Casa

  Six months later and I see the same kitchen table, rooms and wall hangings, but every time I blink, I see the purplish-pink sunset over the bay and Castel dell’Ovo glowing in the golden light; I remember the colorful cliffs of apartments standing sentry and showing off from the hills; and I see the red-moon reflection in…

Home

There’s a rare breeze today, and with the smell of the sea and the heat of mid-July, it brings a reminder that this is my last week. I’m sitting in my dorm, watching street market sellers go about their normal Thursday doings, and my mind flashes back: to that one rainy night in early Padova when I met someone familiar…

Non c’è male

Before work, I always find something entertaining in the rush of morning Posillipo: shops opening; grandmothers shaking the nonexistent dust off rugs from their windows; and Neapolitan men with salt-and-pepper shoulder-length hair simultaneously sipping their scalding caffè, and rompendo le palle of their friends across the street. Today I saw a muscular, blonde, Zac-Efron-type swing onto his scooter…

Bostoniana

In the bus we pass characters: the woman with the 60’s cat-eye sunglasses and piled-on bleached hair, sitting at the same bus stop every day with her sunbathing Jack Russel Terrier whose name is probably Audrey; the old men with the beautifully tan and leathery faces, whose wrinkles remember both smiles and tears as their…

An American for a weekend

One of my favorite things is a city on an early summer morning, the warm dewy air holding its breath in an anacrusis before the day’s crescendo. We leave the dorm for the airport at 5:30 am and watch from the cab as the sun rises, the rosy pinks and blushing purples reflecting off the double peaks…

L’istituzione Napoletana

When I had my meeting at the Stazione back in March, I was offered an espresso. I declined, because despite having been in Italy for almost two months, I was still accustomed to my long coffee in the morning and basta. The lab director shook his head, took a sip from the fragrant cup and said,…

Mergellina morning

It’s 9 am on a Monday morning, slightly raining, and upper 70’s Fahrenheit, a chilly day to a Neapolitan. The marketers have already been up for hours: sellers’ twenty-something sons rubbing their eyes and throwing on backwards ball-caps; aloof anglers walking down a busy Mergellina street with buckets in hand, water sloshing and tentacle shadows reaching up the sides; fruit…

Madònna

A running joke between the American students of various Italian heritage in Padova was how different regions in Italy have unique and often creative ways of resolving dilemmas. The best example of this was when a few of us braved the day and ventured out to Murano and Burano from Venice, retracing our steps through the Marauder’s Map of…