Honest Conversations with Georgette

“Mamma, can I have… la canzone… that of… dinosauri?” In our home, syntax is a suggestion and monolingualism is more a fiction. We operate in a haphazard trilingual cassoulet-like-casserole of French, Italian, and English: a linguistic hodgepodge that leaves guests visibly bewildered, yet feels remarkably fluid to the core inhabitants, us. It’s the kind of everyday reality that gets me thinking about the actual, messy architecture of multilingual households.

By now you’ve probably seen the heat-map graphics with Florence shaded an alarming dark red. The weather station at Peretola has now logged six consecutive days at or above 36°C, a feat that has never happened in more than seventy years of continuous record-keeping here. I was partly inspired to write this after seeing Lindsey Tramuta cover this topic about France’s boiling temperatures.

There comes a time every year in Florence when we go from dreaming about the idea of summer, of taking a beat and relaxing, as if our work or our lives had the same amount of flexibility as my daughter’s school schedule, to realizing what that actually means in a city like this. Even The David has finally admitted he needs air-con È caldo. You can feel it in the summer haze, in the dust that coats the cars, in the cicadas who are now omnipresent in the hills around where we live.

What happens when you stop couching the bad with the good. If this post makes you feel something, if you send this newsletter to friends and listen to my podcast — consider becoming a subscriber. Have you ever said yes to something and immediately regretted it? This week started with a low-grade mental freak-out, which, honestly, tracks if you know me well. I’d agreed to speak at Fuckup Nights — a global movement where three speakers get up and talk about a pivotal failure that changed their life.

From free healthcare myths to the mafia romanticization— a long-term resident and a born-and-raised Italian compare notes. It’s all vespas and rainbows. Image by Jan Tůma from Pixabay Ah yes, Italy. Where nobody works, everyone eats carbs without consequence, and the men are either on a Vespa or on the phone with their mother. Cappuccino has a curfew. And somehow, everyone is on a three-month vacation. Oh, and did you hear health care is free here?

Our little house on via dello sprone, a three floor walkup where we spent 7 years and the first part of Covid I’ll never forget when I moved to Italy in 2005 and got my first taste of the wonderful weirdness of Italian homes.

This was meant to be out on Friday and yet between platform gremlins and the general lethargy of a Tuscan long holiday weekend, our Friday release drifted into Monday. We are a few days late but this episode is way too important to simply brush under the rug. Last week, Valentina and I take ob the oversaturated SEO Tourism Complex which consists of all of that hollow cycle of viral reels and recycled listicles that threatens turning Tuscany into a place tourists go and everyone else avoids.

Buongiorno and a rather poignant Friday to you all. My heart, it must be said, is a touch (or perhaps more than a touch) exposed this week, largely due to the monumental occasion of my daughter turning five. Five. It’s a number that has, quite frankly, rendered me a delightfully soggy mess, pondering with no small amount of wonder how we journeyed from that hospital room in Baar, Switzerland, half a decade ago, to this very week, here in Florence.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. - Italo Calvino Todo Modo, a place of so many happy memories and damn good books If there was ever a week to hold onto that dream, it is this one and honestly I have a good reason to talk about books because this Thursday, April 23rd, marks World Book Day, and here in Florence, we are celebrating with the first edition of “A Firenze fioriscono libri” (Books Bloom in Florence).

If mothers really do know best, Italian mothers might know better. I came across a piece in Italy Segreta that reads like a love letter to the writer’s mom—someone who fixes everything from a cold to a broken heart, and then just… keeps going. There’s the eight-foot ladder she’ll climb to clean a window rather than sleep knowing it’s smudged, the clothes sewn by hand, the Sunday sugo made from scratch, and that kind of love that holds everything up.