Just give the check to il capo

Rob Price

My desk at home, where I'm writing this column, has a shelf full of books on Italy. Most of the books are primers on how to speak Italian, and they share a common feature, the promise to make learning Italian an easy, pain-free adventure.

I started collecting the books about eight years ago, when my mother and father proposed renting an apartment for two weeks in Venice, which the five of us - our daughter included - would share. We would visit the local food markets, buy fresh produce and meats and pastas and cook them in the apartment. We would get to know our Italian neighbors, sharing daily greetings and compliments. We would absorb a little of the Italian culture into our blood and become something I have always dreamed of being: worldly.

But first it would be necessary to learn a little of the language. Since my mother's father was born of two Italian parents who had just immigrated, I thought learning Italian would be fairly simple. Italy was part of my heritage, and so learning the language would be largely a matter of reconnecting with some DNA buried deep in my brain.

I bought a computer program that claimed it could teach me how to speak fluent Italian in a matter of hours. Later, I bought some audio tapes that promised to teach me how to speak Italian while I drove to work. One Christmas, I acquired a multivolume set of educational CDs that promised to teach me how to speak Italian like a member of the American Foreign Service. And there is a book on my desktop called "Venezia," a book written in Italian for three-yearold Italian children, showing in simple words and pictures how the city of Venice was built out of the Venetian lagoon.

It represents the one successful experience with the Italian language I've had in my years of studying Italian, which I've done in my usual on and off way. I got bored with the computer program after a few weeks, although I learned that "arancia" means orange. The big CD collection is just that: big. Too big. And the audio tapes that promised to teach me the language on my way to work taught me basically how to make a fool out of myself whenever I had to converse with an Italian in his or her own language.

How much of a fool? I have a vivid memory of explaining to the owner of the apartment we rented how my daughter rides large cabbages for a hobby, confusing the word "cavolo," which means cabbage, with the word "cavallo," which means horse. This is an easy mistake for anyone who thinks learning a new language is a matter of reconnecting with buried DNA.

On the other hand, I have had some small successes. Over time I did learn how to buy pasta and meat and produce in the public markets of Venice. I also learned the Italian word for "boss" is "capo," and it became my Italian nickname for my father, who has a sort of

genetic disposition toward grabbing the dinner bill at restaurants. Italian waiters have gotten many a chuckle over my reference to "il capo." They know immediately what to do with the check and laugh happily while they do it.

Beyond that, I can't say my Italian has improved all that much over the years, although the books on my desk would suggest I speak the language as well as my long-dead Italian grandfather. Of course, as an immigrant, he preferred not to hear Italian spoken in his house, and so my mother grew up with no idea what a cavallo or capo is. That is a sad story in a way, the story of the loss of a culture. It's fun to have an acquaintance with a culture other than your own, and one way of doing that is to speak, however poorly, a second language. This will probably never make you any money, but it is a unique pleasure.

Which brings me to the point of this column. If you would like to learn another language, start right now. Make it a resolution for 2008. Pick the language you want to learn, buy some books and jump right in. Then, once you have learned how to ask for an arancia in a crowded public market, go rent an apartment for a week in the country of your choice.

There's no telling what strange DNA you may discover.

This column is reprinted from the Jan.14, 2007 edition of The Courier.