An Italian who looked like a cheerleader

Not many Italians apply for homestay. Part of the reason may be that in Italy it is unheard of–or at least very rare–to share your home with strangers. Home is for family;  immediate family, not cousins, aunts, uncles. So it works both ways: odd to stay in someone else’s house. When our daughter went abroad for her junior year to the University of Padova, the university there found the international students homestay rooms.  These were not typical Italian family homes, but university professor homes, or single woman’s homes. People either looking for company and money, or academics from countries more accustomed to sharing living situations than Italians.

So when we get an Italian, it is most often an unusual situation. In Cesca’s case, she ended up with us because ‘there was no room in the dorm.’  The living situation worked out just fine for her and for us; in fact we remain friends to this day. One warm October er we hosted Giuseppe, a rather nervous Carabinieri from Rome who was interested in advancing his career. He worked in the stolen artifact department and played a trumpet in the Carabinieri band (more about Giuseppe in a later blog). Then there was Roberta.  Roberta was young, sixteen, and her father wanted her to be in a family home while she attended a summer program at Harvard to improve her English.

Roberta stayed with us for a month. She was from Modena, a river town in north central Italy famous for balsamic vinegar, Pavarotti, and Maserati.  Her English was already quite rapid and confident. And like most homestay students, Roberta allowed herself to be lovable. That’s the clue to a good homestay: being open to gentle feelings that go both  ways. The student wants to be liked and we want to like them.

If you saw Roberta on the street you would have never guess she was an Italian girl.  Rather you would pin her a cutie from Atlanta: blonde, brown-eyed, freckled and a diminutive American nose. For sure a college cheerleader in a former life, Roberta walked with bounce, smiled like a 70 watt light bulb, and was on the short side but not thin. Her heroine was Hermione, the female friend of Harry in Harry Potter.  She wore Hermione pajamas, dangled a plastic Hermione character from her backpack zipper, and had a Hermione email address.

Like Hermione, Roberta was smart, real smart: a type A personality; a no-nonsense girl. Prior to her month of study of English at Harvard and homestay with us in Cambridge,  she had bicycled across Spain with a group of European teenagers. When she left us, Roberta was off to a week of violin camp in Austria, then a week of sailing school in the Mediterranean, and then a week of family time in her father’s village on the Abruzzi coast, before resuming high school classes in Modena at the competitive liceo classico where she studied Greek and Latin along with English and Spanish, algebra, chemistry, etc.

Roberta told me that liceo students drink a lot of espresso. “A cup in the morning at home.  A cup at morning break. After lunch and two or three tazzini of espresso during the afternoon and another before after school activities. There’s espresso machines in the hallway.”  She stayed up until midnight most nights and often hours after to do homework.

She didn’t have a boyfriend. “Like Hermione I’m always their friend, never the girlfriend.” She rolled her eyes.

Her looks were what frightened Italian boys away. The strong American cheerleader features were taboo. What would their mother say?  They wouldn’t get past the liklihood of her being a stranieri, a foreigner.  In fact Roberta said in the evening kids gathered outside the fence to her house to stare at her (and her sister) in disbelief, as if they were some sort of physical mutation that they could not accept as one of their own. A freak show.  “Are you sure you’re mother and father are Italians?” they asked.

Her own mother had been born in Modena. So had her grandparents, who lived in the house with them. Her father was from a town on the Adriatic Coast. He worked for Maserati, the exotic Italian race car company and travelled all over Latin America  selling to auto dealerships and rich individuals. “Mostly he’s in Mexico,” Roberta said. “He wants me to learn Spanish.”

Father ruled the roost. He and Roberta spoke daily on cell phones to each other.  He was planning a great career for this daughter, so he said….or, most likely, a lucrative marriage to one of his customers, which he didn’t say.

Roberta loved avocados. She requested I buy them for her.  Perhaps in preparation for her inevitable future in Mexico, she ate two a day. Maybe she ate them with such gusto because they weren’t always available at home, since Italian avocado consumption is one of the lowest in Europe (only 25-30 g per capita) and the fruit are totally imported, mainly from Israel and Spain. Avacado trees there are grown for ornamental purposes rather than for agriculture, though there are movements to change this practice, since commercial lemon culture is down: lemons come more cheaply from Spain and northern Africa than from Sicily or southern Italy. Maybe Roberta feverishly ate avocados because her family prohibited her eating them: they didn’t want her to get fat. A chubby Roberta- Hermione would be a less than perfect marriage prospect. An avocado weigh in at 265 calories and 27 grams of fat. But they’re healthy.

Roberta couldn’t control herself when a creamy green avocado sat on a plate in front of her. She liked to mainline–no hanky panky with an avocado relish, avocado guacamole, or ravioli stuffed with the green stuff.

I prepared the avocado the same way her mother did, which was a surprised to both Roberta and to me. I also made simple red sauce exactly the same way as her mother did–with olive oil, onion and tomato, nothing else–and I dressed my salad the same–with olive oil, balsamic, a sprinkle of sugar and soy sauce.  This befuddled us both. How could two women so far away do it exactly the same?

AVOCADO ALLA ROBERTA

Cut a ripe avocado in half and remove the pit.  Squeeze lemon juice over entire surface of exposed avocado fruit to prevent the surfaces from browning. Spread a lovely leaf of Boston lettuce on a plate. Place the avocado halves on top of the lettuce. Fill the avocado cavities with a generous teaspoon of fresh squeezed lemon juice and a 1/2 teaspoon of shoyo (Japanese soy sauce). Garnish with fresh cracked black pepper. Float 1/2 of a cherry tomato inside each cavity. Eat with a spoon, like Roberta.