Obligation

Obligation

My friend Barbara picks me up on her Vespa in front of Termini train station, where several men on motorbikes stopped to see if the blonde waiting on the corner was for sale. Evidently, women, especially ruby-lipped bleach-heads, don't wait for a friend alone on the street and certainly not in that section of town. In a residential neighborhood, yet another Italian mom feeds me an incredible home made meal to the point of gluttony. The conversation runs from genetically pre-conditioned brain cells to why Americans eat so much – which I found pretty amusing since all the Italians seem to eat multi-course meals at least twice a day (but they do, for the most part, seem to stay thin.)

I'm told by several friends that Italian women don't have the independence that American women have. Because of cultural and family mores in place for lifetimes, one 70-year old friend tells me her uncle would not let her marry as a young woman because she was required to stay in town and work for him in the family business. When they marry, the Italian woman moves to her husband's town, which could be halfway across the country. In that generation, women were not allowed to disagree. She finally married at the age of 45 when her uncle died. Her husband passed away after only a decade of marriage. After that, dating is impossible in such a community, she explains,. She confessed that her life was very depressing and I felt saddened as this intelligent woman was forced by archaic obligations to concede to a life of basic slavery. I silently acknowledge how very fortunate I am as a product of the 60's revolution which kept me from a life of permanent domesticity and gave an entire generation the ability to leap over the edge of the expected.

I pour another glass of red wine from the carafe and order the ossobucco and cooked chicory greens. The waiters and tables of old Italian men wonder why a women is eating alone. Tomorrow, I train down to Naples to visit the small part of the family which remained in Baiano when most of the town emptied into ships for the new country of America from the early 1900s on. My 30-year old cousin, Stefania, tells me she is marrying in September next year. Things are changing in Italy. Youth can't afford to marry these days and many have lengthy engagements, even a decade, before leaving the family home. Stefania lives in the house built by our Belloisi family in 1704 on the ruins of a yet older and larger house the family owned. She tells me that I will sleep in the ancestral home (or maybe it was that I was sleeping with the ancestor ghosts?) I hope they're ok with independent blondes traveling alone.