Being Italian in Amsterdam

Most days I forget to be consciously Italian until coffee, pasta, football or my mother’s voice makes subtlety impossible. #

Being Italian in Amsterdam is much less dramatic than I once imagined living abroad would be. I do not wake up beneath an invisible tricolore. I wake up because the alarm is annoying. I make coffee because civilisation requires it. I get dressed, choose perfume, check my hair, get on the bicycle and go to work. Nobody plays mandolins. Then something happens and Italy surfaces without permission. Coffee is wrong and my entire ancestry apparently activates. Somebody talks about food and I become more opinionated than the situation requires. Sampdoria enters a conversation and I am suddenly Dad’s daughter from Genova in a way that has nothing to do with my postcode. Mom calls and my hands start moving while I speak even if I am alone. An Italian song appears unexpectedly somewhere and my body recognises it before my brain decides whether I even like it. There are words I prefer in Italian because English feels too flat around them. There are things I now prefer saying in English because that is the language in which I learned to discuss them at work. Dutch has started inserting itself in practical corners. My head is becoming a badly managed multilingual office and somehow everything gets done. Today at work I switched languages mentally several times without noticing until later. I came home and made dinner that happened to be Italian without thinking of it as cultural preservation. It was just food I know how to make. That may be the point where belonging becomes deepest, when culture stops presenting itself as culture. I don’t cook pasta to remain Italian. I cook pasta because I want pasta. I don’t call Dad to maintain a connection with Ligurian heritage. I call Dad because he is Dad. I don’t wear Angel because it represents Milanese memory. I wear it because I love it and because it smells like me now, even though Mom is inside that smell forever. The intellectual labels come afterward. Life happens first. Amsterdam has become the same way. I do not cycle because I am integrating into Dutch culture. I cycle because my bicycle is downstairs and it is how I get somewhere. I do not celebrate King’s Day as a sociological exercise. I celebrate because the city celebrates and I live in it. Perhaps the nicest thing about four years here is that I no longer stand outside my own life taking notes on what it means to be here. I just am. The notes come later, at nearly midnight, when I open this page and notice what happened without announcing itself.

Remember me, Eclipse.