German Italy

Campo Tures, Italy

As we flew toward Torino over the paid tollways in our compact station wagon, I reflected again on my luck in the family/au pair matching process: not only do they love to travel and have the means to take me along, but they're slow food fanatics (an organic/hippie version of going kosher, related to how food is raised, chosen, prepared and served) so we often sit down to dinner or lunch in fabulous restaurants all over the region; their non-stop tendencies spilled over even into their vacation, with "leisure" coming to mean river rafting, riding rental bikes all over the mountainside, trekking and picnicking in the forest, sightseeing like mad; and all while treating me more like a daughter than a maid or a guest. I am fortunate to be in this situation.

We stayed ten days in a two-bedroom cabin suite in Caminata, a tiny four-block "town" near Campo Tures in the Valle d'Agosto, Dolomiti (The Dolomites, I think, in English), Italy, so close to Austria that all the signs are in German and Italian, and everyone speaks Italian with a German accent. One day we took cushy rental bikes to the nearby town of Brunico to eat polenta and drink red wine, and walk off these heavy meals along the slender central boulevard. On another, hotter day, P-- and I took the boys to a "biological pool," whose chlorine-producing algae gave the large pond a green tinge and its suspicious name, to spend the day swimming, reading, running around the lawns, and tanning on long sunchairs against a backdrop of endless forested mountains and blue sky. We also went river rafting (a thrilling, boisterous activity that made my heart ache for Colorado College), endured many a thunderstorm (during which the chapel bells tolled in order to break up the clouds), trekked and picnicked and fed handfuls of grass to housecat-sized baby goats.

I watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics from an Olympic training center deep in the mountains, weeping into my lemon tea from sheer overwhelm at the sight of hundreds of first-world athletes dwarf the meager handfuls of third-world athletes in a parade around the stadium whose erection displaced so many Chinese. Upon my return from the bathroom where I fled to compose myself, I learned that Italian lacks a word that translates into "overwhelmed."

I spent my day off from 'working' riding my bike across sunny cornfields, writing in my journal, and reading two poorly written historical novels, one about a leper colony in Greece and the other about Leonardo da Vinci and the sisters d'Este who ruled Milan during the Renaissance.

One night after a particularly delicious open-air dinner, I ventured into the restaurant to escape the cold mountain evening to find myself at the mercy of a tableful of hearty blonde locals who spoke less Italian than they did English. They treated me to a shot of "grappa" (sweet hard liquor), a mug of scalding berry tea, and an unbroken series of long and awkward stares. I fingered the tab of my teabag nervously, smiling and glancing at the doorway for one of my boys to fetch me, and finally one of them - the shyest, I think - attempted trilingual conversation. We all laughed a lot, they took more shots, and I discovered that, although 90% couldn't say one complete sentence in English, they all knew and frequently interjected the phrases "I'm lovely" (possibly "I love you?") and "sex on the beach." Where do they learn--??