I don’t speak French.

I did, once upon a time. For a few years, actually.

I’m too young to remember the specifics, but I know it to be true because not only do I have audio recordings of my singing and chattering in French, I have a distinct memory of my French grandparents asking me to say something in English (they found my English speaking adorable), and brat that I was I remember saying “carrot”. A word that is the same in English and French.

I sure hope I’ve matured since then, but I sort of doubt it.

My Frenchy French French mother and I, in panama

I spoke French because I lived in Brussels, thanks to my father’s job with Sears International, which is, incidentally how he met my mother, who worked for Sears San Francisco. My father, who hails from the US-Mexico border (my maiden name is Piña), was forced to learn French when Sears moved us to Brussels. My mother, who is Frenchy French French was pretty smug about my dad struggling through his Berlitz course because they’d just done a multi-year stint in Panama where she’d had to learn Spanish. While being pregnant, having a baby (me), and working with the Panamanian medical system to figure out why her child seemed to be deaf (I was, but that’s a story for another day).

When I say my Mom is Frenchy French French, you must understand that is the technical term for a person whose family tree grows in soil scented with Roquefort and Bordeaux. That is, she can trace her French lineage well into the 1700’s. She didn’t leave Paris for New York City until elementary school.

As you might imagine, if you know any immigrant kids, my mom learned English and she learned it fast. She had to, as a relatively scrawny (sorry, Mom), red-haired kid with more moxie than muscles. Or money, for that matter…her path into the new country was not paved with gold ingots. This is all to say, she endured more than her share of mocking and ridicule. Lots of suffering with maybe a tremulous smile of humorous perspective in retrospect, but mostly the agony that comes with a hardscrabble existence in an overpopulated city.

Which is why, year later, when my father, mother, and I arrived in Chicago (they’d been hoping for Brazil as their post-Brussels posting, but ah well), and I wanted to stop speaking Spanish and French, my mom went along with it.

So instead of remaining a fluent French and Spanish speaker, I became a kid whose lips moved on the elevator up to my grandmother’s apartment, as I practiced saying, “Bonjour, Grand-mère.” She’d open the door, a wide smile on her face, her kimono tied just so around her hand-knit sweater (she was something, my grandmother), and I’d proudly announce, “Bonjour, Grand-mère!” and wince at the flatness of the tones. How could it sound right in my head and wrong out loud? I still don’t get it.

My grandmother never seemed to mind. Maybe because she didn’t learn English, so who was she to judge? I guess she didn’t have to, since she spent so much of her time in Chinatown buying fish and chopsticks and she preferred harvesting dandelion greens in Golden Gate Park sporting her kimono and hiking boots than popping into a grocery store. Again, my grandmother deserves her own book.

my grandmother with her sister, note this photo as when I write in “bread and murder in Aramezzo” about a found photograph, this is the one I had in my mind

Suffice it to say, my grandmother’s English was broken at best. So afternoons visiting her were boring affairs of me listening to my mom and grandmother prattle on in a language I couldn’t understand. Now, of course, I wish I’d paid attention, I wish I’d asked more questions. I wish I could have one more meal at my grandmother’s table.

So no, I didn’t grow up speaking French, but just as you can take the girl out of France but you can’t take France out of the girl, and my mom raised me in a way I now know was blurred by her own upbringing. I grew up assuming bread and brie was a perfectly acceptable movie snack. Christmas was not Christmas without an airmailed box of glazed chestnuts. And special occasions called for artichokes and coquilles San Jacques my mom made in her special seashells that she packed and moved from one place to another. From San Francisco to Alabama to Cupertino, the coquilles always tasted the same. Fabulous.

There were downsides to being raised sort-of French, though I didn’t realize them until I was much older. In fact, it wasn’t until Keith and I took our kids to Europe to scout possible locations for our year abroad that my quasi-semi-Frenchness hit me like a stale camembert.

The short story is, I panicked when I had to speak. Every time I entered a shop or ordered in a restaurant, I felt like that little girl again, confused and ashamed at why I couldn’t make the words rise and fall properly.

Italy loaded me with no such baggage—I felt free and light and this was directly responsible for our ultimate decision to settle in Umbria. For the record, I don’t feel like that in France now. Once I figured out where the panic came from, it slotted into its own silly box, and now I love trying to speak French when I’m in France. Or even when I’m not. Ooh la la!

When Keith got his Italian citizenship back in 2013, he asked me if I wanted to join the fun. Everyone was doing it—him, the kids, the cats…why not! It would be easy enough to sign me up as he was registering our marriage in Spello (so the children could get their citizenship). I said, and you won’t believe this.. I said…“Nah.”

Nah.

I’ve spend much time wondering what in the world I was inadvertently smoking. I had a golden ticket and I turned it down????

my grandmother holding my mother, in the garden of their country house outside paris

There are answers to that question, weak as they may be. For one, I was under the impression that getting dual citizenship through marriage (as opposed to birth) was tantamount to renouncing American citizenship, which I wasn’t interested in doing. For two, I felt like I belonged to France in a way that I didn’t feel like I belonged to Italy.

At this point, many of you may be scratching your heads, asking, “Wait, aren’t you the author of Il Bel Centro? Where you spent far too many pages (get an editor, woman!) cleaving into the soul of Italy?”

Well, yes. Still, I felt on the margins. Kind of like I can go to an art museum and admire and be moved and even inspired, but I don’t fancy myself an artist. I may love Italy, I may feel astonishing gratitude that my husband and children have citizenship, but I belong to France.

I took this photo around the corner from where my grandparents once lived. LIttle do you know, I’m terrified of someone asking me a question and having to reckon with my failure as a french girl

France, it turns out, didn’t feel the same.

When we started to plan our ill-fated 2020 trip around the world, I realized that if we wanted to visit all those EU countries on our docket, I better get a hustle on French citizenship. I didn’t figure it would be a problem, as my mother had spoken to many officials over the years who assured her that as the child of a French citizen, I was considered by France to be French. All I had to do was prove it. Easy enough, with all my mom’s passports, my cousin helping me order French marriage certificates and birth certificates for all and sundry to prove my lineage. It should be a snap.

And it was!

Snap!

They denied me. Just like that.

delighting in gelato, and feeling free of the shackles of anxiety in the piedmont, Italy

Why? Because my father’s birth certificate was missing an official stamp. My father, bear in mind, was not my ticket to French nationality by descent. It felt borderline ridiculous.

Easy enough to fix, my relentlessly optimistic self reasoned. I appealed with a new birth certificate with the requisite stamp, checked and double checked.

I sent that off in January of 2020 but by then the French had more viral fish to fry. Global pandemic and all. Our travel plans became a house of cards until I had a brain wave. Italy at that time (and for the next year), blocked entry to travelers, but still welcomed returning citizens. With Keith and the kids having Italian citizenship, we could theoretically go to Spello. I say theoretically because when we checked in, when we boarded, when we crossed through passport control in Rome—every time—I felt sure someone would narrow their eyes at me and say that while my family could enter, I had to hightail it home with my tail between my legs. We did hear at least one story of that happening, though I told myself, mantra-style, in that case the spouse was traveling without his Italian anchor. While I had my husband, my children, and all the paperwork that tied us together.

In any case, Italy’s feelings about dividing families is, thank goodness, much more open-hearted than the US’s, and I was waved through at every step.

We settled back in Spello, and got used to living in an Italy living with COVID. Then, while in Venice, in December of 2020, my friend fished a letter from France out of my mailbox (mail forwarding is not 100% reliable, it turns out) and sent me a photo of it. The letter said my appeal had been accepted into the system and they’d let me know when a decision was made. They asked that I not contact them, a request that was easy enough to comply with since I had no contact information other than the mailing address.

So I sat patiently. Though I do admit, I checked the mailbox every day, hoping for good news from France.

I finally got word in December of 2022, but it wasn’t good news. I wasn’t even sure it was bad news, really. It was mostly confusing news.

The letter wasn’t a denial of my appeal. Instead, it said that the method by which I lodged the appeal was outlawed in June of 2022, and now I required an attorney to manage the process. In addition, the letter said I had to do this within 6 months of November of 2022. A reminder, so you don’t have to do the math…I was told that my method of appeal, which was legal when submitted three years previous, was now deemed no longer adequate. Not only that, I had until May of 2023 to start the appeal, though the law changed in June and I didn’t get this letter until December.

I flew into action mode. In other words, as I told my newsletter subscribers (are you subscribed to the Grapevine? There’s a link at the bottom!) I anger scrubbed my stovetop while hurling invectives under my breath. “And my name is misspelled on the letter! First and last! And it wasn’t even dated! And, and, and…!”

Tentatively, probably not wanting to poke the bear, Keith asked me if perhaps it was time to reconsider getting Italian citizenship. “But this was supposed to be easy!” I insisted. “Boh,” said Keith, in true Italian style. “It’s clearly not.”

The truth is, I felt that ship had sailed. I refused to sign up for the tricolore when it took nothing more than a form, and there is now a language exam to get Italian citizenship through marriage, and the process can take a whopping four years. I don’t really have four years, as as soon as our youngest flies the coop, we have plans to pick up the baton of world adventure that COVID kicked to the side.

I spent the next day contacting French lawyers. About, oh, thirty of them. When I say French lawyers, I mean immigration lawyers who practice in France. Google got me a lot of names, and I found more by trolling embassy websites.

Meanwhile, Keith quietly investigated the Italian angle. He found out that the language test doesn’t required fluency, just functionality. I’d have to take the B1 language exam, which corresponds to the intermediate level. He looked the test over, and thought it wasn’t easy by any means, but totally doable.

He also learned that Italian law had changed and now those nationality by marriage applications were processed within two years.

After a day or two, my natural default state of optimism took the wheel back from the panic monster. I decided that if I went the French route, I was actually glad to have a lawyer on board, helping me through the process. I heard from many, and they were kind and reasonable and mostly didn’t charge too much. Many offered a free consultation, some helped me understand the process, one even did a free records review. The process had been confusing and isolating and the idea of having someone in my corner felt pretty reassuring.

Some lawyers even offered up free advice. One told me I’d be better off applying from scratch. And one lawyer said he no longer handled nationality by descent cases anymore because the government will find any reason to deny me. Like, the lawyer added, the stamp.

This was a paradigm shift for me. I had assumed France would approach my request like Italy approached Keith’s. Chart the paper trail and we’ll stamp it done. Punto e basta. But instead, they were going to try to deny me? Why have a law offering citizenship to children of citizens when that’s not actually want you want to do? It’s baffling.

I got that lawyer’s email the same day I heard from a reader who said: “Go for Italian citizenship. That way, when you run into problems, you’ll know its bureaucracy. With the French, it may well be spite.”

In any case, over coffee with my friend Sandy who lives most of the year in Paris, we were talking about how to proceed, and in the course of the conversation, I realized that if I moved forward with French citizenship, this would only be the first hurdle. After that, I’d need a passport, which means I would have to go to the embassy and shamefacedly admit that I don’t speak French. I’d be the kid in the elevator again, humiliated by what she let go of.

The gears popped into place. Those gears being—

For every French lawyer I communicated with, I erased my email footer. The one that says, “Writer with Italy at heart.”
I can manage a consulate visit in Italian, I cannot in French.
If I have different citizenship than the rest of my family, it means every place we go, every hurdle we hit, they’d all go to the Italian embassy and I would go to the French. I wouldn’t just feel alone, I’d feel insecure and small, a fragile hanger-on. I understand Italians—their language (to some degree), their mannerisms, their culture. Not totally of course, but the point is I get Italy in a way I couldn’t get France unless I lived there.
Pursuing Italian citizenship meant finally I’d have a measure of accountability to learn Italian. It’s been on my to-do list for oh, ten years? And I’ve felt sheepish about the fact that I haven’t done it… I questioned my motivation, my drive. I wrestled with feeling like a failure, even while I continued to put it off. But this would give me the goal I needed to learn a language of the people who inhabit the country I want to live in. As Sandy says, you can live in another country and keep watching American movies and reading English-language newspapers, but then why are you living abroad? To which I answered, because you want to experience life in that place. But then it hit me—can you experience life, really experience it, if you don’t speak the language? If you can’t read those newspapers and watch those movies?
On my birthday, which landed right in the thick of all this, about half my birthday greetings were in Italian. One or two in French (from family). A stupid metric, but I am relationship driven. So how can I deny that I have all these relationships, these ties, with Italians?

Still, though… I wasn’t sure. Do I belong to Italy?

Then I realized, maybe applying for citizenship in Italy would be the thing that made me feel like I’m part of Italy, rather than a spectator. Maybe putting my heart, bruised by France, back on the line, maybe this was the final piece that would anchor me to a place that feels like home. A commitment ceremony of sorts.

Right around this time, my daughter announced she didn’t care about the World Cup because Italy hadn’t qualified. And it occurred to me… if Italy played France, who would I root for? Oh, this was easy. Azzurri, every time. I know those boys, one of them grew up just down the hill from Spello! No, I never met him or any of the team, but I felt like I had. I could cheer them on and then make them a carbonara.

It may be too strong a statement to say I decided to abandon the pursuit of legal ties with France because of Azzurri, but it also pretty well captures the process.

I don’t feel mad at France anymore. Maybe you think anger at a government entity isn’t rational, and you’d be right. But I have an unreasonable need to be loved by faceless bureaucracies and my rejection easily turns to fury. In fact, back to soccer, I refused to support France in the World Cup because I was still annoyed with the whole lot of them.

The responses from the lawyers when I emailed them all back to tell them I wasn’t going to pursue French citizenship helped soften my defenses. In fact, I wound up wanting to invite them all to dinner. Seriously, as slapdash as the letter from France was, the lawyers more than made up for it. Gracious, kind, understanding. They even said they were happy to have helped. Keith had questioned why in the world I’d close the loop with these lawyers, it’s not like they’d care. But I’m glad I did—I felt complete afterwards. Though a part of me wished I’d hired one from the beginning.

Anyway, this is all to say, I’m not cross anymore. Maybe bemused more than anything. In fact, we celebrated my 50th birthday with French 75’s, duck confit, and a cheese course. As I sipped my drink I considered how my tie to France remains, whether or not France recognizes me as one of her children. I guess I’m kinda illegitimate.

As a lemons into limoncello person, I believe this is all for the best. Now, I am learning Italian, every day. I’m watching Italian TV shows. When I get group texts from farms I followed in Spello, I read them. My Italian friends speak English, but I’m throwing in Italian anyway. I wake up every morning to the photo Keith enlarged and framed of the view outside our window our last sojourn in Spello, and I think maybe, now, I’m allowed to call it home.

I’m beginning to think of myself of, if not belonging to Italy exactly, at least Italy adjacent. All those afternoons spent watching swallows inscribe love poems to the sky. All those conversations with the butcher as he told me the best way to prepare a sauce. All those walks along the aqueduct as I trailed my fingers against silvery olive leaves and ancient Roman stones. All those paused conversations in the street to chat with neighbors about their latest haul of wild asparagus or their new hobby of painting wooden flutes or how many kinds of greens grow on Monte Subasio, they have been footsteps in my path to belonging.

Here’s why this matters, for me and for you. Italian citizenship would solidify my bond with what I like to think of as my adopted country, but, even now, without that passport, I am beginning to consider myself Italian. And even though I will never have a French passport, I still feel French. So maybe none of us need a passport to open the door to belonging to a place.

Maybe belonging can happen without any paperwork at all.

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