It's funny that I am an Italophile, since I grew up with New York Irish, for whom the Wops or the Guineas or the Dagos, were our chief rivals and Catholic cousin Others. I remember when one of my cousins married an Italian woman back in the 50's. You'd think he was the king of miscegenation. In fact, one of the nasty sayings I learned from my grandparent's generation was, "Scratch a guinea, get a nigger." Charming, no?
The first boy I remember being attracted to --although I didn't have the category-- was Jimmy Marcello. He was a sixth or seventh grade classmate. A short, dark-olive skinned Sicilian with shiny black hair. Handsome, shorter than me. To this day I remember having to watch myself from staring too long at that triangular place --still one of my favorites on any man--right at the top of the sternum where the two sternocleidomastoid muscles, those big long ones on the side of the neck-- meet up at the collar bones.
The turning point came when I went to Rome to study. I already spoke and taught Spanish, so I got myself a tutor for Italian and spent a few months at it. I came to love the sound of it in my mouth, its natural drama and sweetness. And its gift for vulgarity and cursing. Then off I went. Although my year in Rome was a tough one in many ways, it was not because of the Italians. I had read Luigi Barzini's wonderful book about his people, The Italians, and so I was prepped for taking them as they were. And I liked them. A lot. To say nothing of the food, the architecture and the Mediterranean sky and climate...and the men. It was my unmistakeable reaction to Italian men that finally made me realize I was not heterosexual. At all.
I recalled my grandmother's dislike of the New York Italians and her assertion of the superiority of the Irish. Sheer chauvinism. Because here was a country full of people, who, along with their particular form of Catholicism and their operatically messy history, had been having a good time for a long time. Reminded me of what a prof said in college, that the Church had never really converted the Italians from paganism, it had merely occupied the country. While the Irish were tying themselves up in Jansenist knots and trying to keep all the rules, the very people who wrote the rules exhibited a proprietor's ease in selective enforcement. While not exactly honorable, or prompt, or organized, or truthful, they were eminently human. Evviva Italia.
The Italy I knew some thirty years ago was just sowing the seeds of the country it is now. Like the rest of Western Europe, it is disintegrating. The contemporary Barzini is Beppe Severgnini's La Bella Figura: A Field Guide To The Italian Mind. The birth rate has plummeted and there are all sorts of "immigrants" now vying for a place among native people who even found one other rather strange. Rome is pretty much in the middle of the Italian peninsula. The Romans had a saying, which I'm sure is matched by every other region in this very regional country: Siamo noiantri i sol'Italiani autentici. Al nord, son tutti Tedeschi; al mezzogiorno, tutti Arabi. We are the only true Italians, to the north of here, they're all Germans; to the south, all Arabs.
I guess the Irish are not the only chauvinists.
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