Italic

When you boil it all down, I guess I’m a pretty poor excuse for an Italian. I’m only half-Italian, really, as my mother was a Euro-mutt: half German, and the other half English and Irish. The ethnicity we most identified with as a family was Italian, though, and as I look at and listen to the other Italian “kids” I know, my life was comparatively devoid of Italian customs and traditions.

I think I know the reason for this. When my father’s parents came over from Italy — on their respective boats, and about fifteen years apart by my best guess — Italians were the “dirty” immigrants washing ashore in waves and glutting the job lines, relegated to the filthiest, least glamorous, lowest-paying jobs to be had, just so they could feed their families and establish a foothold in their new world.

And I think that sensitivity was bred into my father and his siblings, because to a person, none of my uncles or my aunt seemed to be very “Italian.” I believe they each — either by instruction, or by their own initiative — abandoned their Italian identities and clung to everything “American” that they could grab. They spoke English to each other, though they all could speak in their parents’ Abruzzese dialect. They cast off most of the old customs and traditions. They adopted the American versions of their Italian names — well... all except for Uncle Guido — Maria was Mary; Giovanni was John; Francesco was Frank; there was the stalwart Guido; Remo was Ray; Giuseppe was Joe, though everyone has called him Chooch forever. My father is the mystery. The handwritten name on his birth certificate is indecipherable. It’s either Vincurzio or Vincurzino, but certainly not Vincenzo, though he was James Vincent — Jimmy to his friends and family — all his life.

Throughout my life, our “Italian-ness” was more of a distant background than a foundation. Just about the only things Italian that my family honored was that we were all baptized and raised Roman Catholic, and Italian food. At the holidays. Only. Made by my non-Italian mother!

Most of the other Italian customs and traditions I knew of were what I heard from other Italian kids at school and around the neighborhood, the right-off-the-boat (plane, really, I guess) Italian family that lived across the street and a few doors down from us and Italians whose homes I visited with my father when he dragged me along on his handyman or traveling barber errands.

There was always a smell in these homes, an aroma not of cooking, but yet the suggestion of food. I never smelled this aroma in my own home, but it seemed so pervasive to me in these other Italian homes that I identified it as the “Italian smell.”

I smelled it again today when I picked up an elderly couple in my taxi. The gentleman apparently wasn’t feeling too well, and they were on their way to the emergency room at the local hospital. The moment their garage door opened (yes, the garage), that aroma reached my nose before the sound of the woman’s voice reached my ears, and even had I not already seen their name on the dispatch order, I could have told you their ethnicity.

That aroma — which now as an adult I can identify — is anise. The couple’s name? Mattiuzzi.

With that first breath, I was once again briefly in every Italian home I have ever visited since I was a kid.

But not my own.



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