbling, and most of the inhabitants wore black, as was the tradition south of Rome when a family member had died. But because most families were so large, there was always somebody dying on any given day, so basically everyone just wore black all the time. My relatives all wore black for this reason, but in particular because one of the patriarchs had been killed accidentally in a Mafia shooting. It seems he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, meaning he was walking next to someone who was the target of a hit and he himself caught the better part of a shotgun blast. However, I did hear recently that this was a slight whitewashing of the truth. No one will probably ever know for certain what happened, and perhaps it's best that we never do.