2 Rossana's House I Go

Leaving Florence on the 16.10 train to Lucca on Sunday, with the rain pouring down and the train packed with refugees fleeing a sodden soccer match, I turned once again to imagining what my home stay hostess would be like. I had hoped that I would live with a family, maybe with young children who would be easy to engage. But the school sent word that my hostess was an "elderly but very active woman." More critically, she did not speak any English. I really was going to have to communicate in Italiano. Indeed, she greeted me with "Parlo solo in Italiano!" 

Initially I imagined my Signora as a small, aged woman dressed in black with her hair pulled into a bun, rather severe in manner and visage. Her house would be spotless and she would be exact about rules and expectations. But this, as my friend Neens pointed out over lunch before I left D.C., was probably outdated. She thought the Signora would be dressed conservatively but well (she's Italian!), sport short hair, and present a much more modern woman than my stereotype drawn mostly from old Italian movies. Just for the record, my eventual "roommate" at the home stay imagined Signora Rossana in much the same way as I did. As it turns out, Neens' mental picture of Rossana is closer to the real woman; she is small and elderly but with a spring in her step, has short, fashionably cut grey hair, and is engaging, sweet, neat as a pin, an inveterate TV watcher, and speaks the most wonderfully clear, slow Italian. You can tell she's taken in the likes of us before! And yes, her rules of the house are exact to the point that even I can understand them despite a woeful lack of language skills.

One aspect of the home stay that I most looked forward to was living in an Italian household. In this, I am not disappointed. Rossana was born and raised in Lucca and it's possible the apartment (flat, really, since it covers the whole floor in a three-story building) has been in her family for some time. The ground floor is communal and I counted 6 bikes parked there yesterday with room to spare. Rosanna lives on the second floor. The rooms are huge, the ceilings are high. There's a formal parlour where beautiful china dolls are given pride of place on a sofa that doesn't entertain anything/one else. In the immense kitchen in the morning, Rossana wields her enormous espresso machine like a professional barista. There are three bedrooms, one bathroom (large enough to double as a laundry room), and a foyer. The formal dining room is central to the apartment and it is dominated by the TV and an old easy chair from which Rossana receives frequent telephone calls; those on the other end are treated to her sonorous and upbeat Italian, none of which sounds like gossip, but what do I know? I went into a deep sleep last night feeling like I was in a home that synthesizes those of my grandmother (who married Giovanni  from Altopascio down the road from here) and my mother. Who knew that crocheted doilies would function so well as a sleeping potion?

With time, and more Italian, I hope to be able to ask Signora Rossana more questions about her life and family, and maybe I will be able to share a picture of this delightful Italian sprite.

In the meantime, here are a few more photos from Florence; the first 2 are of streets in the Oltrarno (the south side of the Arno River), the third is of the Palazzo Vecchio in the Piazza della Signoria, and the fourth is of a few officials dressed in medieval costumes nonchalantly providing photo ops for tourists like me.