One evening at work I decided to write an essay for the “Multicultural Communications Essay context.” It was late, I was tired, and I felt that if I didn’t do anything creative right away I would die on the spot. So I wrote it.
The essay was selected among the winners, and I had a chance to read it in front of a lot of people. It was an exciting experience as it was to listen to the other essays. Caution: People are much more interesting that they appear…
I was born in Rome, the geographical and existential center of Italy. Rome is just midway between the cold, fast-paced, organized, and efficient North, and the warm, laid-back, friendly, and chaotic South. Everybody knows Rome as a beautiful, old, and motherly city; but Rome knows how to be defiant, disrespectful, and caustic as well.
Rome is a city of emigrants and passers-by who moved there for college, work, or adventure; most Romans are first generation Romans. So were my parents. They both moved to Rome from the South to go to college. They were raised in two different cities in Puglia; they met in Rome and married in 1960. It was just fifteen years after the end of World War II. Both cities and people were still healing from the scars and devastation of the war. My mother lost her father in Albania when she was 5 years old. As many Italians, during the war she moved from city to city in search of safety. She still remembers vividly the hours spent as a child in a dark bomb shelter, protecting her ears from the noise and the fear of the explosions. At the end of each raid, more of her world was transformed into ruins.
My parents grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, I grew up in the ‘70s. We were worlds apart. The ‘70s in Italy were complicated and dangerous years. It was a time of economic growth and relative wealth. At the same time, strong and often violent political movements were shaking the country. Terrorist movements were opening new scars: right extremists were bombing squares and train stations; left extremists were killing and kidnapping “symbols of the power.” The landscape of my country was changing as fast as under a volcanic eruption. Family life was not easy either. My father and I were standing on the two opposite sides of the historical fault that was breaking Italy in two, and still trying to understand each other. It took many years and many experiences to fill the gap.
During my college years, I moved to various cities in a slow, North-East migration. I had to adapt to new dialects and new ways to deal with life. At the same time, I witnessed millions of people from North and Central Africa, East Europe, and Asia moving through Italy as their first stop towards their promised land. Large ships brought thousands of people from Albania, where my grandfather was killed, to the coasts of Puglia, where my mother grew up fatherless.
I moved to the United States 10 years ago. I was 33. It was supposed to be just a one-year stay, but I met my husband and never went back. America! This country is so ancient and so young at the same time; so similar and yet so different from anything I had experienced before. Am I at the end of my journey? Have I finally found my place?