Don't forget Baby Jesus!

A few months ago Michele and I moved to a hip urban condo that's less than half the size of our old house. Every possession had to be carefully reconsidered. When all the boxes were finally packed, Christmas decorations that used to take me two hours just to get down from the attic had been consolidated to a handful of items.

But there was never any question about the presepio Michele's father made for the family when Fabio and Arianna were very young. He hammered natural sticks together to represent the stable and hand painted china figures of Mary and Joseph, a couple of shepherds, the cow and the donkey that watch patiently over the empty crib of tin foil every year. It is Arianna's job as the youngest child to place the little plastic baby on Christmas eve. When we put the presepio out this time, our new apartment really felt like home.

Unfortunately it turned out that we had to be more flexible than we would like with our traditions. My father-in-law is very, very sick and I dropped Michele at the airport on Tuesday so he could be in Naples for a time of year that is always special to Italian families, but this year even more so. Before my husband left he put the baby in the manger early, afraid that an Americana on her own would forget and mess things up.

Tomorrow Fabio and Arianna and I will host the Christmas dinner for the members of our family who live on this side of the Atlantic. My 28 year-old-daughter is opening presents with her best friend from the naval base in Sicily. But we will all be thinking of the ones we love in Naples and good times we've shared in years past.

This is a video from our trip last year at Christmas time. The presepio in Caltagirone, a charming hill town in the middle of Sicily known for its ceramics, is probably the most elaborate in the entire country.

A 12-Step Program for Italian Language Addicts

Talk about a small world. Here we are, land-locked in the middle of Ohio and we can rub elbows online with foreign languages almost as easily as they do in Europe.

One of my favorite sites for extra Italian practice is the British Broadcasting page for languages.

There's a simple placement test, videos, great links to Italian television and radio podcasts, cool Italian (the kind your husband and Amici instructors will never teach you) and a twelve-step course for beginners delivered weekly to your inbox for free. Most of the material is practical vocabulary for travelers - and I plan to watch a lot of these right before my next Italian adventure. Why can't I ever remember to pay for my coffee before I order at the bar???????

Stretch those Italian language muscles as many ways as possible and before you know it, you'll be enrolling in Advanced Conversation with all the really smart kids at school.

Italia e America

The Business Manager and the Academic Director

America + Italy = ?

Kathy met Michele when she was a Vice President with Merrill Lynch just before everything changed at the turn of the millennium. She was writing a series of columns for a local newspaper about how people handle their money and thought it would be fun to talk to someone from a different country. Normally, an interview takes about an hour. They talked for four. Michele invited her to dinner, burnt the frozen vegetables, and kissed her on both cheeks. Eight months later interviewee and interviewer merged perspectives into a single household “per sempre,” complete with respective children, mismatched dinnerware, and all the cultural assumptions that are so basic to who we are we don’t even know we have them.

 Italy: The Constant in the Equation

Italians don’t like change. That’s their charm, centuries of tried and true tradition passed from one generation to the next for as far as the eye can see.

Here are some of the things Kathy learned after she and Michele joined forces:

1. Dry cleaning is not a necessity.
2. People clean their own houses.
3. Wasting food is like throwing away money and an insult to all the people who don’t have enough in the world. You can save the end of the onion in a little baggie in the refrigerator and use it the next time you make soup.
4. The thermostat never needs to go above 64 degrees in the winter if you wear a heavy sweater.
5. If you stop shopping, eventually your brain chemistry changes and it isn’t even pleasant anymore.

 For Better or Worse, Americans Thrive on Change

Michele came to the United States in 1990 and got his first job at University Hospital where he still works today. When he met Kathy he logically thought he’d found someone who shared his views about the value of a steady paycheck. He wasn’t the only one who was shocked a few months later when she abruptly quit at the peak of her career.

Michele was even more confused after the race riots of 2001 when Kathy opened InkTank, a writing center in the middle of the most crime infested neighborhood in the city. In Italy the first and only financial obligation is to the family and it was hard for him to understand why she wanted to work sixty hours a week for free, and, even worse, finance her idealistic dream to connect rich and poor, white and black through the power of words. After several years of running a non-profit, Kathy reluctantly came to share Michele’s more pragmatic views. Taxable or not, businesses have to create products and services that add meaning to lives so that the community is willing to pay for them on a sustainable basis. After one final non-profit tryst with city transportation to improve biking conditions in Cincinnati, Kathy was ready to partner with Michele in a new vision of School Amici, one that combines two cultures, two hearts, two brains and mushes it all up together.

 America + Italy = School Amici

Come meet us in this place that is neither Italian or American, but Italians far from home and Americans never satisfied with where they are, all of us searching for something we miss. A language school is a practical pursuit that engages all the skills Kathy learned in corporate America and the steady discipline that got Michele through medical school. We study vocabularies. We do our homework even when we don’t feel like it. But those of us who sign up for classes, teachers and students alike, do it because we dream the kind of dreams that carry people to foreign lands far from everything they know, towards a secret desire to be changed.