Ancona, Italy – the name comes from the Greek for “elbow.” Ancona is a stubby elbow into the Adriatic in the quiet charm of central Italy with rolling fields of lavender and sunflowers, serene hill towns and limed soil that yields a rich, tangy red wine called Rosso Conero. It’s Maurizio’s city and we go there every summer. Ancona enjoyed a modest medieval glory and it was then that the Basilica of Saint Ciriaco, patron saint of Ancona, was built on the ruins of a pre-Christian temple to Aphrodite which had briefly (for 600 years) honored Saint Lorenzo. In 1071, the bones of Saints Marcellino and Ciriaco were moved to the renamed and embellished structure built of the creamy white stone that makes Mount Conero, source of Ancona’s lovely wine.

Two lions guard the great doors of the basilica, supporting its massive columns. Facing out to sea, the crouching marble beasts have been pitted and corroded over time. Only two parts are polished silky smooth and ruddy: the backs and the seemingly bloody mouths. An adult hand can’t fit between teeth and gums. Ten centuries of children have done the patient work of polishing. When Ancona was besieged by the Holy Roman Emperor, when she repelled him, grew powerful and received tribute from hill towns all around, when the Black Death raged, when the Renaissance surged out of Italy, in the long struggles for unification and the years of war, legions of children played on the lions. They came for mass, for feast days, weddings and holy days, now for concerts, recitals and school trips. Today Anconitani bring their children to the familiar beasts. We brought Silvia, age three, to the cathedral and no one had to tell her – she thrust her hand into the lion’s mouth and laughed.

With the death of her husband, my lovely mother-in-law Sara plunges into the Byzantine world of Italian post-mortem bureaucracy. Yet recall that this is the land of Machiavelli, of official lexicons that border on the Baroque. Example: when I was studying for the Italian driver’s license, the literature had three (3) terms for “rear-view mirror,” one of which was, literally, “the automotive device which permits the driver to look in reverse.” Back to documents. Italy has one called “esistenza in vita” (existence in a life-state), which says that you are alive. Don’t laugh: there just may be situations in which standing there in all your personal glory in front of an official and having a valid ID just aren’t enough.

And there’s attitude. Once I did a translation for the physics department of the Universita’ di Napoli. To get paid I had to produce a notarized document that I was not a member of the Mafia. Because, of course, a Mafioso, doing Mafia things would naturally recoil from signing such a document; his right hand would wither. So I go to the appropriate office and present my carta d’identita’ (identity card). The clerk glares at my last name. Mind you, there are Italian last names as long as mine (12 letters) but mine is German. She begins the “S” half-way on the line for “cognome” (family name). “Excuse me, signora,” I venture, “there may not be enough space.” Nothing, she grimly scratches out the letters, gets to my “w” (an interloper letter, shunned in the true Italian alphabet ). “I have no more space!” she announces, “and still the name goes on.” The cement shoe business is clearly preferable to brandishing my name. Somehow she curls the name around. I have spoiled her lovely document. She looks from my carta d’identita’ to her form and taps the line for “nome” (personal name). Most Italians have no middle name except in the case of a consistently-used double name like Giovanni Paolo, Anna Maria, Marco Antonio, and so forth. A sometimes used middle name, American-style like mine, Jean, just doesn’t fit the system. Either I’m Pamela Jean always and forever OR, if I want to be sometimes plain Pamela, all my ID must say Pamela, Jean (note the comma?). I have no comma. I’ll spare you the rest of the encounter.

And there is the aversion to information-giving. Ancona, my husband’s city on the Adriatic, is more organized than Naples, where we lived, but when we wanted to get married in Ancona and Maurizio called the city office to see what documents were required, he was asked to come in for that information. Ancona is 5 hours from Naples, he noted. “It would be better to come in. The problem,” said the official, “is that people are annoyed when they receive incorrect information by phone.”

And there are the agencies. Sara must “denounce” (i.e. report) that her husband has died, ending a good part of his pension. She does this at an agency called by its initials, IMPDP, or as spoken, “Impdup.” Now “impdup” to me sounds like some arboeal Indonesian mammal with a pesky temper. It certainly isn’t like any Italian word. Yet, in the face of all she has endured, poor Sara must go around saying “Impdup,” asking for Impdup offices and Impdup forms and Impdup stamps. She’ll do it and she’ll make the exquisite pastas and divine stuffed rice balls she prepares for our summer visits, but still . . . To shoulder through the land of “documenti” clearly builds character and perhaps, who knows, that character may have helped create the Renaissance.

Every country has codes, every culture has codes, even as globalization washes over us. I offer these few don’ts, these non si fa (one doesn’t do this) behaviors that I picked up by doing them in Italy and learning, oops, non si fa.
1. Do not give your mother in law a bouquet with carnations because these flowers are a sign of death.
2. Don’t drink cappuccino after noon because it’s a morning drink.
3. Don’t put parmesan on a fish pasta because non si fa.
4. Don’t pour wine backhanded, exposing your inner wrist. You may expose other body parts, if they’re attractive.
5. When four people are meeting and shaking hands, don’t shake hands over another couple while they are shaking hands (bad luck).
6. No matter how cold it is, take off your gloves before shaking hands. A little frostbite never hurt anybody.
7. In the south, don’t eat oranges after a heavy meal because oranges are “too heavy.” (I don’t get it, but I share it).
8. If you go in a bar in the evening for a pre-dinner drink and the bartender puts out cute little bowls with peanuts, little crackers, olives and potato chips, eat the potato chips very delicately, not in big bunches. Have one or two. Maybe three.
9. If you are a grown up female, don’t wear shorts and whoever you are, don’t wear socks with sandals because “that’s what Germans do.”
10. Whatever you are wearing, iron it. Don’t go around rumpled.

You can do most anything else.

I first saw Lake Erie in 1961 on a westward trek with my parents from our home in New Jersey to a family reunion with LA cousins what they determined would be in centrally located Yosemite. My mother, with her typical efficiency had us in the car by 4:15 am, precisely as planned, and we reached Cleveland sometime in the afternoon. We stayed in a shabby cabin on the scummy shore and swam under a gray sky. The gray sky, the littered beach stayed with me when I wrote of Irma coming there after a long train ride to strange new city.
I’ll be speaking in October to the Northern Ohio Italian American Foundation and having often noted to Maurizio how late Italians waited to colonize the New World, making sure that essential urban infrastructures were in place (roads and restaurant trades) and the nasty wilderness beaten back, I thought I’d do a little desultory research on Cleveland history. And discovered . . .
15,000 BCE: the last Ice Age pushed back by prehistoric global warming, Northern Ohio was a tundra, inhabited by caribou and moose.
10,000 BCE: first human inhabitation, with flint brought interstate from Indiana. Zooming ahead to . . .
1300-1500: settled Native American agriculture with beans and maize
1796: General Moses Cleaveland arrived from Connecticut to survey, left his name and went back east.
1800: European population had rocketed to two (2).
1814: The now sort of bustling community changed its dropped the first “a” so “Cleveland” could fit more neatly on the masthead of The Cleveland Advertiser.
1850: First Italian names appear in Cleveland documents
1870: 35 Italian residents, then the floodgates opened, with 20,000 more, mostly from Southern Italy, settling first in the biggest of the “little Italy” regions around Woodland. There was work for men in bridges, roads, railways and steel, for women in garment industries and soon in a thriving Italian infrastructure of restaurants and home building. The padrone system that gripped New York City and morphed into organized crime was for various reasons far weaker in Cleveland.
As in the old TV show, The Naked City,, there must be millions of stories between the tundra age of Cle[a]veland and today.
You may read more on the history of Italians in Cleveland.

It’s an unspeakably beautiful spring day and having given the next chapter in my new book to my writing group, I’m puttering in the yard with a relatively clear conscience. Now Italian has many marvelous words, and speaks eloquently of many concepts that English, with all her 600,000 to 1 million words can not easily express, but I modestly offer these additions to the language of Dante.

1. puttering: How can a language manage without this charmingly onomatopoetic term for the quiet pleasure of doing little useful things in the house or, today, among perennials? Italian has “lavoretti” (lit. little jobs), but the put-put-put of happy busyness isn’t there — the lighter side of Anglo-Saxon pleasure-in-work.

2. cozy: Once on a winter evening in Naples, we were having dinner with our Neapolitan friend Giorgio De La Morte (yes, Giorgio of Death, cousin [no kidding] to Angelo De La Morte). Anyway, we’re with Giorgio and Maria, his Swedish girlfriend. “What is Italian for ‘cozy’?” Maria asked. Giorgio didn’t know, nor did Maurizio. Maria and I elaborated eagerly: it’s cold and blistery outside and you’re inside with a fire, with friends, all toasty. Blank stare from Giorgio, who was perhaps too much of a gentleman to ask just why a human culture would situate itself in such a place. The end of a long linguistic discussion, energized by wine: There’s no “cozy” in Italian, nor in the Neapolitan dialect which, like Yiddish, has hundreds of minutely descriptive terms for personality types, but if you want “cozy,” go to a cold place.

3. snug: See above. And doesn’t just the saying of “snug” conjure comfort, feet pajamas, soft blankets, hot chocolate, and being held?

4. privacy:: Nope, or rather, yes, there’s a borrowed word, “privacy,” for that strange quality some cultures value.

I came upon this unhappy thought for a bright spring day: “Half of the existing 6,700 languages in the world will die away in a century and another 2,000 languages will be endangered if no efforts are made to save them.” Every one must hold, like a treasure box, precious values and sensations like cozy and snug.