Here in the last dregs of winter, we are celebrating Carnevale with dancing and drinking and masquerades and parading through the streets. The upshot of this is that the car and the house and the pockets of my winter coat all have little sprinklings of confetti in them.

We went to the big parade in Viareggio two Saturdays ago and to the little one in Pietrasanta last Sunday and to Ireland in between, first stopping in Pisa to see a Hokusai show at the Palazzo Blu, which is a museum now, but once was the house where Byron lived by the river. My favorite piece was a painting on silk called "Tiger in a Bamboo Grove Looking at the Full Moon." I would like to live my life in such a way that my biography could also be called "Tiger in a Bamboo Grove Looking at the Full Moon."

Ireland was windy and wild and romantic, if you can still feel romance after eating so much fried fish and chips. We went briefly insane at Aillwee and bought kilo after kilo of Irish cheese that we have now in the refrigerator.

I almost had a nervous breakdown driving the microscopic almost-but-not-quite-as-wide-as-one-car roads that were nevertheless two way streets among the encroaching hedgerows in Western Ireland on our way to the Cliffs of Moher and then on to Galway. I has assumed the driving-on-the-left-side-of-the-road skills that I picked up living for a year in the Cook Islands 20 years ago would come back to me. It is always entertaining to discover that you have assumed incorrectly while driving at high speeds through a mirror-image roundabout.

But we survived the hedgerows and the baked beans for breakfast and the incipient scurvy and the pints of Guinness and the wind that made me buy a hat and ended the serviceable life of our umbrella. Besides cheese and hats, we bought books in English and Irish seaweed snacks. We listened to traditional Irish music in a traditional Irish pub and also even managed to see a second Hokusai show in a museum in Dublin.

Our Moldovan cab driver on the way back to the airport our last day in Dublin, having lived for a while in Italy himself, exchanged emails with us so that he could send us info about making our own grappa (we had given a rousingly vivid description of our life here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea). Yesterday, we got this email from him:

Hello Jonathan and Jonathan's wife :),

I hope you had an easy flight back to the Italian community and the big family!

Above all, I want to mention the moment that touched me the most. After you got into the car, you both exchanged a glance and smiled at each other with such deep respect and love. In that instant, I saw that you were truly united and happy as one. I’m so glad I witnessed that.

I hope that one day, when I reach your age, I will experience such a moment with my own wife.
Thank you for the inspiration! 

To this letter, I am attaching the books we discussed about self-distilled spirits.

Update: Three days after paying an eye-watering amount to "overnight" my non-criminal record to my brother in Washington, DC, the tracking number tells us that it is currently sitting, for unknown reasons, in a DHL facility in Cincinnati. I'm fucked.

 

Having passed the Italian language exam, I am now entering into the REAL test of fortitude and skill that will determine if I get Italian citizenship -- the Bureaucracy Challenge. This consists of: filing the appropriate paperwork. We have an immigration attorney who has years of expertise in this process. I have a husband who is an Italian citizen. I have an advanced degree. I have Italian heritage. I have grit and persistence and a real desire to be a part of this country. I may yet be defeated.

So, the last time I was in the US, I got fingerprinted and sent my fingerprints off to the FBI to get a copy of my criminal record -- a piece of paper that says I have no criminal record. You have to do this in the US because the FBI will not accept fingerprints made outside the US. There is a six month deadline for filing this piece of paper along with your citizenship request before it expires and you have to do it all over again. (And the current dipshit in the White House has made a complete mess of the government and is threatening to eliminate the FBI, so it may be that it becomes impossible to get this piece of paper at all going forward.) Mine will expire in just a few weeks.

I also got a copy of my birth certificate and the "Apostille" for it -- which is a piece of paper required by the Italian government when you are submitting official forms from outside Italy. The piece of paper says that the form you are submitting is, in fact, the form that you are submitting. It is literally a piece of paper that says "the attached birth certificate is a birth certificate." It is issued by the same office that issues the birth certificate. OK, Italian government -- you do you.

We then had to have these forms officially translated into Italian by an official translator who translates them and then has to go before a judge in person and swear that her translation is a translation. The judge then gives her another piece of paper that says she swore her translation was a translation. Then we pick up all that up from her in Lucca and take it to our attorney.

I then took the Italian language test for citizenship (which is only offered three times a year) at the next available opportunity. The results were released two months later -- which was 8 days ago. As you know, I was quite surprised to find that I had passed and immediately set up an appointment with our attorney.

At that appointment, the attorney tells us we have a problem because some of the documents say that a person with my exact name and Social Security number was born on my birthday in "Fort Smith, Arkansas", and some say that a person with my exact name and Social Security number was born on my birthday in "Arkansas" and some say blah blah blah "Arkansas, Fort Smith." So we had to make an appointment with the American Consulate in Firenze to go there to get a piece of paper that says that these three people are all me.

So yesterday, we woke up at 6:45 and drove to Firenze to make it in time for our 10:30 appointment. (We stopped on the way at a Tobacco Store -- yes -- because that is the place that you buy a 16 euro stamp called a Marca da Bollo that will be needed later.) Going into the U.S. Consulate is like going into a war zone. The heavily armed guards search you and confiscate your phone, your keys, a tiny little flashlight that I had in my purse, my umbrella. OK, American government -- you do you. Then I paid $100 (you have to pay in dollars, not euros, because the American Consulate in Firenze is technically in America) for two signatures on this piece of paper. 

Then we stand in line to get all our confiscated stuff back before we high-tail it to Lucca (the provincial capital) to make it to the office of the Questura, where they will "legalize" the signature we got in Firenze by stamping it with the 16 euro Marca da Bollo that we got in the Tobacco Store earlier and signing it. The office was only open until 1:00 and then not open again until next week, when we will be in Ireland eating nothing but pub food and getting scurvy.

So we sped to Lucca, arriving just after 12:00 and trying to find a parking place in a city famous for not having any parking places. But we finally got one and headed to the Questura, which was all locked up with a big sign on the door saying that yesterday, for no announced reason, they were closed and that if there was some emergency, go to the Prefettura instead, which would also close at 1:00, not to re-open again until next week. So we found the Prefetture on the map, ran there and wandered around trying to find the office that would "legalize" the signatures, but all of the doors seemed to be locked. (These government offices are both grand Renaissance palazzos with stone walls and giant wooden doors that can clearly withstand battering rams and 40-foot ceilings, which means that running up the lovely marble stairs to the third floor is like going up to the tenth floor of a modern building. It doesn't make exploring around to find the right office something to be undertaken lightly.) We finally got into a third-floor hallway by going in a door when someone else came out and we were able to slip in before the door slammed shut and locked behind him. We wandered around some more and finally found the right office. The lady was very nice (everyone is always very nice) and told us to wait in the hall. There was no one else in sight anywhere. 

Then there were lots of paper rustling sounds in her office and other strange noises and she came out and went into another office where we could hear voices arguing for a while. But finally, she came out and gave us the piece of paper with the 16 euro Marca da Bollo on it and a signature. This signature signified that the other signature was a signature.

Then we drove back to Pietrasanta to our attorney's office where we spent an entertaining forty-five minutes trying to log onto the automatic document system that I had previously had to set up an account for, at which point the attorney said, "Why doesn't your criminal record have an Apostille with it?"

The answer is that no one ever told me that I needed an Apostille for the criminal record and I myself had never heard of an Apostille in my first 60 years of being alive on earth and so have no clue when you need one and when you don't. An Apostille seems insane to me.

But now -- immediately -- I need it. I need it before the criminal record expires in a few weeks. And the only place to get it is in Washington, D.C. where I have to present the original piece of paper saying I have no criminal record (a piece of paper that was at that moment with me in Italy) and then wait two weeks and go pick up the piece of paper with the Apostille now attached. Then they will both have to be re-translated by the official translator who will go swear in front of the judge that her translation is a translation and then uploaded into the fun electronic system.

So we went to the DHL pick-up point (which is a computer store on the edge of town) and overnighted the letter to my brother in Washington (and by "overnighted" I mean that it will hopefully arrive someday in the not too distant future). The lady at the computer store had a tremendous amount of difficulty filling out the DHS form because my brother's cell phone has an area code which is not in Washington, D.C. where his address is (because he got the cellphone before he moved to Washington and the DHL system seemed to find this utterly incomprehensible to the point of it being just completely unacceptable), so at one point she kind of handed over the computer to Jonathan and he worked on it a while to try to get it to believe that a sane person would have an address in Washington and a cell phone that he got in Pennsylvania. So we will see if the package ever actually arrives. I doubt it. But if it does, my brother will then take the piece of paper to the U.S. State Department between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. M-F (the only time they are open) and drop it off and then go back to get it in two weeks and send it by DHL directly to the translator in Lucca who will translate, swear, etc.

I emphasize that all that is just the stuff that happened YESTERDAY. I await my next challenges in the So-You-Think-You-Can-Be-Italian sweepstakes with a mixture of awe (at the wonders of the best bureaucratic system in the world) and dread. Today I am resting up and carbo-loading to be prepared.

 

I finally got the results back from my Italian Language Test for Citizenship and it seems, in contrast to all reasonable expectations, that I passed. So we have made an appointment with our immigration attorney and I am now beginning the formal process to become an Italian citizen. This would have shocked all my ancestors who fled from Italy for the bright dream of America, the land of milk and honey. They lived in a very different world.

So I am looking forward to the bureaucracy of the citizenship process. It should be epic, given the red tape we have encountered so far. Even as I write this, in fact, Jonathan is down in town in class taking driving lessons because, two years in to the process, we have been so soundly defeated by the red tape and bureaucracy of the Italian DMV that it finally seemed that the only option was to just start at the beginning. He is the oldest person in class and the only one, he says, who takes notes.

But to counter-balance the good news, a wild boar got into the garden last week and dug up a huge amount of ground in the olive grove. It is difficult to even photograph because the area is so big. Jonathan is sad that we apparently slept quite peacefully though all the excitement. Jonathan would like to see a wild boar in action. Jonathan is nuts.

But in other pork-related news, Monday and Tuesday were the festival for San Biagio. We went early Monday morning and stopped in to the Duomo to get Jonathan's throat blessed. Our friends at the pub assured us that it was happening all day long. But we were such eager little beavers that we arrived too early and wound up being there right at the beginning of the early morning mass. So we backed out as unobtrusively as possible and instead enjoyed all the booths for the fair. Roast pork sandwiches called "porchetta" are the big thing for the fair and it is never too early around here for roast pork. There were whole pigs laid out everywhere we turned. There were also plenty of roast pig heads arranged to appear so as to be calling out to passersby, proving that the porchetta sellers of Pietrasanta know how to have a good time.

We bought some wild-rose-infused oil and dried citrus slices from our friend Manuela at her booth and then a big bunch of yellow mimosa -- the first I've seen this year -- from a flower seller. Then we went to see the animals that were waiting for the Blessing of the Animals in the piazza by the Uffizi di Commune and the mimosa flowers made me very popular with the horses. 

Barbara assure us that, having missed the official activities at the church, I can bless Jonathan's throat myself up at the house as well as any priest could. Yesterday we blessed it with celebratory champagne because of my language exam results. But it was French champagne, so the blessing may not have taken. We will bless it again with the boys down at the pub with good, cheap local red wine. That will do the trick.

Sometimes, lately, the sea turns burnished orange at sunset and sometimes it is deep ink blue. Last night Jupiter and Venus and Mars were all lined up with the moon in a bright band across the sky and Jonathan and I stood out in the yard to look at them and at our shadows on the drive cast by the moonlight. "Let's always remember this moment," we said to each other.

 

Jonathan had his post-op check-up with the surgeon last Thursday. All looks well. The results of the biopsy are not back yet, but the surgeon was very off-hand about them, telling us that the biopsy is really just a formality and that he sees no signs of anything to worry about. This is a huge relief and the world seems much sunnier as a consequence.

Which is odd because it has been a torrentially rainy week -- so much so that we have had to put towels at the bottoms of all the east-facing doors and windows to soak up the water that is blown in under them by the lashing winds.

In such a situation, it is lovely to take refuge down at the pub where absolutely nothing is going on -- in the most convivial way. Last night there was no dinner being served and Valentina was holding the fort on her own. The boys were playing cards in one corner  while Serena and Mario talked together in the opposite corner. We sat with Nonno and Geppolino and Valerio and watched the news and talked about the excellence of the mutton that Daniele had made for lunch that day, the procedure for the throat blessing at the Duomo tomorrow, how Semina has been out hunting, the cingiale that has obviously come into our olive grove and made his presence known by digging up the ground in a big trench, who is living in Mirio's house now, how Nonno has a secret method (accurate, he says, eight out of ten times) for predicting the sex of an unborn child, the medicinal value of red wine, and other topics of general interest.

We watched the last half of a soccer game between Bergamo and Torino and I was happy to see that one of the players was named Belladonna, emblazoned across the back of his jersey. It ended in a 1-1 tie. Nothing much happened. I drank a hot punch al mandorino against the cold weather. For a little while, the world seemed tranquil and serene. For that space of time, it was impossible to imagine the chaos of the horrible political scene so that the ugliness coming out of the US, like a pestilential miasma, seems very far away.

The third episode of our podcast is out now. I am working (sporadically) on our taxes. In two weeks, we are going for a few days to Ireland on one of the cheap flights out of Pisa. Next week, Jonathan will be taking driving lessons in a desperate continuation of our never-ending quest for a valid Italian driver's license. The first purple crocuses have started to appear outside.