In October of 2009, I wrote a piece I called “Paralyzed in Paradise” — a fever dream, composed at 4 AM in Dallas, somewhere between sleep and the dread of a workday ahead. Italy was falling apart from within, I wrote, and couldn’t see it. The wines had too much wood, too much Merlot, too much of everything except what had made them worth caring about in the first place, and in my dream I burned the barriques, exiled the consultants, starved the PR firms on zibibbo raisins until the poison leeched out of their press releases. And then the alarm rang out in the early morning fog of autumn.
That was my first serious attempt to name what Italianità means when it goes missing — by describing the space around the sculpture.
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There was also a night in Ortona in 2010, walking a beach alone in the darkness, waiting for something — the sun, the sea, the summer that hadn’t arrived yet — and finding instead a wine bottle that had washed up on the shore, scrubbed soft by years of sand, and I stood there turning it over in my hands wondering what promise it had once carried, what dreams the people involved in making it had brought to the work, whether they labored their whole lives to afford a little house on the cliff above me, only to leave it as an entitlement to some thankless niece or nephew who would never understand what it cost. Italy was showing me again that Italianità is not a postcard — not Amalfi and golden light and pasta on a terrace — but also the undertow, also the weight of what a civilization carries when it begins to forget what it is for.
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I grew up with it, or at least with the shadow of it, beginning in my grandfather’s vineyard in California and continuing through summers in Italy, working harvests with relatives who never needed a word for what they were doing because it was simply how they lived — you pick the grapes, you eat what the season gives you, you pour the wine and sit with whoever is there, and the table is the point, and the wine is the frame around the table, and nobody is performing anything. When I moved to Texas in 1978 and spent the next forty years trying to translate all of that — not just the wines, but the thing underneath the wines — to people encountering it for the first time, I was always reaching for something that resisted being handed over directly, something you could gesture toward but not quite package.
Italianità. Not some concept workshopped for a PowerPoint presentation, a podcast or a press release. The noun that Italians use for the quality of being irreducibly, organically, stubbornly Italian — it resists translation because it resists reduction, and any attempt to pin it down too precisely tends to kill it in the pinning.
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The spirit of Italianità had traveled with the diaspora — to the Bronx and to Melbourne and to Buenos Aires — not as nostalgia exactly, but as a way of being in the world that refused to be fully assimilated, that persisted in the way a table gets set or a meal gets made long after the language has been lost.
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In 2014, writing about Franciacorta, I tried to put it plainly: that the wine appealed to my sense of Italianità, to what it means in my world to embrace the varied culture of Italy — the squash blossoms stuffed with anchovies and fried alongside the Satèn, each one insisting on the other, neither making sense without the other present.
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I carried cases, poured tastings, educated salespeople, stood at trade show booths in Verona, walked vineyards in Friuli and Sicily and Abruzzo and the Langhe, and through all of it I was trying to say one thing: that Italian wine, and Italianità, is not a category but a culture, carrying within it a set of relationships — between people and land, between food and season, between the person pouring and the person drinking — that you cannot separate from the liquid in the glass without destroying both.
And then in 2018, sitting in a booth at Vinitaly, tasting Prosecco as if I had never encountered it in my life, I felt what I could only call hospitalitas — that most Italianità of things, extended across a table in a warm and open manner — and I understood again, as I keep having to understand, why I gave forty years to this.
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In 2011, driving back through the fog toward the Friuli airport after a week in Colli Orientali — a van full of sleeping compadres, the flat winter light coming through the windows — I admitted something to myself that I had never quite managed to say aloud before, which is that Italy is the nail I hang my purpose on, that I keep coming back because there I can still be the person I was at fourteen with my father’s camera, the outsider peering into every little corner that catches my attention, not mocked for my sensibility, invisible enough to catch something that the people who live there have long since stopped seeing.
A week in one place, I wrote then, Colli Orientali — how valuable is that for one to get an idea of this Italianità? Who really knows?
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I keep coming back. I carry it in the way I have written about wine for twenty years without asking anyone’s permission.
The real thing lives somewhere in that February fog, in a question asked to no one in particular — in a bottle turning over slowly in the hands of someone standing alone on a dark beach in Abruzzo, still wondering what it is he has found.
