Taste of Home

As I promised yesterday, I said I would talk about a special family.

A few weeks ago, I was accepted into a program as a part of one of my classes. The program is called "The Family Project." With another girl from my class, I will be visiting an Italian family once a week until the middle of April to form a close relationship with them. Essentially, we will be researching four different topics for class (like gender roles, immigration, or whatever we choose) and getting authentic Italian perspectives on our topics from this family. Of course, it isn't all work, as I learned during my and Leti's first visit with our family yesterday.

We take the bus to the family's apartment with Julie, a young staff member from Umbra who was to accompany us the first time (so we didn't get lost). The family had participated in this project in a past semester, and are friends of my professor. I have heard that they are absolutely hilarious and "quite the characters," but nothing prepared me for how incredibly welcoming they were! We entered to an Italian kiss greeting and enthusiastic barks from Charlie (the little dog!) Ernesto, the dad, and Clelia, the mom, speak very little English, so we were excited to practice! In Italian, they explained to us that it is perfectly okay to ask them to "repeat" something, and that language is more about understanding than speaking, so as long as we can convey our ideas in creative ways, grammatical perfection is irrelevant. Very profound. Ernesto proceeded to jokingly make fun of Clelia's enthusiastic hand gestures while speaking by frantically waving his hands around his head. Typical. :)

Francesca, their fourteen-year-old daughter, was the cutest and wasted no time whipping out her travel guide about New York soon after we arrived. It's funny, because I have a similar guidebook to her country. She said it is her "dream" to go to New York City. It's my dream to be here right now. I really hope that happens for her! I am excited to get to know Francesca better; she is so poised and well-spoken!

Even a month in, I am still consistently amazed by the overwhelmingly welcoming attitude that so many people have here. I am looking at the situation from the family's point of view. Here are two foreign students invading their house for a "class project" once a week. They have no idea who we are. And yet. There are kisses on the cheek. There is tea and an unlimited supply of cookies. There are questions and answers and laughing and stories and memories. And this was just our first meeting.

I am sure I'll have a lot more stories about my "family" in the coming weeks! We're going to their house again this Tuesday. In other news, I am heading to Lucca and Pisa (yes, leaning tower) tomorrow for the night! Pictures to come!