When I was first shown the collection of buildings my father-in-law owns in Molinella, a small town in northern Italy, I immediately began calculating how much longer he might live. The buildings are not luxurious. Two of the three are what the family call “factories,” but they’re really just large, rectangular brick and concrete shells on the outskirts of town used by various small manufacturing companies. The interiors resemble nothing so much as enormous garages. One of the factories has a couple of modest apartments attached. Inside one of those apartments is where my wife did most of her growing up.

The third building is in town and it has two floors. Downstairs is another garage and a finished rental space that currently houses a local community center. Upstairs is another apartment, and that’s where my wife lived – with her parents and her grandmother – until she was nine. It’s also the house where her father was born. Shortly after her grandmother’s death, Elisa’s parents left the factory apartment and moved back into town. People don’t move very much or very far in Italy. In my father-in-law’s case they don’t move very much or very far, then as soon as possible they move right back where they started.

Since my father-in-law was only sixty-five at the time of my first visit, and since his own mother had died at ninety-two, things weren’t looking immediately promising in terms of my wife’s inheritance. Being almost forty-four myself, I realized I might not come into co-possession of the estate until I was nearly seventy-five. A depressing thought. But I wasn’t sad or frustrated. I simply started to think about leaving my wife for someone else. Which, in case you’re even more damaged than I am and need it explained, is much worse.
But that line of thinking is incongruous with my emotional attachment to the people involved. I love my wife madly and deeply, with gusto and delight. Aside from some purely instinctual animalistic urges that arise now and then, I am free from conflict in my devotion to her and my commitment to our union. I’ve never been able to say anything so decisive about anyone before.

I also love her parents. Ivonne and Umberto are the kindest, most generous, most enjoyable non-English speaking couple I’ve ever known. They’re among the most enjoyable creatures I’ve known capable of any kind of speech.

One of the great pleasures of my life with Elisa is getting to know her family, as well as getting to know her home country and culture – though I have found some Italian customs baffling. The cultural habits that foreign travel has made me question the most, though, are those based here in the good old U.S.A.  

All through my youth, and even through early adulthood, I lived under the false impression shared by many Americans: that the United States of America is the best at everything, and has the best, most advanced versions of everything. I’ve got news for you: It’s not true.

For instance, if you think the U.S. leads the world in cleanliness or availability of abundant produce, you haven’t visited an Italian grocery store. My wife has said many times upon merely eyeing an American food shop, “An Italian would never buy food from those people. In Italy, those people would be out of business.” That was her response to a pretty decent place. I’ve also seen the look on her parents’ faces as they gazed into a New York delicatessen, horrified by the grime on the cracked linoleum floor. The processed, prepackaged food products and the yellowing, crusted “fresh” ones were secondary insults.

But even before I’d had a chance to experience the lifestyles of my wife’s Italian compatriots, or to see their reactions to our cities, I learned about their collective fascination with us. The first evening I spent in the presence of Elisa’s parents was on a trip we took for Christmas, only two months after we’d begun dating. In spite of her Catholic background and upbringing, in spite of her parents’ life-long indoctrination to ancient small-town customs and habits, and in spite of our unmarried status, there was none of the drama that had accompanied my visits to the ancestral homes of previous girlfriends. Those earlier trips had all been surrounded by seemingly endless negotiations over who’d sleep where. Delicate, roundabout discussions had to be held about how established a relationship needed to be before her parents, or even the girlfriend herself, felt comfortable enough for us to close the door to a room and share a bed.

Neither Elisa nor her parents indulged in such postures. Her parents are working class-Catholics living in a tiny medieval town in Northern Italy. But they possess a respect for their only daughter that lifts their sophistication beyond that of many cosmopolitan Americans. When I met Ivonne and Umberto, Elisa’s childhood room had been made up for the two of us like a kiddie-porn honeymoon suite. Two single beds had been pushed together and made up as one. The wall above the headboards was covered with framed photos of Elisa at fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years of age. Across the room were posters of Peter Sellers and Jerry Lewis that had hung there since she’d put them up when she was a teenager. Though many now think I’ve ended up with a woman as beautiful as my wife because I work in film and television, the truth is that Elisa thinks Jerry Lewis, circa 1965, is the sexiest man she’s ever seen.
“He was gorgeous,” she says.

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