Traveling Lite (sort of)

We're boarding in a few minutes and I got away with two carry-on bags despite bringing 3 cookbooks for the cousins, one fragile candy dish (from my mom for the cousins) and 3 t shirts, 3 dress shirts, gym shorts, a pair of dress shoes, nice shorts, a pair of drum sticks and a drumming practice pad for Joe. I would have brought the whole drumset, but I hate to check in bags!

Leaving for Italy

     Tomorrow I leave for a two-week visit to Italy. This is a postcard picturing the Dante Alighieri, the ship that my grandmother took when she left Genoa in 1920 and traveled to the United States. She was a little over twenty at the time and left her father and several of her brothers and sisters behind in order to join siblings who were already living in San Francisco. She wouldn't return again for thirty years when she traveled by ship once again, this time with her husband - my grandfather Peter Ratto.

     As it happens, it's been exactly 30 years since I last visited Italy. One week from today my son Joe and I will be staying in Genoa a few blocks from the same harbor from which my grandmother sailed 92 years ago. The next day my cousin Milio will pick us up and take us to nearby Chiavari where we'll meet with some other cousins not far from the little village where my grandmother was born. I've been practicing my Italian, trying to remember some of what I have forgotten since college and even managed a (sort of) Italian conversation with Milio on the phone last week.

     I'm sure that a great deal has changed since my last time in Genoa when Heidi and I visited during our honeymoon. I can't imagine, though, how difficult it must have been for my grandmother to say good bye to her family, never knowing if she would see them again, and how surreal it must have been for her to return after three decades.

I can't wait to be back in Italy.