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.