The spring my older daughter Charlotte turned six, I went to the office of the elementary school in Siena and put her name on the list for first grade, a five minute procedure that, in light of the standardized tests, recommendation letters and interviews to which my Stateside friends were subjecting their children, left me suspicious: could anything so readily accessible and totally free of charge possibly be any good?
In superficial ways, her first years of elementary school were baffling. My confusion would start with the list of supplies we had to buy, the word “quaderno” (notebook) appearing repeatedly with various endings like -ino and -one, which indicate to a real Italian mother how many spiral notebooks to buy, how many three ring binders, or what size squares the graph paper pad should have, but to me meant only that the guy at the school supply store was going to have fun with me. Once, I remember feeling relieved to see listed a “vocabulario” which I knew to mean “dictionary,” until I saw the next item on the list, “dizionario.” Continue reading Reading, Writing and Lunch: Scuola all’Italiana
“Tell him we’ve killed the pig,” squawked the voice, and hung up. I called my soon-to-be-husband, relayed the message, and was told, “You’d better go get him.” So I started up the ape, our ancient, three-wheeled, stiff-clutched, over-steering little pick-up, and, after one false start (my mother-in-law came running out of the house, hollering over the roar and grind of the ape, “Don’t forget the blood!”), drove up the mountain to the neighbors’ farm to collect our apparently free-ranged pig carcass, which then spent the night in our barn.
The Truth About Tuscany 