Lo straniero (Part One)

Douglas Grant Mine (December 26, 2009)

The family sends out a Christmas card every year featuring the brothers in some half-buffo or novel pose. This was the photo on the 2006 edition, marking their first Natale in Mamma Nicoletta’s homeland. Alongside the boys is Zeta, the family’s Miami-born German Shepherd who also made the trans-oceanic transition.

Journalist and novelist Douglas Grant Mine, a former correspondent for the AP who now lives in Italy with his family, tells the exhilarating, thought-provoking story of an American trying to get Italian citizenship... (First of two parts)

Today, after three years of residence in centroitalia, I handed in my application for Italian citizenship.

When it comes through, in about two years, it will make my life here easier and only then will I enjoy a full complement of civil rights. But it’s not like it’s a red-letter day for me, something to celebrate. It leaves me almost melancholy, feeling diminished in my American-ness.

      I’ve always disdained flag-wavers. I subscribe to the thesis that ostentatious patriotism is the refuge of jerks. That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m not very happy, deep down, to have been born in the USA.
       I made the 20 minute drive from Fano, the little Adriatic coastal city where we live, up the two-lane highway bordering the shore to Pesaro, the provincial capital. The bureau for these procedures is in the prefettura, which is housed in a handsome 15^th-century building, the former ducal palace, on the north side of the expansive main plaza, the Piazza del Popolo.
      I found the appropriate office and sat in the waiting room with several other people, mostly younger folk, all extra-comunitari like myself. There was an Argentine couple in their 20s. They might have had Italian grandparents, which could make things easier for them. A West African woman about 30 years old was giving some valuable advice to a couple from Moldavia. She, the black woman, spoke excellent Italian and was gladly and generously trying to help them avoid some of the setbacks and pitfalls she had encountered along this sinuous trail toward a new nationalityFor my companions in this antechamber, Italian citizenship would represent considerable improvement of their chances for a modicum of prosperity, for a better life for themselves and their children. This was a momentous step for them, one fraught with hope.

My motivations were different. I didn’t come here for greater opportunity. My own country continues to be unmatched in the world for offering to its own citizens and to arrivals from around the globe a bountiful banquet of opportunity, along with the chance to experience and embrace the concepts of liberty and responsibility, the rule of law and individual rights as described so eloquently by those iconoclastic revolutionaries named Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Madison. (Granted, Canada and Australia provide similar contexts. But even many Australians and Canadians emigrate to the United States every year. Why is that?)

Of course not everyone achieves The American Dream. The struggle leaves some by the wayside.

But most of those who reach U.S. shores and work for a degree of material security and a sense of belonging to a country that stands for something do indeed achieve most of their goals. In so doing, they become Americans. Something different and, in their own minds, better than what they were before.

I’m not Italian-American. I’m a typical American mongrel mix. Of my eight great-grandparents, three were German, two were Irish, two were Swiss and one was Dutch. But I grew up in New Jersey, which after New York has the biggest Italian-American community of any state. So throughout my childhood and adolescence, half or more of my friends and classmates were the children or grandchildren of immigrants from Italy. Mostly Sicilians and Neapolitans.

Stirling, where I went to middle school, was (and still is) more than 80 percent Italian.

Streetsoccer – SKILLS THAT TRAVEL WELL – Bruno, who began playing organized soccer in Miami at age 5, stops the ball to consider his next move during a pick-up game in the only street of Poggio alla Lastra, an Apennine village in the Casentinese Forest. Sports – principally il calcio – served the Mine boys well in the process of integrating into Italian life and culture.

Carnevale – NEW HOLIDAYS ARE FUN – Toby (second from left) and his classmates at the Enrico Mattei Elementary School in Acqualagna dressed up as autumnal trees for the school’s Carnevale parade during the Mine-Spendolini family’s first winter in Italy after leaving Miami. The boys, who lamented the absence of the Thanksgiving break and MLK day, eventually realized that the Italian school-year calendar compensates class-weary kids with days off unheard-of in the States.

Boys – LACING UP – Tobias, Joe and Bruno (l to r) put on their skates on the steps of the family’s Coral Gables, Florida home a few months before the big move to Europe. Though they were happy and well-adjusted American kids in Miami, the idea of such a sea-change never intimidated them, what with having learned Italian from Mom and having enjoyed summers in Acqualagna and Fano with La Nonna Elvira, gli zii and their cousins Veronica and Elisa.

My wife is Italian. Not Italian-American. Italian-Italian. We met 16 years ago when we both were working in Central America, in El Salvador. We had a whirlwind romance and got married and we had three children in rapid succession, in 1994, ’95 and ’96. All boys.

From birth they were dual citizens; American by way of dad and Italian through mom. But we spent most of their childhood in the United States, in Miami. To be precise, we lived in Coral Gables, a lovely residential municipality of Greater Miami. The kids, naturally, became more American than Italian, even though their mother, Nicoletta, did an admirable job of making sure they learned her language.

“Non capisco se mi parli in inglese,” she insisted for months on end, feigning incomprehension when, at the age of around 4 the kids, immersed in pre-school and American daily life, wanted to use English inside as well as outside the house, where up until that point either Spanish or Italian or a pidgin of the two had prevailed.

More than eight years went by. And we were happy there. Then, three years ago, when Bruno was 12 and Joseph was 10 and Tobias was 9, Nico and I decided to move to Italy.

I’d spent some time here, and liked this country. I spoke the language fairly well. (My Spanish, which had become almost a second native tongue after 13 years of work in Latin America, helped.) It was Nicoletta’s homeland and in my mind it harbored a wealth of history and culture. My college roommate for four years was a Cuban intellectual who turned me on to “foreign” cinema in the 1970s, and Cornell had three small theaters on campus that held several retrospectives or mini-festivals every year. I loved the movies of Ettore Scola, Lina Wertmuller, the brothers Taviani. Italy in the early 21^st century seemed to Nico and I a fundamental part of both the Old and New Europe, and as such an eminently interesting place for us and our kids.

This was our reasoning: If we, because of our particular circumstances, were able to bestow on our children the extravagant gift of becoming full partakers of and participants in two worlds, then we would be almost negligent not to do it.

In the late summer of 2006, it became a matter of Now or Never. Bruno had finished his first year of middle school. He spoke passable Italian, but his entire academic formation had been in the States. He’d never been instructed in the intricacies of Italian grammar, the formal study of which is a big part of elementary school here. He could not write in that language. So seventh grade seemed to us the last point at which we could drop him into the Italian public school system with the expectation that he’d be able to catch up. Waiting any longer might be asking too much of him.

We came. And the kids have done great. In school and out. They now enjoy that rare condition of being absolutely bi-cultural. If you see them in an American context surrounded by American kids, they are indistinguishable in idiom and mannerism from their mates. The same goes for here. Unless you know their background, if you watch and listen to them on the beach in Fano, playing with their pals, you would think they were born and raised here.

By the time they finish high school, though, they will think of themselves as (and thus be) more Italian than American. I believe they will retain a good dose of their American-ness in their psyches and hearts. I’m still pleasantly surprised by the fact that, 38 months into our life on this side of the ocean, they still speak to each other in American English. I thought they would have switched to Italian by now.

But how do I feel about the prospect that their principal cultural identity – their framework of cardinal references and signposts – will be predominantly Italian? That they probably will not feel, like I do, a visceral attachment to and a kind of spiritual kinship with Bob Dylan and Jackie Robinson and Walt Whitman?

I feel a little sad about it, honestly. Voglio dire, I’m glad we came here and that we made our kids bi-cultural. I’m proud of them, of the kind of adolescents they are becoming before our eyes.

But what I cannot help feeling a bit sorry about is that Italian society, the one into which they’ve become so thoroughly integrated, does not set before them a construct of ideals suffused with nobility.

Not that the ideals of America – freedom, the rule of law, inalienable rights, equal opportunity – are unfailingly practiced or rewarded. The system is far from perfect.

But most Americans have absorbed, even if only by osmosis, an affinity for those concepts and they share the objective of seeking to perfect their democracy, their country, by using the principles and ideals on which it was founded to effect progress from generation to generation.

That shared notion is generally ennobling. To varying degrees, of course, depending on the individual. But the underlying current is there, and flowing.

Here it’s a different story.

There could be no Italian Rosa Parks. No individual standing up (or remaining seated) in defense of her or his rights could catalyze a movement that, through grassroots protest and civil lawsuits, might erode injustice and advance the development of democracy. Neither the courts nor politics – the two main avenues upon which a people makes concerted moral and civic progress – work that way here.

That does not mean there are not heroic Italians who take a personal and dangerous stand against perfidy. Dozens of brave men and women in recent decades have refused to pay il pizzo, or protection money, to extortionists from La Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria or the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia. But they usually are terrorized into submission, and the idea that they might defend themselves or their families and somehow strike a blow against criminal tyranny by pressing their case through the lethargic, politicized and ineffective judiciary is beyond Quixotic. Any suggestion – by an outsider, say – that one might try that route would elicit from most Italians only smirk of resignation tinged in equal parts by disgust with the status quo and pity for the foreigner’s naiveté.

Andrea and Paola are friends from our years in Miami, where Andrea was an IT manager for Costa Cruise Lines for four years. He was transferred back home, to Genoa, five years ago, and left the cruise company in 2006 to set up his own business as a consultant and software designer in Arenzano, outside Genoa.

“It’s tough these days for a lot of people,” Andrea told me as we strolled through the narrow streets of downtown Genoa. “The middle class is really hard-pressed. It’s the first time in my memory that middle class people find themselves barely reaching the end of the month with any money at all in their pocket, having to go that fourth week without things they always took for granted.”

“Why is it that?” I asked him.

“Italy has very deep-rooted structural constraints on its economy. The huge and inefficient public sector, corruption, cronyism and organized crime. And all the entrenched powers that benefit from the status quo. It’s very hard to change things here.”

“So you’re not optimistic about life here, say, over the next 20 years? About prospects for Ricky and Alberto?”

The kids, 16 and 18, seem like happy and well-adjusted ragazzi. They both study at Arenzano’s liceo scientifico, and are planning on going to university, which here costs less than a thousand dollars a year.

“I wouldn’t say I’m not optimistic,” he said as we stopped beside Paola and Nicoletta at the display window of a shoe store. “These problems are eternal. They’ve always existed, and we always find a way to get by and get through them.”

That sort of resignation is endemic.

There could be no Barack Obama in this country. That’s not to say that Italians don’t love him. Most of them do, and are eager to say so. Even those who line up on the conservative side of the political spectrum.

Such moral support for the U.S. president is, at heart, an expression of admiration for the essential American-ness of Obama’s storyline. And Italians – even knee-jerk leftist ’68-ers, even after eight years of George W. Bush – genuinely like Americans. I don’t know if it’s because so many have a great-uncle or great-aunt and second cousins who made good in the U.S., or because Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe or because of stories handed down from parents and grandparents about GIs and chocolate and sliced white bread, or Rocky, or what. A combination of all that and much more, probably.

Obama rules here. It’s a manifestation of excitement and enthusiasm for the fact that there are countries like America where politicians are held accountable for their deeds and fresh ideas emerge to fill the citizenry with resolve and hope.

(to be continued)

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Americans in Italy emigration expatriates Immigration Italian citizenship Italian lifestyle Obama

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On January 12th, 2011 Scott Driesen wrote

Living the life in Italia

I saw Stirling and just knew that DGM was the same friend from way back when. I see life is good for you and your wondeful family. I always knew you would end up a traveling journalist, catching your name on stories in great American newspapers. Interesting story, you go bro.

On January 1st, 2010 James G wrote

Lo straniero

Obama,just like JFK years ago,is just a symbol,an image,just like the Hollywood movie stars like Wayne,gable,Bogart,Newman etcc."La fuga dei cervelli" reflects the reality of many professionals,most of whom still young , who don`t see many hopes sull `orizzonte italiano in many fields.The political and mobsters link is like a Dna of our heritage[and future] thanks in part To the "american " liberizzazione of WWII.Those malviventi should have remained in jail and not be part of Government,still today.Thanks Uncle Tom!But just like in Chile,Honduras, and other places the Yankee crusade keeps on" ficcandosi il naso,e mani, dove non dovrebbe.And you believe that the average American tax payer is not a wimp?Why doesn`t he/ she complain about deficits,waste$, wrong" Occupations "of other countries,favoritism for tirants,unfair trades{China,India] outlaw mercenaries, and on and on,,?Didn`t they learn fron Vietnam? " Win" in Afghanistan and Iraq? Which Hollywood movie are you guys watching now? John Wayne ,and Gen ,Custer are dead//

On December 27th, 2009 Annonymous wrote

Information on dual citizenship

I read where you mentioned that if your grandparents had come from Italy it would or could be easier to get dual citizenship - is this true? If this is a factual statement would you please furnish me any links or information necessary to begin this process? All four of my grandparents came to the USA from Italy and I'd like to learn more about this as we've considered moving to Italy when my husband retires. Whatever you can send is much appreciated! molto grazie ~grazia

On December 27th, 2009 Anonymous wrote

Americans in Italy

I was very interested to read your story about your attempt to become and Italian citizen given that you are married to an Italian and your children hold dual citizenship. I was really enjoying the article until I came to the part about the lack of real heroes and role models in Italian culture. I actually couldn't believe it. Saying that there could not be a Rosa Parks in Italy, for example.

During the early part of the 20th century, many Italian labor leaders led demonstrations for worker rights that led to a living wage for many and which inspired such movements in other countries. Watching the early movies made in the '50s, can give one good examples. Italians continue to "manifestare" when there is something that they feel needs addressing; they don't just sit on the sidelines lamenting.

Have you even listened to Georgio Napolitano's speeches at year end. They are nothing short of inspiring. Sure, he is not a young Obama, but his wisdom is incredible. He, too, was young once, and had that "non so che" like our President. Italy may not be multi-cultural like America, but it isn't America and probably will never be. But modern Italians are a blend of people from all over the Mediterranean, from Etruscans to Gallic to Oscans to Samnites even to the Arab world. This makes them strong, innovative, and makes them function despite the Mafia and other organized crime.

A month ago I attended a conference here in New York about economic stagnation in Italy. The young men who were speaking were frustrated with the Italian system, and there was expressed a wish that Italy would "wake up" and cure its "sickness" with a new global economic order. Certainly, there are things that need to be done. However, Italy did not suffer as much as other European countries in the global downturn, because of its more conservative financial system. Small family firms continue to thrive, despite the downturn, making the most beautiful things in the world. There is a uniqueness to Italianita' that is special and that extends to all aspects of Italian life. Some of this uniqueness may not be in sync with a globalized society, but it is what attracts us to it...culture, art, family, etc. Buon Natale e Buon Anno Nuovo Patricia Sandler

On December 28th, 2009 DGM wrote

Spettabile Patricia, Thank

Spettabile Patricia, Thank you for your comment. As I say in the story, the courageous individuals who refuse to pay protection money to gangsters are heroic in their actions in the same way Rosa Parks was. Every society has its heroes, and Italy is no exception. A few from recent decades who come to mind are the investigating magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who paid with their lives for their bravery. Roberto Saviano, author of “Gomorra,” is a contemporary one living under constant threat of death for depicting the tyranny exercised in Campania by the Mob. But what I am attempting to underscore is a difference in systems. American society, by way of an effective and politically independent judiciary that is esteemed by the nation’s citizens and respected by the other branches of government as co-equal, offers the individual recourse against injustice. So Rosa Parks’ defiance was a first step along a path, an institutional one, that led to progress for the nation as a whole. A similar scenario in Italy is difficult to imagine. DGM

On December 27th, 2009 Silvia Giagnoni wrote

I couldn't agree and

I couldn't agree and sympathize more with Douglas Grant Mine. As an Italian living in Montgomery (by the way of Rosa Parks...), I completely subscribe to his idea of our (soon-to-be) country. His analysis of the reasons why Italians like so much President Obama are right to the point. To respond to Patricia Sandler's post, all this doesn't mean that Italians are coward or don't protest. Quite the opposite. As a matter of fact, we do protest all the time, as she rightly pointed out. Do things change though? Not really. And as it turns out he best sociocultural analysis of this aspect of Italian society (which results in a fundamental lack of social mobility) remains Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Silvia Giagnoni

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