Erba Lunese
Erba Lunese
Here we are: 2 Americans, 1 French/Italian and 1 Roman. Our Italian language skills are improving, but we are certainly not fluent. Martina speaks a little English (but hates to speak it….she thinks that it sounds horrible. She hates the word ‘spoon’, it makes her crazy!), she prefers French and speak Italians fluently, but doesn’t write it that well. Claudio is a Roman who loves fast cars, so to compensate for not having a fast car he speaks as fast as he wishes he was driving. How do we communicate? Well, there is a lot of pantomime and sound effects. During the whole construction phase, a drill was a “BRR BRRRR”. As in, “Have you seen the BRR BRRR?” That’s simple stuff. What about when we are discussing the fine points of record keeping? Or a complicated discussion about chopping parsley, where I’m trying to say that I think that we might be bruising the cell membrane walls instead of cutting them?
Last night, we were talking with some friends about how we communicate, and Claudio termed our language “Erba Lunese” (air-ba loon-a-zee). He’s so right! We have invented a new language that is based in Italian, with French/American elements and relies heavily on sign language and noise making. Some one should be doing a study on us: how a language is created and evolves. And when we get tired or stressed? That’s when it gets really strange! We’ve watched other people, either English or Italian speaking, and they can’t make heads or tails out of what we are saying. Most of the time it’s not a problem, but sometimes it can lead to issues….like the dishwasher not showing up last night because of misunderstandings.
Today is our first rainy day in about 4 or 5 months, the first day of continuous, slow rain. All the plants are just luxuriating in their bath; they aren’t being pounded by rain, but are just being treated to a gentle spa-like rain. The Tevere River has actually run dry in the past week; the water situation has been dire since July so this is a much-needed rain. Here is our sugar plum tree that is right outside the restaurant door. It’s such a generous tree; it’s been steadily giving us fruit since July. The other day, it dropped a plum right on one of our diners! She took it as a gift and promptly popped it into her mouth, and I would have done the same.