How My Italian Influenced My Life

Rarely have I studied a topic that flows from my ears to my brain to my tongue as easily as the Italian language. The Italian blood that runs through me is more than the genetics that gave me my dark hair and thick eyebrows. It is the work of the generation that traveled from Istria in the north and Sicilia in the south, meeting through friends in Chicago, and encouraging their Children to study hard and make a living for their future families. In time, that influence would be passed on to me; finding my grandfather’s meticulously-written electricity notes circa 1935—filled with drawings and words I did not yet understand—inspired me to take Italian at my own high school.

The moment I realized that my Italian heritage was wholly a part of me was a rather insignificant one, yet to me is one of the most remarkable realizations of my life. The summer after my second year of Italian study, I was driving in my car, listening to a young trio of Italian teenagers, Il Volo, meaning “The Flight.” As one of the tenors sang a solo, Ti voglio tanto bene, I realized that I could understand every word he was singing. Though it was a

Even better, was that I felt confident enough in my skill that I could use it with my closest living Italian relative, my father’s mother, la mia nonna. More than speaking the language, I discovered my family’s past. In conversing with her and my father, I discovered that I will be only the third person in my paternal grandparents’ family to attend college, that my grandmother had only a sixth-grade education, that my grandfather, despite never holding a degree in mathematics or physics, worked for three decades on CTA train cars as an electrician. The marriage of my grandparents in 1952 represented a synthesis of the culture of northern and southern Italy and