WORDS: Emily Mais
Connect with Emily on Instagram | @failing.gracefully | EmilyMais.com
I don’t know who to address this love letter to. If it is to a group of people, a culture, a region, a country. A city. A feeling. An old home, a new home, or someone in particular.
So, instead, I will address it to you.
I’m currently house-sitting a friend’s apartment north of Rome. Beside me is dinner – roasted cherry tomatoes with garlic and olive oil, and a loaf of fresh bread. I was raised in a half-Italian, half-British household, and, ironically, I do not come from a lineage of Italians who love to cook.
“Rustic is always better, anyways,” my Italian mother would say to me.
And by “rustic” she meant using the least amount of ingredients and choosing the recipes with the least amount of steps. And she was always right.
Tomatoes were always the focal point of every meal – from my Nonno’s pizza rosso and pappa al pomodoro, my mom’s pasta fagioli, and my personal favorite: when my Nana would preserve green tomatoes in the summertime.
After my Nonno would take my sister and I to the public pool, we’d spend the rest of our August days sitting underneath the sun in the backyard, dipping pieces of bread into a mixture of olive oil and that bitter juice of the green tomato.
I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. Like many Italian immigrants, my Nonno and Nana came to Toronto, somewhere in between their late teens and early 20’s. When my Nonno, Danny, first arrived, he brought over his family and of course, his new wife, Menina – my Nana.
My Nana’s mom suffered from a heart attack immediately after my Nana left, and my Nana has always believed she died from a broken heart.
My Nonno worked night shifts at the car factory down the road, while my Nana charmed her way into working at the local bank.
“I walked in looking like Sofia Loren, with your mom in the baby stroller, so of course they had to offer me a job.”
My Nonno and Nana were the textbook definition of complete opposite. But they both knew how to live, and how to exist, each in their own way. And no one was going to tell them otherwise.
My Nana wore a floor length, green sequin gown at her son’s wedding and sang directly to him in front of hundreds of people, while my Nonno’s favorite place in the world was sitting in his backyard, not speaking to anyone.
Love is a concept that I’ve spent months trying to define over the past year. And I’ve come to realize that trying to define love, something that is just meant to be felt, is exhausting.
“Why Rome?” everyone back in Toronto always asks me.
“I have no idea,” is my honest reply.
And why Danny? And why Menina? Two complete opposites – yet opposites who spent over fifty years together.
But maybe, that’s the point of love. To remind us that it requires no rational thought. No drawn out thinking and mathematical processes or conclusions. No schedules, no rules. No right or wrong, no correct or incorrect. It’s just a feeling. A feeling that comes from the heart, and not the mind.
A living, breathing feeling.
I think about my Nana in her green sequinned dress and my Nonno staying put in his tomato garden. I think about how my mom taught us how to not only live, but survive and thrive off of two main ingredients: bread and tomatoes. Nothing more, nothing less.
So, maybe this is a love letter to the chaos, to the unpredictability. To the unknown. A love letter to those love stories that won’t make sense to the outside, and maybe, they’re not supposed to.
And at the same time, it’s a love letter to the simplicity of living. Slow afternoons in the garden, in the kitchen, roasting tomatoes. In the April sun with a bottle of Vermentino and 2 of your closest girlfriends.
A love letter to time.
Time to make sense of what we don’t know, and time to appreciate what we do know.
What we know is love.
And what we know is Italy.
And do we understand either? Maybe we’re not meant to. But that’s the magic of it.
“It’s crazy, but there’s nowhere else like it.”
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