Come On Dante! Tell Us What You Really Think About Your Fellow Italians!
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Having been married to an Italian for 35+ years, all I can say is each province has a different time on their clocks.. and none are on time.
And the food is excellent!
Well, Dante’s grave is in Florence in Santa Croce, The Basilica of the Holy Cross. Also there, the graves of Michelangelo and Galileo.
Dante’s *empty* grave is in Florence.
Thanks Pinky. I was unaware of the rivalry. According to the map, Dante didn’t think to much of Ravenna either.
I dunno, I think Dante liked whoever was hosting him at the time, and tore apart everyone else.
My mother could tell you of a dowager she knew who had a grand house and a herd of cattle. She had a niece she favored whose capable husband took care of the cattle. She’d hired an immigrant lady from Veneto to supervise her household (who returned to Veneto a few years after the dowager’s death). Mom said one embarrassingly amusing aspect of her was her assessment of southern Italians and their ways. “Absolutely snotty about them. “Sicilian, Sicilian” she would say”. She was particularly dismissive of pasta, a foodstuff she deemed fit only for Sicilians. “I grew up on rice”.
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My sister-in-law’s maternal-side relations were from Genoa (where her mother was born in 1919). In 1946, her mother married a man whose family was from Naples. Her mother’s family referred to him as ‘Tonto’.
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I’ve heard the modern Genoese dialect is difficult for others in Italy to understand. An English professor who had an office in my suite and whose family was from Naples explained, “They have no grammar. It’s just jumbles of words.”
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