“If I want to work here, I must learn Italian,” my brain thought.
One week earlier, I had won tickets to the dress rehearsal of the Metropolitan Opera’s gala performance of Rossini’s Armida. Going to the Met always sat at the top of my educational bucket list, and it felt good to check it off. I couldn’t wait to sit in my seat and imagine standing on the stage.
Upon arrival, I discovered that I had front row tickets at center stage: the action seats where sweat and spit fly, where you can smell the resin from the violins, and where you can possibly even see the brass section using Facebook during the performance. I sat directly behind conductor Riccardo Frizza. I set my subtitles to English. The lights faded.
The men’s chorus entered, and the rehearsal sped along until one of the tenor’s arias. Then the conductor instructed everyone to go back a few measures. He readied his baton, and they all started again.
I didn’t know what was going on, however, because his instructions came in Italian. I sat dumbstruck with no idea what he had said. The bachelor’s degree I would receive in a month hadn’t prepared me to speak Italian. “Well, I’m moving to Italy,” I said inside.
Seven months later, I sat on the marble steps of the basilica in Perugia, Italy, and looked out over the piazza. All I saw was gray. The road, Corso Vannucci, looked like a charcoal “river” of cobblestone. And the “river” supported gray marble walls which reached up to the cold January clouds.
Though my first impression of Perugia seemed bland, color radiated from the people in my view. To my left, four teenagers walked into a café. All spoke quickly and all at the same time. “Italian conversation?” I pondered. “All talk, no listening . . . .” Shortly after that, a man passed me and whispered, “Ciao, bella.” A minute later, another man swept by in the same manner and said, “Sei bellissima!”
My thoughts changed as I realized that these people were also observing me. Over the next 10 minutes, eight men had subtly complimented me, walked the circumference of the piazza, and gloriously positioned themselves on different platforms. They watched me and glared at each other. I felt like an American rabbit being circled by six handsome, tan, well dressed, Mediterranean, Italian-speaking wolves. Experiences like this happened abundantly to me in Italy. You quickly learn that Italians fluently speak body language.
I had come to Perugia to attend L’università per stranieri di Perugia, which calls Il Palazzo Gallenga Stuart home. Built in the 1700s, it once served as a palace for a Perusian noble family. The third-floor classrooms acted as bedrooms and they still have murals painted on the ceilings. Carlo Goldoni, the father of Italian theater, made his professional acting debut in a particularly beautiful room of the palace in 1720, the Sala Goldoni.
Today students can register for classes in one-month, three-month, or six-month increments. At the time I attended, a single month of tuition cost €400, a bargain for the quality of immersion you receive. Beginning classes cover basic Italian language speaking, writing, and pronunciation. Advanced classes add courses on culture, business, and translation. The university also offers classes in history of several Italian art forms, including music. I had the language skills required to comprehend the advanced classes within six months.
My classmates came from all over the world. We quickly began to identify each other by characteristics that exuded from any one individual. For instance, everyone knew I sang. A classroom on the second floor served as my practice space every afternoon. My professors and peers could faintly hear me in the lobby, a floor below. The Russians had the most affable and friendly personalities. In our history of Italian film class, we watched the famous Italian film Il Postino. In the film, the Catholic priest says, “‘The Communists do not believe in God. . . . Do you not know they eat their babies?!” Large belly laughs came from all of us. I called one of my classmates the Syrian Superhero. Every day he wore a Syrian flag around his neck like a cape. I dropped the nickname when I learned that his family lived in Damascus and lived in fear of both the government and Syrian revolutionaries. I made friends with an Arabic man, and though he and I were close, we did not speak the week that American Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden.
In July I moved to Novafeltria to sing in Rigoletto with the program La Musica Lirica. After e-mailing the director to see if they had cast their Maddalena and making a phone call to my parents, I put myself on a train to Emilia-Romagna. The program arranged for me and two other singers to stay with an Italian family.
The Boschetti family taught me to love Italian culture. Mamma Fedora taught me how to make ragù from scratch, a process that takes bottles of wine and a whole day of cooking time. We read to each other while cooking. I bought an Italian/English copy of Alice in Wonderland. The editors had printed Italian on one page and English on the opposite page. Fedora would read me the English pages, then I would read her the Italian pages, and we corrected each other. One afternoon I participated in her yearly tradition of making nocino, an Italian liqueur made with unripe walnuts still soft in their green husks. Sugar, two bottles of wine, a bottle of vodka, 40 unripe walnuts, cinnamon sticks, vanilla beans, and cloves all sit in a glass jug in the hot Italian summer sun. Fedora’s vintage stock from 10 years ago could sell for big bucks!
We often walked through the forests, along the river. Fedora would sing the same two words over and over, every day: “Ooooooo river!” “River” coming from a native Italian speaker sounds like [wiwᴧ]. So, “Ooooooo [Wiwᴧ]!” We would laugh and get in water fights.
One afternoon we walked an unusually long distance, and before we reached town, night had fallen. We squinted to stay on the trail. In those moments I noticed a strange green light in a bush. I stopped and asked, “What the heck can that be?” She pointed to another light. “Lucciole,” she said excitedly. I saw another, and another, all coming from the bushes. Within seconds we stood on our hiking trail surrounded by thousands of fireflies that glowed from every hidden corner. I had never seen them before. Euphoria brought tears to my eyes, and I sent a prayer of thanks and gratitude out into the universe for letting me experience something so beautiful with my new friend. “Lucciole,” I said. “Si, Blair. Lucciole della foresta.”
Later that night, sitting in Fedora’s garden, she sang me a folk song called “Lucciole,” written in the dialect from the Emilia-Romagna region. She also taught me that the word lucciole has a double meaning in Italian slang. It literally means firefly, but Italians also call prostitutes “lucciole.” She expressed that I must always clearly identify what kind of lucciole I am talking about!
The performance of Rigoletto came, and I sang my first full Maddalena. I had participated in the most advanced Italian class offered at La Musica Lirica that summer, and Fedora let me know that my diction sounded fluent opposite a cast of English speakers. In class the next morning, my Italian teacher said, “My husband slept through the whole show—until you came on stage.” A short time later, everyone participated in the certification exams at the close of the program, and I received the highest grade of all the students in my class and earned the nickname Miss Italia. The morning I departed, Fedora and I had coffee at the Café Grande Italia. We said our goodbyes, and I boarded a bus back to Perugia and L’universitá per stranieri.
Stefano Ragni teaches the history of Italian music at the university. His curriculum covers everything from Palestrina to film composer Ennio Morricone. I enjoyed his classes the most and I count my time spent with Stefano as the most valuable performance and musical education experience I have had. He teaches his students to love Italian music. In fact, no matter what music he teaches, he informs you of its Italian origins!
Rumor had it that Stefano allowed students with musical ability to perform with him on concerts in the Grand Hall. The hall looks exactly how it sounds. Gray marble walls rise high up to the ceiling. Hundreds of chairs covered in blue velvet face the front of the hall, which features a grand piano and a painting of Mussolini and the roads to Roma that could easily measure two stories high.
After Stefano discovered I sang seriously, he gave me music to learn every week and I studied it in my apartment. We would have a couple run-throughs, and if I had any mispronunciations he surly corrected me—and then we performed the music on concerts every Wednesday. After a few weeks of our performing together, the newspaper Giornale dell’Umbria featured an article about me. I had an easy conversation with the reporter, who asked about my performance history and living in Italy. Consequently, more people frequented our concerts. After one concert, a very old woman said, “I have not seen an actress like this since La Callas!”
Stefano and I presented a special recital called “Alla Rossini” featuring Rossini’s cantata Giovanna d’Arco, as well as several songs from his Péchés de vieillesse. Stefano’s joke when introducing my pieces always went like this: “Today American soprano Blair Ball will sing French . . . in Italy.” Our multinational audience always laughed.
During my last months in Italy, my language skills flowed into fluency. I blended in among the local population. Everything Italian from olive oil to the country’s rolling thunderstorms permeated into my skin. I had become lean walking everywhere that year, wore fashionable clothing, and actively communicated within the city. My “Una voce poco fa,” had expanded into “Fra il padre” from La donna del lago, and the “Agnus Dei” from Petite messe solennelle.
I spent time visiting cities like Lucca, Siena, Cortona, and Lucignano. One memory, too good not to mention, happened at Christmas. One of my friends lives in a castle in the town Solomeo. At a birthday party, he introduced me to the host, his neighbor and fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli. One party attendee made me chuckle. I watched the six-year-old boy (with blue swimming goggles on his head) sit wide eyed and mesmerized. He stared at an exotic dancer dressed as Santa Claus who jumped out of the birthday cake and danced on the table. (Honestly, I’d like Santa Claus more if he had a top physique and knew how to dance.)
I send you my best wishes if you have interest in learning Italian. Go to Perugia and learn! L’università per stranieri di Perugia effectively teaches Italian. Perhaps you can sing with Stefano. Take your music! Let little old ladies gush about how you remind them of La Divina! Most importantly, meet Italians. Speak Italian with Italians. Spend time in the Mediterranean sun and breeze. Drink the wine. Steal passionate baci! If you go, I hope you find it as enchanting as I did.
