February 3, 2010
She hoped to read Dante in the original, my sister did, to discuss him in his native tongue.
But first she needed to pick up some basics.
So she came all the way from Los Angeles to enroll in ibla!, a tiny Italian language school housed in a palazzo just steps from Ragusa Ibla’s cathedral.
I’d already spoken with the director and head teacher. They’d assured me that their teaching method was “communicative” and “fun” and “modern.” But I wondered. I’d seen language classes in Italy where teachers clung to an approach as antiquated as the Roman Forum itself.
But here’s what Linda has to say about the experience: I spent a week studying Italian at ibla! school in spring 2009 and loved it! The teachers were hip and fun and tailored the classes to our level. They used conversation, games, interesting exercises and homework and really helped us become more skilled in speaking Italian. I made some good friends, loved the comfortable classrooms and also the historic setting (Ragusa Ibla is beautiful). I recommend this school and am looking forward to returning and taking more classes.
The classes at ibla! are very small, especially in off-season—sometimes just two people. This can be a beautiful thing if you like lots of practice and individual attention. But the downside—at least for some people—might be that you don’t get to meet many classmates, and you may be hanging out alone in your free time.
Haven’t you always wanted to speak the language of love? It’s never too late to learn. ibla! runs a special “Over50 Program” that combines Italian with the study of culture, wine and food. Yum. What are you waiting for?
If you’re lucky, you may end up speaking Italian with a baroque accent. Sicilians love exaggeration. Baroque is in their bones. Consider this: no food in Sicily is merely good, buono, it’s always buonissimo, to die for. No human being is just plain ugly, brutto, he’s bruttissimo, hideous. No car or view or cake or shoe in Sicily is ever beautiful, bella, it’s always bellissima, drop-dead gorgeous.
If it’s excitement and glitterati you’re after, study Italian in Florence or Rome. If you’re looking for baroque charm and hospitality in a sweet (and relatively inexpensive) stone village, I recommend ibla!
Here’s ibla!’s website.
If you can’t make it to Sicily to study Italian, if you can’t leave home at all, think about taking advantage of a distance-learning program to polish your language skills. Cyberitalian is a website devoted to teaching Italian and Italian culture. The director, Maura Garau, once headed the Italian program at the United Nations Circolo Culturale Italiano, and she knows what she’s doing when it comes to language instruction.
If you’re already at an intermediate level of Italian and want to speak more idiomatically, enjoy and learn from Dianne Hales’ fun (free) blog Becoming Italian Word by Word.
Follow your own star, as Dante would say, or more precisely, “Se segui tua stella, non fallirai a glorioso porto.”
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Do you have a yen to speak Italian? If you already know Italian, do you have a secret to help the rest of us?
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January 21, 2010
Here’s how I got into trouble.
After teaching a short course in Ragusa in 2002, I’d returned year after year to Southeast Sicily to root around for a little casa. The Fates pushed back with all their might and I finally admitted defeat.
In the spring of 2007, I came to see friends one last time and close the Sicilian chapter of my life. Ciao, Sicilia.
A day before bidding the island farewell, I scaled the long staircase up from Ibla’s Piazza Duomo to see the cupola from on high. After many years cocooned in scaffolding thick as wool, it had reemerged triumphant.
It looked good enough to eat, like whipped cream on a tumbler of granita. I felt a secret joy. Bells tolled, clouds slipped up from the valley. I inhaled la zagara—orange blossoms on the breeze—like a drug.
I turned. There, on an unassuming little row house with a mottled wall and weatherworn door, I saw the magic words: VENDITA.
I saw. I called. I bought. Cast myself into a new world just like that. 1-2-3.
Never imagining for a minute what was in store.
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Jann Huizenga
December 3, 2009
For a year my showers were icy, my radiators cold. The new Renzo Piano stovetop just sat there, shiny and useless. I’d filed a dichiarazine and oodles of other papers, had a friend fake signatures and make phone calls when I wasn’t in town, shelled out €450 in utility fees at the post office, lost hours in grouchy mobs hoping for face time with a bureaucrat. I fawned, flirted, cajoled, and sobbed. After each trauma I self-medicated with chocolate.
Then one fine day in October, Enelgas—like God Almighty—said Let There Be Gas.
The experience soured me on bureaucrats, known here as fannuloni, slackers.
But I could no longer put off a visit to the dreaded water office, l’ufficio idrico. It was time to fess up that I hadn’t paid a centesimo for water since buying the house in 2007, nor even reported a change of ownership.
I take a number, A30, and wait. The slip of paper in my fist bears no relation to what’s flashing on the wall monitor, F6.
“Non funziona,” says a farmer in from the countryside. The crowd swells. We take matters into our own hands and politely number off.
Finally seated at the sportello, I’m shooed away. You must, says the woman, purchase a marca di bollo at the tabacchaio, then proceed to the post office to pay another fee. Which I do. Back at the water office, my bureaucrat pulls out a form from a cracked blue folder and writes the date. “Friday the 13th!” she says. “A lucky day!” (Just goes to show how topsy-turvy things are here.) The clock above her head is running ninety minutes fast.
I hand over my passport, my codice fiscale, and my water meter reading. Clickety-clack goes her keyboard.
“Our computer does not accept your name.”
Perché?
“There is no key for J.” She fusses and gripes and stares at the screen. “And no key for H.”
She calls over the boss. After much ado, he locates the problematic letters. The printer whirrs, spitting papers onto the floor.
The name is spelled wrong; the date of birth incorrect. Corrections are made; the printer whirrs again. More signatures required.
“Are things the same in America as here?” my bureaucrat asks.
“Well, there’s less paperwork there.”
This produces a sudden outburst. “O, siamo maestri della bureaucrazia!” We are the maestros of bureaucracy.
An understatement, seems to me. I slink out of the office across Piazza San Giovanni to Caffè Italia, where I calm myself with a chocolate eclair and hot chocolate thick as pudding.
 
November 11, 2009
After gorging yesterday on focaccia con funghi and cannoli con crema—typical Sicilian fare—I swore I was going to diet today.
But when I swatted away the plastic bead curtain of my local bakery this morning looking for a small roll, a magnificent mound of deep-fried, sugar-dipped fritelle greeted me.
It’s November 11, San Martin’s Day, the baker patiently explained, and we always eat fritelle on this day. I asked her to put one in my bag.
“With raisins or chocolate?” she asked.
In the name of research, I got both. Here they are precariously perched on the railing of my balcony, against the backdrop of Ragusa Ibla’s San Giorgio cathedral.
I wish you could hear how wildly the bells are clanging in the bright blue air as I bite into these pillow-soft fritelle. They are like glorified warm donut holes, perfumed with fennel.
On November 11, San Martino, new wine is considered ready to drink for the first time. The new wine should be enjoyed, or so said my smiley baker, with typical Ragusan dishes—ricotta-filled ravioli as a first course, pork chops as a second. And fritelle for dessert. But never mind, I made them my main course and washed them down with an old wine.
November 2, 2009
A few years ago, I wanted to buy a ruin of a house on a solitary road out beyond the Ragusa cemetery. Sicilian friends (perfectly rational, well-educated ones) said I was matta, insane, that I’d be visited at night by dead souls.
“What do you mean?” I hollered. “I live two blocks from a cemetery in the US and I’ve never seen a ghost!”
They looked at me mournfully and insisted that the danger was real. They themselves would absolutely never pay me a visit there!
So I gave up the idea of that house with its faded pink walls, shocked at how alive the dead are in Sicily.
Sicilian cemeteries are always set well outside of town behind imposing walls. Below is the Scicli cemetery, full of mausoleums, magnificent pines and tall cypress.
Cemeteries here are well-tended, with custodians and on-site florists. They seem to be open most of the day, even during the long lunch break.
Many of the tombs show pictures of the dead.
Streets have names, just like in a real town.
Today is il Giorno dei Morti, Day of the Dead. Sicilian families flock to cemeteries—arms overflowing with lilies, mums, roses, and daisies—to spend time with their dearly departed.
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