Righting Words

1:30. October 9, 2011. My Apartment in Firenze.
Like I’ve said in previous blogs, Italy is a place that takes you by the arm, sits you down and makes you face a world of human history just so you might contemplate what it is you want for your own contribution. You may reach any old piazza and you are presented with the fact that millions of generations of people have stood on those very stones; martyrs, murderers, saints and sinners alike have reached the same place in which you stand and made their own contemplations and subsequent contributions. The language is the same way. You don’t get to say that you love a chair the same way that you say you love a person. You must order your feelings and decide what is important enough to love. You might say, of an object, “mi piace la sedia,” or in English, “the chair is pleasing to me,” in other words, you like the chair and it pleases you but you don’t love the chair. It doesn’t end there though. You don’t even say “I love you,” to your friends, these words, this phrase, “ti amo,” is reserved for the most intimate and precious of human relationships.
You may have heard before that Eskimos have 26 words for “love.” In Italy they have just one and they use it sparingly. I found this out while sitting next to a new friend I recently met at a coffee shop, as we exited the shop she shouted back to the staff with whom she’s become well acquainted, “ti voglio bene!” This means, roughly translated, “I want the best for you,” and it’s a common saying here. I asked her, “What does that mean, why do you say that?” so she explained this to me – Americans have an obsession with the word “love.” We say we love a chair and we love our friends and we love our family and we love the way the new paint color looks on the walls, and we use the same word for all of it. It’s not that there aren’t an abundance of words in the English language to express a liking for something but rather that we often choose this word “love.” It is different in Italian, they understand that the feelings associated with certain objects and certain people are so different that it is just inaccurate to use the same word to explain them all.
I’ve taken pride, in the past, in the ease with which I can tell someone I love them, I pretty much say it to all of my friends and family, I say it about places and foods and books and the color grey. Maybe I shouldn’t. All of this sameness, perhaps eventually will dilute or disguise the real “amo,” the reserved love. Italy is a place that makes you really want to know that reserved love, and Italian is a language that forces you to dole it out with discernment. To decide what it is you truly reserve love for and then to say it with absolute clarity. This may be the most important thing one can do in their short lifetime.
My recent revelations have taught me just how wonderful and supportive people can be. It seems I’m not the only one to have reached a piazza in their lifetime. It is an ever-humbling journey to acknowledge your mistakes and then start to fix them and you really can’t fake this type of humility. More than anything I’m realizing the “amo” in my life. In the face of all these deeply humbling realizations I have such dear gratitude for the people who’ve reserved their most real love for me and who continue to stick by me. You are the reason that people invent expressions like “ti amo” in the first place. You all mean more than any words in any language could ever express.