Untitled

For a full proposal contact revtravel@yahoo.com

Chapter 1

There is a cool breeze of late March lingering in May, it is the last chilly breath of a day about to slip behind Sicily. I am already nostalgic, looking back from an imaginary day in the future somewhere with old friends or family, reminiscing the view that is now before my eyes: the silvery slip of sea beyond the rooftops to the west; the varied layers of pale blue mountains just beyond that, like the torn edges of an old book; the blanket of gray clouds above them with a heatless yellow glow, clouds that always seem to lurk there hastening the sunset by half an hour; the collection of lights from passing ships burrowing silently through mercury, a moving city skyline if I imagine. When the yellow light slips to the edges of the clouds and pales to white and the last streaks of the sun's rays thrust into the heavens, the mountains melt into the clouds and a billowing ridge of deepening blue replaces the old, a new range of peaks every night, every hour.

The castle, not far off to my right, its warm stones fading in the halflight, looks like a small giant being taken down by the mob of weaker concrete boxes that surround it. Reggio's lonely landmark among the dull gray apartment complexes. I've never hated those homely places, utilitarian, the laundry hanging from tired crumbling balconies. With few exceptions the apartments are not the red-tiled Italian postcard; their rooftops remind me of the Middle East, maybe Cairo, dusky and flat, strewn with the builder's debris, the odd brick or forgotten rusted pipes. On the roof across from me a bicycle is tucked along the parapet, everywhere I see the bristles of the TV aerials, scattered, crooked, seemingly homemade and wishful, the occasional satellite dishes tacked on walls or in rooftop corners, all eerily bent in prayer toward the same invisible Mecca.

I have tried to photograph it so many times and have a small stack of characterless shots that speak nothing of the smell of the sea rising up on the breeze, the distracted traffic murmur, the poised energy that holds me to the view of neighboring Sicily. No one would look at these photos and be smitten with nostalgia. But for me they are reminders of a feeling of satisfaction, the satisfaction of having successfully created magic out of material others might have rejected. It's what we all feel when we finally accept a friend, our family, or even ourselves and smile at the imperfections and even come to adore them. Across the open space between me and the next building, the windows are dark and I suspect a good many of our neighbors are already down on the Corso for the evening stroll, the passeggiata. I've loved these days...

I couldn't write a book about falling in love with Florence or refurbishing a Tuscan villa or castle to start my own plot of grapes, as if Tuscany were still something that could be "discovered" and as if most of any of us had the resources to buy land there anyway. Why couldn't I write about some out of the way nothing place that was simply Italy for the sake of Italy, something with a couple paragraphs or less in the guidebook?

I had to admit I found my own secret room with a view, but before I had even arrived and even during much of my stay, many were those who wanted me to believe I was looking for pearls among goat droppings. "Why Reggio?" they'd ask with a twist of the face that looked like they had just stepped in those droppings.

Well, the truth is I hadn't picked Reggio. It had chosen me....

We called it The Plan. Much like the Church, the Book, or for Egyptians, The River, this common noun took on sacred capital letters when it became the center of our lives, the object which superceded all concerns, all logic-The Plan. Many a plan perhaps started benignly with "I met this woman and..." This was no exception.

I had met Enelis during Carnival in Panama; we dated, we became close, and quite early on in our relationship, one night at a friend's beach-house party, I had a whim. "Wanna go somewhere for a year?" She did and so did I. ****Initially I suggested Turkey where I had lived before, but as we thought about it and worked and figured, Italy emerged the victor. Neither of us had ever been there, and, well, Italy is its own justification.

The Plan: I would find a teaching job there and we would spend a year up to our necks in history and the stuff of romantic movies. Being an American I understood getting legal work would be complicated by the European Union's demand to hire from within its domain. Why hire an American to teach English with England herself among the member nations? The solution was to find a school willing to take on the added paperwork and long lines at governmental entities. A desperate school, I thought for a moment and quickly banished the thought.

I left no cyber-stone unturned, compiling lists of schools and dispatching emails to them even when they claimed they would not hire non-EU citizens. One day in a Panamanian internet cafe I cried victory when an email from an Italian school appeared in my in box asking if I was interested in working for them. It was a school I didn't remember applying to and couldn't find on my lists. But the passing days without any replies whatsoever had inflated a balloon of anxiety in my chest so I was quick to lay claim to the opening. My affirmative reply set me down a long road of obstacles, stumbling through a process half-blinded by naive enthusiasm and half by the limited information my contacts would provide me regarding the position. I hadn't even spoken to anyone yet; everything was done in the silence of emails. But I committed and began to scour the internet for more information about my future home, Reggio di Calabria, a city at the tip of the toe of Italy's boot. Kicking Sicily, I said.

I knew little of Italy, but I knew enough to understand that the South and the North were separate worlds. The Northerners considered the South poor and provincial and an economic burden. The Southerners considered the North rushed, cold and superficial. But many of the Southern youth migrated north for better work. A travel guide described Reggio as a depressing collection of concrete slum tenements that emerged from the rubble of a 1908 earthquake that leveled all the quaint red-tiled construction of the stereotypical Italian village. I guess I found my desperate school, I thought.

Could one live la dolce vita without being surrounded by monuments and postcard scenery speckled with quaint villages? Without a fix-her-up villa to return to or a flaming Italian romance, would Italy be so glamorous? Not having an inheritance or a real estate empire back home and still waiting on my Nobel prize award, I didn't think bella Tuscany was affordable. So I told myself the south was more authentically Italian and less touristy anyway. It would be my task to make sweet wine of those sour grapes.

I emailed one last question, "Is it expensive?" The response was "Life is cheap here." Sicily and the deep South have a long and intimidating history of Mafia activity; I hoped that was a commentary on the cost of living.

Chapter 2

Long before I had even arrived, I was feeling the slow strangling grip of Italian bureaucracy. I moved back to the US to get everything in order, while Enelis stayed behind in Panama to do the same. I spent days which bled into weeks and finally months, waiting for papers to arrive in the mail like some enviable invitation from a local baron which I only half believed would come. I was Kafka outside his castle begging to find the person in charge.

First my school was slow to respond and I feared that perhaps I had been forgotten and there was no job. I was able to reach them on the phone finally and Marina, the owner, and several secretaries convinced me to remain calm, that everything was going along as planned. They only had to send me my contract, I needed to sign it and send it back. They would take that document to the local police department, the Questura, and receive a document which then had to be sent back to me with the original contract. I had to take those papers to the nearest Italian consulate, which for me was Chicago several hours away, and present those papers. Five to twenty days later, in a perfect world, I would receive my permesso di lavoro and I could head for Italia. A long headache, but doable.

The contract finally arrived at the end of July and I sent it off immediately. It was July 28, the deadline for turning in these contracts. It would arrive too late. So I was back to worrying. Enelis had already quit her job and was preparing her paperwork to study Italian at Dante Alighieri University for Foreigners in Reggio. The thought of all this collapsing for lack of a work visa was frightening to her. "Do you know what I did today? I went to the consulate to ask about my papers. They said I needed to call. I was standing right there in their office and I had to call them to ask. So I went downstairs to the street and called. They told me I needed to go to the office in person. Aarrrgh! So, I went back upstairs, it was ten to twelve and they told me they were closing and I would have to come back another day!"

So it was the same on all ends. Marina was searching for an alternative form of legal permission for me to stay in Italy for a year and said she had spent hours at the Questura. Had I ever worked as a translator or could I at least find someone willing to say I had? Apparently there were other rules and deadlines for this position and I quickly found a former employer to bend his letter a bit to make it appear I had translated. I faxed it off and got no reply.

The days ticked past again and our anxiety rose another several notches. Enelis called in a huff, "Today the guy at the consulate said, 'Reggio? Why do you want to study in Reggio? They are ignorant there.' I told him I couldn't afford the north and he shrugged and said, 'True. It is cheaper.'"

Then Marina had an idea. She would write up a teacher training program. I would be going to study how to teach English to Italians. She would provide a "scholarship" each month and I could legally "practice" teach for the year. Papers were signed, stamped, sealed, sent, faxed, copied, smoked over, and left for long periods of time on a desk somewhere and there was nothing more to do but wait.

But in the end, to no avail. The school year was about to start and there was no work permit in sight. My only other option was to go ahead on my tourist visa. When the papers finally came through I would have to fly home again to take them to Chicago personally. Absurd! I thought. But who was I to argue?

Enelis flew from her home in Panama and I met her in Atlanta to fly together on to Rome. But I was frustrated (but not surprised) to find that though I had confirmed my flight with Delta, there was no seat available for me. Italians do not have the monopoly on inefficiency and disorganization. There is no arguing with the grunts who work the gate desks so Enelis volunteered to give up her seat and we both took an alternative flight that went through Paris and landed us in Rome about four hours later than we had planned.

Charles de Gaulle airport suffered from a serious lack of posted information and with a mere forty-five minutes between flights it was a race to find our gate. We, and another four people sharing our predicament, were the last people on the plane which was entirely ready to pull away from the gate and wait for a long time on the runway. We arrived in Rome about two hours later, surprisingly, with all our luggage. The only trouble was the French had not stamped my passport. The first European Union member country in which a traveler arrives is responsible for stamping the entry regardless of the final destination.

When I noticed I had no stamp, like a good citizen I went directly to the immigration booths at Fiumicino airport. A woman sat there with no new arrivals to trouble her, chatting with a coworker. I explained the situation figuring they could just simply stamp it and be done with it. Not the case. My first phrase in Italian: "Non è possibile."

"Well, why not?"

"Because if you enter in France, they must stamp it."

"But they didn't."

Shrugs by both of them. "You must do that in France."

"Well, obviously I am not returning for it."

Exaggerated shrugs, raised eyebrows, wagging heads. "Non è possibile."

I chuckled in amazement. "But I have nothing here. Look. Nothing." A third official sauntered up and joined them as they all leaned in to look and then leaned back shaking their heads, the corners of their mouths turned down. Non è possibile.

I continued in the very limited pidgin Italian I had crammed before the journey and a spattering of Spanglish when necessary. "There is no date. I stay ten years. No problem. I say I come yesterday." They just shrugged as if to say That's none of our business. When in fact that was EXACTLY their business. IMMIGRATION!

The third man discussed something with them and they turned their gestures of denial toward him for a moment. Then there was an air of hesitation, the third man wagged his head a bit and turned to me. "Come with me."

We stepped back through the empty immigration lanes to an office. He explained the situation to another officer who said something back, the judgment of which was not clearly favorable or negative. We returned to the woman and her partner who seemed to still be discussing the whole matter. The man I thought was becoming my advocate presented the case once again, and the verdict fell with finality.

He turned to me, shrugged and repeated what I was close enough to have heard quite clearly, Non è possibile.

I nearly gave up, felt the rising jitters of frustration, my jaw clenching, when a thought occurred to me. I smiled like a used-car salesman, even summoned up a false chuckle, "OK, then. I DIDN'T pass through Paris." The man paused. "No, I no fly France. Never. Did not. Just Atlanta to Roma. Diretto. Atlanta and Roma. No France. Look."

I showed him my plane ticket for my return flight. My tickets and receipts, of course, still showed my complete original itinerary, direct from Atlanta to Rome and back again ten months later (seven more than what my tourist status allowed, by the way). As if the entire previous conversation had never taken place, he shrugged, showed it to the woman who seemed irritated, but then stepped into her booth, stamped it, and handed it back to me without looking.

Si, è possibile, I thought, and scurried back out past customs before anyone's mind changed.

Chapter 3

We haggled down to expensive for a shared van to the hotel. The luggage is very heavy, they told us. They loaded it handily into a van and three head-scarved Muslim women and a man joined us for the half-hour ride into Rome. One of them kept fussing abstractly with her veil as it wouldn't sit right on her hair; she took it off several times before finding the right positioning. I asked of their country of origin. Iran. They were attending a world nutrition conference.

In front of their hotel they unloaded their bags and then the driver whisked us off toward our own hotel. He unloaded us quickly, took our money, and was gone just as we realized we were missing one suitcase.

I slapped my forehead in exasperation. Enelis asked, "Was it still in the van?"

"No. We unloaded everything." "Everything" included three of four suitcases, two big bags, and two smaller ones. The fourth suitcase was easier to miss for a moment in such a collection.

It took two elevator rides to take the bags up to the fifth floor hotel where the receptionist called the first hotel for us and asked if any Iranians had shown up with an extra bag. They had. And they had left it with the receptionist. A disaster narrowly avoided.

Rome was unfortunately a whirlwind. It was late afternoon when we returned with the recovered luggage and we ate a quick meal before venturing down to the subway to get off at a stop that needed no introduction. The Coliseum. We emerged from the innards of Rome to see one of its most famous landmarks lit up majestically at night.

This was our first moment in magical Italy and yet we were fortunate to even see but a glimpse of Rome before we would rush to the deep south. In fact, until we had settled in and started exploring a bit later in the year, we could elicit gasps and apoplectic faces when we answered "Just Reggio" to questions about what places we had seen. "Not Florence? Venice? Milan? Just Reggio?" But we had those few hours in Rome and from the Coliseum we passed from ruin to ruin snapping photos and marveling at the way ancient structures stood side by side with or across alleyways from modern brick and stone buildings. We rushed about regretting that there was so little time to savor our new environment. But I told myself it didn't matter, soon we would be swimming in culture, breathing the history, admiring the gorgeous architecture each day as we walked home through the perfect movie set.

We followed a tourist map crossing through the unpredictable traffic, until we found the Trevi fountain. It was nearly eleven at night yet a sizeable crowd lounged and lingered around the brightly lit 18th century fountain with its statues of Neptune riding a chariot, essentially a giant seashell pulled by two sea horses guided by Tritons. Pretty grandiose stuff with a constant stream of tourists turning their backs and tossing coins over their shoulders. One coin and you will return to Rome some day. I was growing increasingly groggy from lack of sleep and missed the shot when Enelis tossed her first coin. Snapping the second photo, I caught the second coin tumbling over her shoulder which meant she would fall in love with an Italian. One more coin and the marriage would be sealed; I grabbed her hand and we set off for the hotel to get a few hours sleep before the long train ride to our new home the next morning.

"I don't have that information," the woman told us. I looked up at the sign above us that said "Train Information." They didn't know anything about prices, only schedules, and we were told we couldn't buy tickets there. The woman pointed us through double doors to a travel agency where a sign said there was no train information. Non-overlapping magesteria it would seem. But not exactly true. I have since seen customers take their dear sweet time asking questions and deciding in line at the ticket window. "What day would you like to travel?" "Well, I don't know. What do you think, dear? We could travel on Tuesday. Are there seats for Tuesday? Yes? Well, then again Wednesday might be OK. What about Wednesday? What were all the departures again? What if we went ..." Ad infinitum. The clerk typically looked on blandly not interested in whether she served one or one thousand customers that day.

We took a number with twelve other clients ahead of us and watched in dismay which gradually became alarm as the clock ticked away and the numbers on the Customer Served display did not. The departure time was approaching quickly and we still hadn't hauled down the luggage of a traveling king and his court from our tiny room at the hotel. Enelis practically dove on the counter when the number came up and we watched like children that were being denied the restroom as the woman painstakingly typed the necessary information into the computer.

She slid the ticket onto the counter and the race was on. The first trip brought about half of the baggage, some pieces precariously balanced on others. A kind Irishman from the hotel lent a hand in the lobby so we could get it the one block to the station where Enelis would guard it while I went back for the rest. Then we loaded it all onto two pushcarts and raced to the appropriate platform. We were a few minutes past the departure time. Then we remembered we were in Italy where the only nice thing to be said about their World War II-era fascist dictator Mussolini was that at least he had made the trains run on time.

There were no conductors at that moment and I peered into passenger cars until I found a compartment that was empty. A bystander helped me heft everything onto the steps of the car as Enelis ran back toward the head of the platform after someone had told us we needed to validate the ticket before boarding. It was like punching a time clock; each ticket had to be made legit by a date and time stamp.

She boarded again as I climbed over the strewn luggage to get to the passageway where I had found a compartment that was completely vacant. For good reason-it was locked. In fact, two hours farther south in Napoli, a group had a reservation for the remainder of the journey down to Reggio. I gleaned this information too late from little slips like jukebox tags next to the compartment door. Some whistles were blown and distorted Italian announced the departure, and soon the train was lumbering south out of Rome, as we tried to create a path around the suitcases without blocking the bathroom door. No one seemed to mind squeezing past and everyone took a moment to stop and stare at me blankly. A few offered mild smiles of condolences.

The conductor passed through and punched my ticket but said nothing of the obstructing baggage. Just as he was passing, a woman in her sixties came raging from the dining cart. He stopped hesitantly and received her barrage full force. She wore black stretch pants that were having their elasticity sorely tested and a loose sweatshirt. Her raw skin was reddened with rage and perhaps a little too much sun. She waved her ticket like a sharp object and bellowed at the man in what even I could know was poorly pronounced Italian, "Where is two? Where is two?" Perhaps the English equivalent of the scenario would sound a bit like "War is toe?!?! War is toe?! Dammit, why count you other stand??" Spittle flew from her jowls and the conductor assumed the stance of a large rock in a gale. His hearing wasn't any different. He stated something firmly in reply. He pointed behind her and turned to go and then she really flew off the handle, going on and on about Number Two and her inability to find it. The ticket flapped, the spittle flew, and the train continued rocking her uncomfortably among our little maze of luggage. He simply pointed to the big number two on the train window and continued on. Apparently it wasn't a satisfactory answer and she rambled on about "the other car was number two, now this one?" and she had been sent to that one, etc., etc. The little glass door closed behind her and I was thankfully shut off from her noise. Non è possibile, I wanted to tell her.

Enelis found a couple seats two cars farther forward and so I began the long process of moving one or two bags at a time through the dining cart and the narrow aisles and the two sets of sliding doors and two tight-squeeze swinging doors at each juncture. The wobbling train made me a drunk sailor trying to drag anvils on deck in rough waters. The smaller bags fit in the compartment but the four larger ones needed to be arranged once again in the small boarding space next to another WC.

During all of this the landscape of southern Italy passed before the windows. In the countryside, simple white houses with red-tiled roofs dotted landscape that appeared dry after the record hot summer, but not so dry not to support an ample amount of olive trees and small vineyards. The sky was a cloudless azure contrast to the earthy tones on the gentle hills.

We shared a compartment with a kind sixty-ish woman with short, salt and pepper hair. She wore sunglasses, sat with her legs crossed, and smiled at us kindly. Speak English? Spanish? No, she replied. German? French? No, we replied. The man, in casual business attire looked back and forth between us and then mentioned he knew some English. He was on his way to Salerno, south of Napoli a bit. She was from Messina on the island of Sicily. Then I told them where we were going and asked the man his honest opinion. He smiled and looked nervously out the window, then back at me. He curled his mouth down a second, like an upside-down shrug with the lips, then smiled some more, shaking his head. "Reggio? No. No. Eh, not so good."

"Why's that?"

He shook his head some more and did the lip thing again, but all he could come up with was, "No. It is not so good. Maybe Napoli. Many Americans they live in Napoli. But Reggio? No."

The air conditioning wasn't working and so I occasionally stepped into the hall where a small window swirled fresh air into the car. The Salerno man followed me at one point so he could smoke a cigarette, blowing the smoke outside. Smoking was prohibited but several Italians made their way to these areas to smoke on the sly. One or two used the bathroom as a smoking booth, and whoever was standing around would be an unofficial look-out in the unlikely case that a conductor might pass and, even more unlikely, give a damn.

The man tapped me on the shoulder and pointed. "Vesuvio." Conspicuous in the less dramatic landscape surrounding it, Mt. Vesuvius rose up like the sleeping beast it was behind Naples, overlooking rooftops that have replaced so many other rooftops that had been consumed by the volcano's wrath over the centuries.

"Pompeii?"

The man nodded, "Si, si."

"Come...è... Com'è?" How is it? I wanted to say, unsure of the contraction.

"Molto bene." He nodded. Very good. A short train ride from Reggio, I thought.

Not much later, when he got up for another cigarette, he beckoned me to follow. On the other side of the train he pointed to the sea. The beach stretched back behind us and a towering cliff jutted into the water with old buildings huddled together on it, something that could have been (and probably was at one point) a scene from a movie. The alternating rock and beach evokes such a sense of drama and romance. We were passing the Amalfi Coast. Famed for its beauty and its beaches, this was in fact the setting for at least one recent movie, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Now it was an easy weekend destination for me. Did Italians watch movies of American countryside and dream of it as paradise? I couldn't imagine.

Salerno soon approached and our compartment companion got off wishing us a good voyage, and we were left with the Sicilian woman. We sorted out some basic conversation in the stuffy heat of the compartment. At least we had a place to sit and nod in and out of heat-magnified sleep like induced fever dreams.

Our relative comfort did not last until Reggio, however. After a short spell of relishing the air-conditioning of the dining car, I returned to find Enelis trying to communicate with two police officers who had stopped at our compartment. When she saw me she beckoned. I felt that urge to look around, point at myself and gesture, Who? Me? They spoke in slow Italian to tell us that the last half of the train, the part that we were on, was not going on to Reggio but would stop, separate and be loaded on the ferry to Sicily. We had to move our luggage back to where we had originally made our stand.

When I arrived there with the first piece I found we would not be alone. Rassa and Akvilla were also bound for Reggio, and like Enelis, would study Italian at the University for Foreigners. They were two giant Lithuanian women who resembled Xena the Warrior Princess and her blond sidekick both in looks and size; the bangs of Rassa's long black hair dipped to a point in the middle re-emphasizing the absence of her two-handed sword. And with them was luggage that nearly matched ours. We all found the humor in the situation, and stacked all the pieces on top of themselves nearly to the ceiling. We half-sprawled across them like someone trying to hide something too big to be hidden. We spent the rest of the ride sweating to hold them in place like a lesser known labor of Hercules.

Outside the train the coastline opened up to long beaches and the sea glistened with the late afternoon sun. The terrain became more mountainous with patches of rock breaking through the green and the train rushed through many tunnels causing the push and pull at my eardrums. Soon Sicily lay on the horizon like a hazy mirage. We were a couple stops from home....

The Lithuanian girls on the train were the first cheerful commentators on Reggio. "Did you see the pictures on the internet? It is BEAUTIFUL!" I had seen them and I noted there were always three-one close-up of the castle, another of two statues from the museum, and a beach shot from somewhere outside of town. The girls didn't convince me, but their hopeful enthusiasm gave a spark to some of my own.

The train stopped in Villa San Giovanni where the cars bound for Sicily were separated off the back before we continued on for the last ten minutes of the journey. The train went underground just inside Reggio and after one stop re-emerged at the central station, so we had arrived in the center of town without having seen anything of the city outside. The combined luggage of the four of us was heaped in front of the door to exit the car and I jumped off quickly and loaded it to the platform as the women moved each piece to the top step.

Rassa and I took the stairs down to the passageway under the tracks and climbed the steps to the terminal where we made phone calls to our respective contacts. Hers was on her way. Mine was in a class until 7:30 and would come immediately afterward, a forty-five minute wait. That gave me enough time to move the luggage to the terminal at least.

We said goodbye to the Lithuanians, who we'd probably see again soon, and we waited on a bench in front of the information booth. "What do you think she looks like?" Enelis asked.

"Marina? Hmm." I looked around the terminal. The woman were mostly slim, nicely dressed, long hair, some blond, some dark, some colored to be one or the other. "I think light brown hair. Shoulder length. A little tall. Thin."

I wasn't so far off. Nearly an hour after my call a tall slim woman about thirty-eight or so with long golden hair hesitated at the sight of us and then smiled. She came to us at a half run. "Oh, this is so great! You made it! Excellent!" We nearly bumped heads when I went left when I should have gone right as she kissed me on both cheeks. One can never be sure of such things.

"I'm sorry you had to wait so long, but I was in the middle of a class."

"Oh! One of mine I guess?" Classes had started Monday and it was already Wednesday and she was covering until my arrival. A week before, she had finally given up on receiving my work papers in time and told me to come whenever possible and we would work it out from there. We had grabbed the soonest flight available.

"Well, I have your apartment for you, and the keys and everything are ready. Is all that your luggage?" Her eyebrows flew up and she started laughing. "I don't know if it will fit in my car. I think we will have to make two trips."

We left Enelis to guard the bags and went to get her car. It wasn't as small inside as a VW Bug, but nearly so. It had a hatchback and I folded down the back seat. Most of the luggage fit but we had to leave Enelis with the few extras and come back for her.

Marina drove quickly and recklessly, I thought, until I saw that everyone else was driving, tangling in and out of lanes and intersections like a bucket full of earthworms trying to make for the bottom to avoid the hook. We turned in and out of one-way streets, and at times went the wrong way down them, until we arrived at a short blind alley lined with concrete apartment buildings. I observed a bill pasted over previous announcements on the corner of the first building.

"Who is... Bruno? Someone running for office?"

Marina looked to see where my gaze had fallen. "Oh, those are... what's the word?... obituaries. When someone dies they put them up all over the neighborhood."

The narrow alley we were staring down was packed with cars leaving just enough space to pass through their midst. She reversed the car a bit then turned into the lane and drove to the end where she found space enough to open her door. "Here we are." She hopped out with the keys. "I think it is this one." She worked the key in the lock but could not turn it. "Oh dear. I thought it was... Maybe it was next door." I unloaded a couple bags watching her. She went to three different doors before returning to the first leaning her head back and looking up at the building. "I'm almost sure... Yes, it is this one. But the key..." She tried it again and the lock turned. "Bravo. And don't worry, there is a lift. But it might not all fit." In fact, the elevator required two trips as well.

The apartment was very large and fully furnished. The two bedrooms, a nice bathroom, a short front hall and a kitchen all had marble floors and nicely varnished doors. The ceilings were high and all the walls painted white. There were two balconies looking out from the two sides of the building. From the kitchen balcony I looked out over the surrounding apartment buildings. There was a dark strip beyond the rooftops and a line of lights beyond that on the horizon. The sea and Sicily.

"I'm sorry but as I told you there are still two students in the other bedroom. But they leave tomorrow morning so that should not be a problem."

We dropped off the luggage and raced back to the station for Enelis to make the final luggage haul. Afterwards Marina asked, "Are you too tired? Would you like to take a look around?"

"Absolutely!"

Marina used her cell phone to call the school secretary Yolanda for a recommendation for a pizzeria. "I don't ever go out," she explained apologetically. Yolanda insisted that we stop by the school first and so we did. Though she had told me the school was nearby Marina took a while to get us there. "It is a lot closer walking. With a car you have to make so many turns with the one-way streets."

Marina parked out front of a four-story building with long balconies across the front. On the second floor banners that said "Living Languages" tried to make the best of an unattractive facade. We climbed the stairs to the school lobby and Yolanda, a short, brown-haired woman with glasses looked up and smiled. I had spoken to her several times from several thousand miles away. She was Spanish and since my Italian was not nearly fully functional, she could bail me out when Marina was not in.

She knew Enelis as well from helping her get in touch with Dante Alighieri University and enroll in Italian classes during the summer when no one seemed to answer phones or return emails. She asked about our trip and we gave her the short version. A man with short curly light brown hair and glasses came around the corner and introduced himself with a heavy Scottish accent. Eugene was the academic director and was easily persuaded to join us for what I considered a rather late dinner.

In the car as Marina weaved around looking for the pizzeria, Eugene asked me what I had heard about Reggio. I told him the awful truth quoting my Lonely Planet guidebook, "hectares of concrete slum tenements." He chuckled. Marina groaned, "Why does everyone say that? It is not so bad."

"The trouble is that a place earns a reputation very easily. But then it takes a long time to change it even when it is not the reality," Eugene offered.

One of Reggio's reputations was for the Mafia. I jokingly asked Marina if her family was involved. They weren't-if she could be believed.

Eugene led us across the street and a speeding car slowed to let us pass. "You don't even know they are here unless you go looking for them."

"So really nothing more than another form of corrupt government. It's just they aren't elected to positions; they have their own way of getting them?" I suggested.

"Right!" he laughed.

We sat at a table near the TV and Eugene was distracted by a soccer match. Marina teased him about it and it reminded him of a story. "Once I had a date with a woman here in Reggio and when we went to sit down, she asked me if I wanted to switch seats so I could see the game on the television. I told her, 'There is nothing I want to see other than what is right here in front of me.'" The three of us groaned and he admitted, "Well, the truth is I could see the reflection of the game in the mirror behind her."

We ordered beers and what we were told were personal pizzas. The pizzas turned out to be more than 16 inches in diameter and the four of them hung over the table edges as there was not enough room. "One per person?"

We toasted the coming year and our safe arrival and set to work on the food. In the end both Enelis and I had sizeable remnants and asked if we could carry it back to the apartment. I could tell by Marina's hesitation this was not common practice. Growing up in a house where food left on the dinner plate could mean child left at the dinner table, I developed a guilt complex about wasting food. The waiter didn't seem too put out, but next time I figured I would share a single pizza.

It was getting late and Marina dropped us off at the apartment. "Do you know your way to school tomorrow? Or should I pick you up?"

They had drawn me a map at the restaurant. "No problem. I'll find it. Thanks for everything."

"Oh no, no, please. I am so happy you arrived safely."

She shot out of the alley in reverse just inches from the mirrors of the cars parked up over the sidewalk on one side and flush with the wall on the other. We went up to the apartment and tried to force sleep on brains that still thought it was about four in the afternoon.

Chapter 4

After the long job search, packing up in Panama and living out of my suitcases with friends and family back in Wisconsin, and then the maddening visa fiasco for both Enelis and me (Enelis had had to go through not only the Italian student visa circus but also the expensive and always nonguaranteed visa process for the US simply to pass through on her flight), it seemed a minor miracle to wake up to my new home and go to work like it was a normal day.

Good weather seemed a good omen as we looked out our kitchen balcony at a clear blue sky. The Strait of Messina was a deep blue band about ten blocks away, and beyond that Sicily, its rocky mountains speckled with green, glowed in the morning sun.

A young German couple emerged from the master bedroom with their massive backpacks and pointed out some of the food they were leaving behind before they left to catch an early train north, and then we were alone. The master bedroom's balcony was shaded in the morning, but a sunny delight in the afternoon and the perfect perch from which to watch the sun set over Sicily each night. A couple of plastic patio chairs rested there invitingly. Under the balcony was a wide open space, a parking area for the other encircling buildings and a green space that opened out from the garden apartment of our own building. It was overgrown with weeds and a couple of scrappy trees, and sectioned off from the world by a tall brick wall that followed the area's irregular shape which looked a bit like Nevada upside down. I imagined it was a very good breeding ground for mosquitoes and hoped the altitude would keep them at bay since the apartment had no screens on the windows. What protected the windows were roll-down panels of wooden slats.

There were four beds in the apartment, all of them singles. We slid two of them together and propped one of the others against the wall on top of the remaining one to construct a sort of sofa in the second room. Each room had a nice office desk and there was a large wooden bookcase in the second room-plenty of space for work and study. The cupboards were full of dishes and good cooking equipment, not like the second-rate fry pans of university living. Cooking is obviously serious business in Italy. There was, however, no oven, only a stovetop.

"No lasagna, I guess," I lamented.

"Or pizza." Enelis added.

I would ask Marina about it later.

Clotheslines protruded from the railing of the kitchen balcony, and we looked down on a building in progress, piles of sand awaiting cement, the metal cables protruding from the roof like untrimmed rampant whiskers. Beyond that we could see into the lives of others at about our altitude. This angle also afforded a view of Sicily and the Strait of Messina.

An old sewing table occupied the corner of the foyer in front of the kitchen door. The bathroom was between the two rooms and at the opposite end of the foyer from the kitchen. The tub had no shower curtain, not even a place to hang one, and so we were destined for the squatting shower with the handheld nozzle.

Coming from concrete and floor tiles in Panama, Enelis was impressed by the marble floors which would have cost a fortune for someone from her country. The cool stone had the added benefit of keeping the heat down in the apartment. We rushed to unpack our things into our new home before I had to go in to work.

Italian traffic has something of an art to it. Where at first there appears complete chaos, there is a sort of governing order: he who goes first has the right away. Sounds nuts, but inspecting the parked cars I found fewer dents and scratches than what I saw in Panama, for example, where it is cutthroat recklessness. Separating us from the rest of Reggio to the north-the downtown, my school, the castle-was a short stretch of east-west highway that fed traffic to the north-south freeway that passed down from Napoli and Rome along Reggio's east side and continued south until it became a regular two-lane highway. This east-west feeder road was composed of two lanes on either side of a massive concrete storm run-off that had been laid in the bed of what used to be a stream down from the distant mountains but was now a deep, odiferous channel of muddy water heading for the sea. Cars would come flying down the off-ramp from the highway and make a Formula One run for the end of the stretch. The first intersection was one of two primary crossings for us, the bridge of San Pietro over the muddy concrete river bed, and was marked by traffic lights that did not work. They didn't blink red and yellow like a baffled traffic cop but stood without light like one sleeping on his feet. Cars raced to this point from four directions and just when it seemed there would be a pile up, various cars slowed and there was a weaving of compacts and delivery trucks, and the frequent pounding of a horn to establish the drivers' pecking order or simply reiterate their impatience. A line of cars enters from one road, turning left across traffic into the other, like a conga line making its way through a crowded bar until a crossing car slips into a small gap, stems the flow, and starts his own opportunistic run. Sooner or later everything is stopped for a moment, bumper to fender to car door, like a weave of automobiles.

It is a terrifying act of faith, but pedestrians in some cases even have equal footing. I could see that when I stepped to the curb, the oncoming driver hesitated, even slowed just a bit, enough to tell me that he just might stop if I stepped off the curb. I stopped one or two cars, stepped behind another and reached the other side and followed my map to school. The sun was still a bit hot in October but the humidity wasn't bad. Nevertheless by the time I reached the school I was sweaty and uncomfortable. Jeans are very heavy for this climate but they are the norm. Initially I saw no one, man or woman, wearing shorts during the day. But summer was over. Many of the women wore pants, a few wore skirts to the knee.

Outside the school I pressed the doorbell and someone buzzed me in. The school was on the second floor. It was an apartment converted into a collection of six small classrooms, an office, a common area with a tangle of small tables and chairs, a reception area, and, like some sort of shrine, a large red coffee vending machine. It was 50 Euro cents for a world of high-charged options that came out in tiny plastic cups. Caffè corto or lungo (short or long), cappuccino, macchiato, coffee with chocolate or just hot chocolate or tea. All came bitter, sweet, or semi-sweet. I took a "long" which despite its name is barely an inch of coffee. Unlike in the States where we imagine that coffee is some kind of drink that one can sip at and savor over time, the Italians have no such interest: it is a fix. They slam it back like a whiskey shot and are off jittering to the races. There is a reason there are no chairs in an espresso bar.

Electricity is expensive and everyone is conscious of it. The staff room and the restroom were equipped with motion detectors so if someone happened to forget to turn off the light, it would go off automatically after a few minutes. For me this soon became an annoying cattle prod; every time I daydreamed, staring off into space, I found myself in the dark, waving at the ceiling to bring back daylight.

The secretaries had the remote control for the air conditioners in the classrooms and horded it. When all the classrooms were full, there was a rotation; if all the units were on at the same time, the power would go out. There was a tiny closet of a room that passed as the staff room and library. A wall of English resource books took up half the space and we all had little storage cubes for our materials. There were two chairs and room for one more person standing comfortably. When all six teachers were there, it was best to simply wait your turn rather than attempt a square dance in a bathroom stall.

Marina was leaning on the front counter when I walked in on that first Friday. When I asked if there was a place nearby to buy a Coke, her eyes flew wide. "Drinking water! I forgot to warn you! You didn't...?" Marina put her hand to her mouth.

"No." I had already been in too many foreign cities in my life to drink tap water without soliciting several reliable opinions.

"Thank God! It wasn't always like this. We had drinking water ten years ago. There are many natural springs directly below the city. But now someone makes a lot of money selling it." She shrugged. "We buy it. It is necessary. You see how dirty the streets are? It didn't use to be like this. When the mayor was from the leftist party the streets were very clean. But then a few years ago the conservatives won. Now you see how it is?"

Then I asked her about recycling. "Well, yes, there is supposed to be recycling. Then I saw that they throw it all together with the rubbish so I stopped."

Marina didn't want to overwhelm me with my classes the day of my arrival so I only taught one or two the first couple days before being handed the full load on Monday. I was preparing a lesson from the textbook Marina had given me for a group of young children according to my class list. Christine, a teacher from England , came in and chatted. I commented about the text. "How old are these kids?"

She leaned in over my shoulder. "They must be about 17 or 18 for that book."

"Oh. I thought something was up. The grammar is too advanced for kids."

As I gathered my materials minutes before the lesson, Marina whirled in. "I am so sorry! My fault! My fault! Everything is my fault! That is not the right book. It is this one." She produced a beginner's text, something on the "Hello, my name is" level. I walked in on a class of nine adorable ten year olds that spoke very little English.

After a humorous hour and a half of gestures and listen and repeat, I put my materials away for the weekend. The rest of the teachers finished as well and headed for home. Only Eugene remained and Yolanda who went about finishing a few things before she'd close the building. Enelis showed up and we asked Eugene a few more questions about things to do, places to go. We stood leaning on the counter in the lobby. The place had become eerily quiet.

Eugene leaned back in an office chair. "So do you have any plans then? Are you hungry?"

"I'm starving."

"There's a really great restaurant not far from here." He looked up at the clock. "It's still early yet. We might be able to go without a reservation."

"Early?" It was 8:30 already.

"On a Friday or a Saturday most people eat around 9 and later."

We walked down the hill and past the castle until we came to a wooden door with frosted glass that seemed nicer than the surrounding brick building. I Tre Fafalli-the Three Butterflies.

The interior was dim and rustic, bare wooden rafters and dark hardwood floor, and only one of the 15 or so tables was occupied. Nevertheless the waiter, an unshaven young man with his shirt opened three buttons down, paused uncertainly and began counting them. He consulted a reservation book, then another waiter. They debated and he turned to us with a polite nod and led us the two steps to the nearest table, already set for three. I figured if patrons came around 9:30 or later, we would be gone by that time anyway. How wrong I was.

We sat for a few moments and I looked around at the walls. Old black and white pictures of Reggio, some odd assorted artwork, and a small accordion hanging from a nail, its bellows opened like a fan. "No menus?" I asked.

"It's not like that. You just sit and they keep bringing things out."

And so they did. First a bottle of water and a carafe of red wine. Then a basket of bread. Then fried bread squares and a plate of goat's cheese sauce for dipping along with a cup full of tiny black olives with a fruity hint to them, Calabrese olives. "Forget the bread. You don't want to waste space."

Broccoli, baked halves of potatoes with cheese, parmigiana (a baked, layered dish of eggplant and tomato sauce), bruschetta with anchovies and tomatoes, a long fried something or other with a meat sauce in the middle, carrot puree rolled into balls, breaded and deep-fried. Mashed potato balls spiced with fennel, soft cheese balls with a hot red pepper paste on top, a plate of baked beans with a slight spicy pinch to them. The plates came whirling in from the kitchen. The tables around us filled up with clients quickly in the next half hour. The music was a strange blend of local traditional music and a few selections from around the world, and had its own circular movement and the two waiters moved in a rhythm that made the evolving meal into a culinary dance. We couldn't clear plates fast enough. I handed an empty one to Eugene and he slid it under another but then the next pirouette of the waiter lighted three more plates before us. The next waiter was close behind and, finding no space, balanced a plate of corn on the cob sections atop the wine carafe.

We ordered another bottle of water and carafe of wine. The small plates eventually stopped coming and we were given our choice of two pastas, penne and fettuccine, one with seafood the other with a cream sauce. My belly was already getting tight.

Enelis randomly remembered something and leaned forward. "Eugene, what is the Italian word for earthquake?"

"Terremoto."

"Almost like Spanish," I said, pleased that there was one less word to learn.

Enelis frowned. "Oh, OK. Then what does bergamotto mean? I saw that in a tourist brochure about Reggio: 'The City of Bergamotto.'"

"Bergamotto is a fruit. In fact, Reggio is one of the only places in the world you can find it. It is similar to a lemon, has a sort of green skin to it. Have you ever had Earl Grey tea? That's what gives it its flavor. They have a liqueur of bergamotto. We will have it after the meal if you like."

After the pasta I leaned back stunned by food. Enelis had a glazed look in her eyes and Eugene even asked her if she was OK. "Just very full."

The waiter came once again. Eugene translated. "The second plate (il secondo piatto) is either a pork cutlet or salsiccia a sausage." Enelis and Eugene were full but I felt there might be space for just a taste. So we ordered the sausage for one and shared it. Curled on the plate it had all the imperfect look of something homemade. The fennel was strong and the meat tender; it was a pity I had so little room for it.

A round of shot glasses came out. We made a final toast and sipped at them. Bergamino was like a sweet, chilled Earl Grey tea with a punch of alcohol, a digestivo. It worked its magic, relaxing our stretched stomachs. We split the bill three ways and I ended up paying for a massive feast an amount I would expect to give out for a single plate at a nice restaurant.

We walked to the seashore just to see the lights of Sicily. Somewhere there in the dark was Mt. Etna. Eugene remembered a time he had to brush the ash off the car in the morning. The anecdote answered my unasked question of whether it was still an active volcano.

Enelis asked where the Questura was, the local police. Travelers technically have eight days to register with the local Questura and her student visa required the same.

I was still a tourist until papers showed up at the school and I was nervous about that. Eugene told me not to be concerned. "When I finally did everything legally I had already been working here for quite some time. Finally I had all my papers in order and I went to the Questura. They asked me, 'How long have you been in Italy?' and I told them,"-he rolled his eyes up like a liar thinking-"'Oh, I've been here two weeks.' The man just started laughing at me. He looked around and leaned forward and whispered, 'Sir, you taught my son last year.' He laughed again. 'Don't worry,' he whispers. Then he took care of all the paperwork. So you see, if you know people... It's all about connections. Everyone has connections."

We headed for home and in defense of Reggio Eugene offered this difference: "In Rome or Florence no one will stop and talk to you in the street. You will see that the people here are wonderful." So far so good.

Chapter 5

Our door buzzer was not for the weak of heart. It looked like a painted over school bell and had the power to alert me of visitors perhaps from the balcony of school if I listened carefully enough. It always made me jump and elicited an involuntary curse of some kind. Even the buzzer of the apartment next door was loud enough to draw me from my bed on the other side of our apartment to check the door. As if the spike of adrenaline weren't annoying enough, often I found that no one was at the door, neither in the hall nor downstairs outside the foyer. There were two possibilities: the mailman or someone dropping off fliers for the competing local supermarkets stepped up to the building intercom and pressed every one of the buttons in sequence until someone answered and opened the door. I learned that if the neighbor's door buzzed and then mine followed, I needn't bother. Our intercom was broken and couldn't open the door for anyone anyway. Best to pretend I wasn't home.

The other possibility, and this was almost as frequent as the mailman, was that someone had parked their car right in the middle of our little blind alley and at least half a dozen others were parked in. Anyone who had somewhere to go was obliged to go down the row of buttons asking for the guilty party.

Pasquale was the first one to alert me to this potential cardiac arrest when he dropped by to introduce himself. After hissing an expletive through my gritted teeth, I opened the door on a short smiling man with a kindly face. He had a stout look to him, thick eyebrows and dark hair that thinned a bit on top. He was in his early forties, neatly dressed but just shy of formal, like a teacher maybe. He introduced himself cautiously, reading my face to see how much I understood. I understood he was our landlord. It was a moment of confusion for me as I had been told someone named Nino was in charge. I found out he was more of an apartment search agent when his bill showed up at school at school the next week, a sort of finder's fee.

Pasquale lived in the first floor apartment and informed me that if I needed anything I only needed to ask. "Eh... eh...," he wrung his hands a moment and peered past me, lifted his eyebrows and indicated the apartment, "Posso? May I?"

"Oh, of course." I let him in and he took me about the apartment showing me everything, in particular the television remote and how that worked. Then he took me out into the hall to show me the electric box and what to do if the power went out. He asked me what my job was and I told him. He too was a "professore" as we were all called. He taught electricians at a local tech school. With great patience he gestured and spoke very slow Italian with a few English words he could remember to explain to me that he would be bringing me a contract to sign. "How long will you live here?"

I hesitated. "I don't know. At least until June. No. At least until July. The end of June. The end of June I finish. My job finishes. June 30."

The ballpark figure was all he was interested in, and he made a face that I would describe as a facial shrug. The brow folded into a frown and the corners of the mouth pulled down for a moment and released again in a way that didn't express annoyance but rather said "Don't worry about it, it is not important." He smiled at my stumbling attempts at Italian. "Piano piano," he reassured me, slowly, little by little I would learn.

"Can we go...?" I pointed up the stairs to the roof access.

"Si, si, si. I will bring you the key."

"Do you need another thing?"

I looked back at the kitchen. "Is there an oven?"

"Ah, yes, an oven." He thought about that. "No oven. But I will think about this. Maybe we can find something."

He smiled again, shook my hand, and wished me a good day.

On Saturday Enelis and I walked down to the train station to find out some departure times for a couple small towns with nice beaches that Eugene had recommended. All information had to be drawn up on the computer piecemeal;*** there was no printed timetable. The little microphone on the counter didn't work so we exchanged shouts through the thick glass with the man at the information window. We made a couple notes and decided to spend the day exploring Reggio a bit instead.

We had a late start on the day and by the time we were in the streets nearly all the businesses had closed. In fact, during the week as well, businesses typically closed their doors from 1 to 4:30 each day. Sometimes they shut down a little earlier at 12:30 or reopened a little later at 5:00 or even 6:00. And Sunday we were told nearly everything would be closed. We passed through streets empty as if an approaching disaster had cleared all but a few brave souls from the city.

The main street is Corso Garibaldi, named-like so many other Italian main streets, parks and piazzas-for the man who had led a ragtag army of volunteers around southern Italy to bring the entire region into the fold for Italian unification in the 19th century. The Corso was lined with boutiques, banks, bookstores, and espresso bars. Expensive Italian fashion draped sleek mannequins in the windows. Every block had a shoe store and I admired Enelis' self-control throughout the year. At one end of the Corso in Piazza Garibaldi in front of the station was for me a strange spectacle of a sort: McDonald's. Behind the glass were Italians that puzzled me, paying rather high prices for food that couldn't possibly compare to the plates next door, not in quality, taste or price. Inside were primarily young people, teenagers, families with their kids, mostly middle-class or above if I had to guess.

Two blocks farther north was the Questura, the local monument to inefficiency, a thick block of imposing concrete the architecture of which ironically suggested 'utilitarian.' Past that was a city block of green area surrounded by a stone wall, the park Villa Comunale. There was a concession stand at the center, handful of children's simple carnival rides. A defunct zoo was tucked in behind some trees and t the north side. A stagnant fountain resembling a country and full of lilypads was surrounded by a few very small cages, mossy, stained and corroded. When we found out that big animals like lions had been kept there in sad conditions it seemed more like a haunting historical site, like a war-time prison camp. On the next piazza down the Corso, after a couple more blocks of shops, sat the rebuilt cathedral, gleaming white and sharp, a beautiful exterior though not the aged structure one would find in non-earthquake-abused communities. Several blocks farther on, the theatre stood out as another beautiful building, columned with two curving ramps up to its front doors. Scaffolding and billowing canvas covered another building getting a makeover. A small empty lot surrounded by a cheap fence was the site of excavation. Right in the middle of main street archaeologists were sifting through blocks and potsherds from the Greek world twelve feet and more than two thousand years below modern Reggio. It was one of the few visual reminders that the otherwise twentieth century-looking Reggio, had a history that reached very far back. It was founded as Rhegion by the Greeks in the 8th century B.C. [history?***]

An Italian "bar" is a cross between an American bar and a coffee shop as opposed to simply a pub outright. Bars primarily keep patrons wired up with espresso and croissants but also offer a shelf of liquor-whiskeys, aperitifs, and digestives. They also commonly serve pre-made sandwiches, pastries and sweets. They are some of the first places to open during the day, the cups, saucers, and spoons tinkering like alarm clocks as they are laid out along marble countertops each morning. But we walked for an hour before we found a bar that was open that Saturday afternoon. The barman, in his late fifties with graying hair and a healthy growth of pasta pushing at his polo shirt, was nearly dozing in a chair near the entrance. He jumped to his feet and ushered us in.

"Gelato?" he asked as he rushed to take his place behind the long green marble counter.

Enelis asked how much it was and he waved that question away. Come see, he indicated and drew her to the ice box to point out the six flavors of Italian ice cream, their surfaces neatly sculpted like Japanese Zen gardens.

He loaded up a dish with one spatula of each flavor and then caught me looking at some finger food on the counter. With little effort he persuaded me to take a plate of them. They were all bite-sized fried things and he needed to reheat them in the microwave. Mozzarella balls, dabs of breaded spinach, mashed potato balls, spiced balls of rice with cheese inside, and olives stuffed with a veal paste. He nodded to Enelis and convinced her as well, adding another handful of the golden morsels to our plate. He came around the counter like the maitre d' of a fine restaurant when the countess entered and offered his elbow as he escorted Enelis to the table. As we dug into the finger food, he brought us glasses of fruit punch. He put Enelis' gelato in the fridge temporarily while we ate the hot food.

Niccola, or Niky as his name appeared on the sign above the door, typically kept his bar open during the traditional afternoon break. "On the weekends," he explained, "I open at midnight for friends. We stay here until maybe six in the morning, drinking and eating things. Then I go home to sleep and come back here at four on Sunday afternoon." He looked at Enelis. "Where are you from? Brazil?"

"No, Panama."

"Bravo."

"Are you traveling by car?" he asked me.

"No, um... on foot."

"By train?"

"We are staying here in Reggio."

He smiled, "Che bello." He turned to Enelis. "What do you do?"

"I am a student here at the University."

"Bravo," he said. "The students they come here always. In August there were students from Hungary, Ukraine, Poland, many Polacks. A few from Brazil."

I marveled at the international crowd the place was drawing despite the sound beating it received in most travel guides and from other Italians. That was due primarily to Dante Alighieri University for Foreigners. Unlike most other places in Italy, Italian language programs were very affordable in Reggio. A month-long class that met three and a half hours each morning, Monday through Friday, was 100 Euros. Housing and food was another matter, but rooms were available through the school for under 200 per month.

We finished the food and Niky returned with Enelis' gelato. I asked if he had bergamino, eyeing the bar. "No, but there is limoncello. You must try it. It is tipico Calabrese," a phrase that we would often hear in regard to food; the Calabresi were very proud of their traditional products and in nearly every case, a taste was enough to prove the merit of that pride. He poured out a couple shots of a lemon liqueur, a digestive similar to the bergamot-flavored one we had had at the trattoria the night before.

I was wary of the bill we must have been racking up but in the end Niky only charged us a few Euros. He pointed out that the drinks, including the shots, were no charge. "We are friends," he said. He escorted us to the door, his arm around Enelis, squeezing her against his side every few steps. He told us to stop in any time. We promised we would.