La Lingua Italiana è per tutti e per tutte le età

An Article from Michael Kiefer about Lingua Più

http://www.azcentral.com/travel/articles/2010/03/04/20100304italianclass0307.html

Learning Italian in Italy

by Michael Kiefer - Mar. 4, 2010 06:06 PM
The Arizona Republic

CITTÀ DI CASTELLO, Italy - The message was scrawled in love-struck, foot-high letters by the riverside.

"Io e te, tre metri sopra il cielo. Irene ti amo." ("Me and you, three meters above heaven. Irene, I love you.")

Hopeless romantic: I thought it was lovely, but my traveling companion quipped, "This Ti Amo family must be very large. Already today I've seen 'Maria Ti Amo,' 'Lisa Ti Amo' and 'Laura Ti Amo' written on walls."

Later I mentioned the graffiti to my Italian instructor, Roberta, and she dispossessed me of my reverie.

"Oh, that," she said snidely. "That comes from a popular Italian teen movie. My daughter's boyfriend even wrote that to her once."

Ah. So, even the cliches in Italy are of high quality.

I spent two weeks in Città di Castello, a small, walled Umbrian city, not because I wanted to go somewhere but because I wanted to be somewhere. Nestled on the upper Tiber River near the Tuscan border, it's not so much a tourist destination as a regular, albeit historic, Italian city where most people don't speak English, and if they do, they have difficulty wrapping their ears around an American accent.

Here Roberta Marsili and her partner, Laura Gastaldi    , run a language school called Lingua Più, which means "language and more." They teach English to Italians and Italian to foreigners. In the summer, the Italian learners are group-tour Brits, and Aussies and Americans who want to go somewhere different. But in the off-season, when I visited, the students are Europeans who own houses in Italy and need to learn the language for their day-to-day life.

I studied Italian in college, but mostly, I can muscle my way through conversations in Italian because I'm fluent in Spanish. It's a bit like trying to use an American wrench on a metric bolt. It doesn't quite fit. Roberta complained about my ugly Spanish accent in Italian, much as her students complained about my ugly American accent in English.

Once, when I was in Sestriere, near the French border, a Spanish word accidentally slipped out during a conversation with a bus driver, and he was so annoyed at what I was doing to his language that he stopped talking. More than once, Italians who have lived in Spanish-speaking countries have picked up on my accent and shifted into Spanish to save us both a headache. I was counting on Roberta to cure me of those afflictions.

So I took two classes a day in Lingua Più's tiny classrooms. In one class, my fellow students were a pair of retired British college professors who had a home nearby in the restored medieval mountaintop village of Monte Santa Maria Tiberina, the site of a World War II battle. Frank was a hopeless case as far as Italian went, but he liked to cite research suggesting that learning a language kept the brain sharp.

The other class consisted of a Dutch couple who work for American firms and were restoring an old home in Città di Castello. They were brilliant learners, and the drills in that class included such great phrases as "Marco ha raccontato a Francesco di avere avuto un figlio dalla moglie di lui." ("Marco told Francesco that he had a child with his wife.")

Most of all, I wanted to master the all-purpose syllable, "eh," which Italians can bend with more inflections and meanings than California adolescents can wring out of the word "dude." When posed as a question: What?; as a resigned assertion: That's the way it goes; as a retort: So what?; drawn out and emphatic: You betcha!

Roberta's daughter, Giorgia, could hold up her end of a conversation, one syllable at a time: "Eh? . . . uh . . . ah . . . "

But when I tried, I could never hit it right.

"Eh."

"Too short."

"Eh?"

"Sounds like a duck."

"Ah!"

"That's what you say during sex!"

I went through a learning curve: The first few days went well, then I hit the wall, all brain circuits clogged by trying to force three languages through the same synaptic channels. But after about a week, I was conversing more comfortably. And I paid special attention to the hand gestures essential to the Italian language: A rotating finger held head-high means "later." An outward flick of a cupped hand means "get out of my face." An inward flip means "I'm leaving."

On my way home to Phoenix, I stopped in New York City for a few days. One night, I found myself chatting with a young Italian woman tending bar in the East Village. My Italian flowed as smoothly as the wine, and the conversation went well enough that my wineglass got topped off for free a couple of times. I amused her with my knowledge of hand gestures.

Then I brought up the graffiti: "Io e te, tre metri sopra il cielo."

She scoffed.

"I have a special hand gesture for the man who writes that to me," she said. "We call it 'the umbrella.' "

To illustrate, she raised her right fist and slapped down on the inside of her elbow with an open left hand, the classic Italian salute.

"The best part is that it shows him which way to go!" she said.

There was only one logical response.

"Eh!"