Living the Dolce Vita
CiaoBellaLessons e’ tornata…and is pairing up with Sarto’s Italian restaurant this Saturday at 3:00 pm for a wine and language introduction to Italian. If you’ve wanted to learn a few phrases and words to make your nonna proud, this is your chance. In a no stress environment you’ll come away with some of the basics around this beautiful language. By the end of the lesson, you’ll be belly laughing as you sing an Italian pop song. Email me to reserve your spot! samanthabensoncox@hotmail.com.
Cosí si fa. In Italian, this translates to “this is how it’s done.” The Italian culture is one that stands on the shoulders of centuries of tradition, history, and thinking there is only one way to cook pasta perfectly. Certain assumptions are taken for granted—ice hurts digestion and should be avoided at all costs, cappuccino must not be ingested after late morning because it’s just gross to put warm milk in a full stomach, one should look one’s best in all public moments except in one genre of clothing that has been woefully slow in catching up to the rest of the world and that is athleisure wear. While Italians are cutting edge on all things fashion, they are still wearing old school sweatsuits from the 80s with this awful brand called Kappa whose iconic brand features its emblem of two back to back silhouettes. And every Italian man over 18 must possess a beat up blue terry cloth robe to adorn his bathroom hook. But I digress.
I was recently reminded of just how deeply these assumptions are etched into the Italian psyche. To refresh my dormant language skills and fill my social calendar, I casually and briefly dated an Italian ex-patriot recently relocated to Denver. I thought I would soothe his homesick and country sick soul with some homemade tagliatelle in gorgonzola spinach cream sauce, but as I added the pungent cheese he became quite alarmed and cautioned me that too much cheese was very bad, possibly putting me at risk of the ubiquitous health crisis of….cellulite. Strike one. I told him to worry about the state of his own thighs.
The second incident (strike) came as I gave him a tour of my townhome. I had a shirt on my dresser that I hadn’t put away and he was alarmed that I didn’t have a chair. In his three-octave range of broken English he told me I should I have a chair in my bedroom for this purpose, as it is an eyesore to have a shirt on a dresser when a chair would much more artfully fill this role.
The third strike took place soon after. Being younger, the ex-pat was of a different generation and apparently while cellulite warnings and decorating tips had made the cut, apparently not all the food rules has been passed down. He was already on the way out, but perhaps as a last-ditch effort to regain my affections, he offered to make me lunch. My anticipation grew as I imagined perhaps picking up a tip or trick for my already stellar (modesty is just another virtue of mine) tomato sauce. But the scene quickly deteriorated. He had no hot pepper flakes in his apartment (!!!???). Instead, I spied him adding a generic supermarket spice mix that contained celery root. I breathed deeply in an effort to steady myself. The horror of it! A generically mixed bunch of random spices intended presumably for steak would clearly ruin the sauce. The last thing I remember from that day was him adding raw (not sautéed in olive oil!!!) garlic to this strange concoction. This fling was clearly over. Over my shoulder as I make my getaway (empty stomach, mind you), I vaguely remember calling out, “Cosí non si fa!” Cellulite and chairs for draping be damned, but blatant disregard for the basic tenets of making tomato sauce is simply unforgiveable. It is just not done.
So why Sip n’ Speak? Why do I love teaching language the way I do it? I’ll start by repeating part of the spiel I give every year on back to school night. I tell parents, my goal is for your kids to not be standing here in 20 years saying, “I had ____ (insert number ranging from 2-6) years of ___________ (choose Spanish or French) in ___________ (insert high school and/or college), and I can’t speak a word.”
I, the language lush, am here to tell you there has been a revolution in language instruction (hopefully, and in most classrooms– where the teacher has a pulse). Gone or severely restricted are the days of direct grammar instruction, drilling, and verb charts. We have entered the era of comprehensible input. This means giving students language he or she can understand in a context the student cares about. It has to be both understandable and relevant. In my high school classroom, I am still somewhat constricted by what is in the textbook. I have to teach the word pupitre, an antiquated term for “student desk” that 3 out of 4 native speakers I’ve interviewed do not know. Since my pet peeve is body parts draped listlessly across desks during my highly engaging lessons, I make the best of this word by telling students, “Get your head off my poopie-tray! It’s gross,” received by much laughter.
But when I am not wearing my virtuous civil servant hat, the classroom is mine. I am free to make the rules to best suit my students and their real world goals. I do this by making sure the environment is stress-free (hence the popularity of sipping for adults and singing for kids). This is research based (the lack of stress not the booze), but you’ll have to take my word on it unless you want to read my 35 page master’s thesis on language acquisition. We put gestures to new words to help store them in long term memory, and we give priority to informal, oral language over grammar, since 99% of us won’t go on to be a Spanish or Italian linguist but will need to be able to respond to and ask basic questions.
On Sundays over the next coming weeks at celebrated Chef Elise Wiggins’ acclaimed Denver restaurant Cattivella, students will get to laugh, relax, and learn Italian while drinking vino. They will use gestures to help them remember basic vocabulary and conversation, as well as engage in travel dialogues. They will immediately be able to use what they’ve learned to order from the menu and will hopefully be so engaged that there is not a single head down on a table. I just hope they don’t fight me on the Italian pop songs.
Swearing in Italy is an art form and quite ubiquitous. Perhaps it’s because things just sound better and are more fun to say in Italian. I learned the hard way that there is a limit. I had been under the impression that “Vaffunculo” has no heavier of a connotation than, “you jerk!” even though I knew its literal translation had to do with telling someone to screw himself. But I heard it everywhere…from tight-jeaned, spiked haired Roman teens on the subway jokingly using it with each other, to dubbed over American movies (there are no subtitles, but rather actors who make their livings as the voice of Brad Pitt or whomever). I could have sworn it was said on soap operas and even by old ladies in the grocery store, so I came to underestimate its power.
Cut to a rainy night in Rome. There I was, heading out in the cold November rain on my shiny silver brand new motorino, that, truth be told, terrified me and had been set aside for trips of no further than 5 miles from home. Traffic is an entire subject unto itself, but suffice it to say it is scary with lots of close calls and left turns made into dense oncoming traffic. Once I had asked Fabio about how they did it and why there didn’t seem to be a disproportionate number of accidents. He turned his head to whisper in my ear (we were riding on his scooter at the time) and said, “When we Italians see a hole, we try to fill it.” Or something like that. But I digress. After tearing myself away from “Charmed” in Italian, to head to dance class. Since I was embodying my alter ego, living out my Roman adventure, I thought starting adult ballet classes would be a soul liberating, fun thing to do. I didn’t realize I would be the heaviest in the class, and the only one to have not taken lessons as a child. I can still hear the teacher’s voice, “Su, su Samantina!” or “up, up”, reminding me to lift my butt. And the nickname? Italians find it endearing to add an “ina” or “ino” to the end of names. So in spite of all this humiliation, I was ready to brave the weather.
My heart pounding with impatient drivers beeping the whole way, I finally pulled up to the dance studio. Driving is only half the stress, as any Italian will tell you. Then there is parking, a true art requiring creativity and daring on the part of the driver. If no spots exist, angles are used, or worst case, hazard lights are simply left flashing. So imagine my frustration when the perfect spot right in front of the studio was suddenly blocked by a man in a car telling me I couldn’t park there! What business of it was his anyway, I thought. Emboldened by the adrenaline from the ride, I told him emphatically, “I’m parking here!” He said, through his open window, “You can’t park there!” I retorted back, “Yes, I am parking here!” He again told me I couldn’t. So I decided to try to be a real Roman and bring out the big guns. “Vaffunculo!” I brazenly yelled. Suddenly this professionally dressed business type looking man was out of his car with his hands on my scooter telling me he was going to throw my vehicle to the ground. So I did what any self respecting, empowered American woman would do given such circumstances. I screamed bloody murder. “Auitoooo!!!!” My dance teacher heard me through the open window and came running out, and the rest is a blur that ended up with me parking there and him disappearing.
Later, walking arm in arm and eating banana and chocolate chip (straciatella) flavored gelato, I asked my best Italian girlfriend, Nadia, a stage actress, what I had done wrong. I theorized it was my being a woman, that perhaps it was inappropriate, or the fact that it sounds ugly to hear swear words from a non-native speaker. She laughingly assured me that neither of these explanations fit: “Samy, Samy, Samy! Not at all.” It turned out her explanation was quite simple….In her words, “Roman drivers are very rude and very aggressive. Also, you were pretty, what is the word…ballsy…in saying that you were parking there.” I breathed a sigh of relief realizing my use had been, after all, appropriate.
Imagine my surprise at this Christmas vision in my very own King Sooper’s. Pellegrino! Having renounced my wine dependency, I have transformed myself from the red wine girl to the Pellegrino girl. This bubbly water is a staple in Italian restaurants as travelers know their options given by waiters are “sparkling or still”, never “bottled or tap.” I once had the pleasure of dining in one of the top rated restaurants in Rome and was presented with a three page water menu, detailing the mineral composition and degree of sparkle of each water. Being frugal, Fabrizio (my then husband)and I would sometimes order acqua del rubinetto, as his left of center leanings coupled with Roman pride lead to his disdain for paying for water when free, mineral rich water from the original Roman aqueducts could be had gratis! He also liked to brag that his ancestors were writing laws and poetry while we (anglos) were painting ourselves blue and hanging from trees. But I digress.
So while I can’t in good conscience buy all that glass or plastic, I did treat myself to a Sodastream (make your own bubbly water machine) as an early Christmas present to myself. It may not contain all the right mineral compostion or have the exact right amount of fizz, but it still tastes pretty good. Salud!
CiaoBellaLessons 