A few days before I left for Europe, it happened that I found myself in conversation with an elderly man over tea. He hadn’t travelled in many years, and was very keen to hear all about my plans. Just before we parted ways, he leaned in close and told me conspiratorially, “Mark my words, after you come home you will say the Italians were the most giving, most welcoming people you met.” I’m not one to generalize people or countries, but the Italians I met would live up to the prophecy.

The trip gave me the opportunity to finally meet Valeria, a pen pal I’d been writing to for about ten years, who had invited me to stay with her and her parents, Giuseppe and Giuseppina. Really, those are their names. They live in the Piedmont region of northwest Italy, in a town so tiny I have yet to find it in any atlas. The town is on a little hill, with one road connecting all the necessities of life: the store, post office, doctor’s office, church and castle. The view from the top of the hill is of a rolling patchwork of vineyards, with a smattering of red-tiled rooftops. Valeria and her parents live at the base of the hill, near the vineyards, on the road that leads to larger towns and cities with names that conjure up fabled images: Alba, Asti, Santa Vittorio, Torino, and even a town with the singular name of Mango. I hadn’t expected Piedmont to be so lush; calendars, coffee table books and movies had led me to believe that Tuscany held the monopoly on sun-drenched vineyards and lavish crops. But the list of food produced by Valeria’s family alone seemed endless -- from lettuce and tomatoes to the more exotic lemons and pomegranates, not to mention wine from their own vineyard, peaches from their own trees, oil from their own olives.... you get the idea. It was September, so the vineyards were cloaked in autumnal beauty, with golden sunshine and blankets of mist giving the hillsides a dreamy glow. The quiet emptiness of the road was occasionally interrupted by a slow, small, three-wheeled truck, laden with a bounty of dusky purple grapes. Valeria showed me the cellar where a huge barrel was just being emptied of its wine and rows of dusty bottles lay waiting to be filled. Everything about the place was impossibly perfect, the quintessential Italian experience.

Giuseppina, or Pina for short, used to cook in the family’s restaurant, and it seemed to me that she was still cooking for a crowd of people rather than just the four of us. The food was overabundant in quantity and impressive in its simplicity. Something as basic as green beans cooked in olive oil and garlic would be absolutely the best thing I’d ever tasted... until the next meal, when she would produce something even more amazing. One of the first words Valeria taught me was basta - enough, to avoid being overloaded with too much of a good thing.

Valeria and Giuseppe were at work during the week, so I spent a lot of time with Pina. Neither of us spoke the other’s language, but we communicated with gestures, drawings and facial expressions. Spending time with Pina was like being in Italian Immersion Kindergarten; she saw any little experience as an opportunity to build my vocabulary. I was sketching outside one afternoon when she sat beside me and laid a book on the table. She opened it with a little smile and I saw that it was her wedding album. As we looked through the photos, by pointing to the members of her family she taught me the words for husband, daughter, sister, brother, cousin, etc.

A walk up the hill one morning was another lesson: tree, flower, vine, church, castle. We stopped at the store, where I was introduced to the man behind the counter in a stream of Italian I didn’t understand, but I did catch the word “Canada.” This raised some interest - it didn’t take long to realize this town doesn’t see many visitors - and the shop keeper dug around in a drawer until he produced a handful of postcards. There were two images: one was a present-day photo of the town, the other was a black and white photo from some years ago when the town was even smaller. He proudly gave me two of each.

Then Pina led me into an unmarked building next to the post office. We entered a small room, all four walls lined with chairs, many of them occupied. Pina and I sat down. As people were called into an adjoining room one by one, I gathered that this was the waiting room for the doctor’s office and that she had an appointment. Not surprisingly, Pina knew everyone in the room, and she proceeded to catch up on the local gossip. My instinct was to wait outside or meet her back at home, but I got the impression I was being shown off as the visiting Canadian. She was telling them about my trip; the chatter was sprinkled with some words I recognized, Parigi - Paris, where I’d just been, and Venezia, where I was headed next. The word “Canada” was generally followed by an interested glance in my direction. I mostly nodded and smiled. When Pina’s turn came I was left in the waiting room, conspicuous in my dissimilarity, and remembering Valeria’s explanation when I had said it felt like people were staring at me: “Well, you don’t look Italian.”

Pina and Valeria tried to teach me a phrase in Italian that features all the particular sounds of their local dialect, and translates as “two peppers plunged in olive oil.” I thought I’d done all right, but when Giuseppe came in and they had me recite my new phrase for him he just looked at me blankly with no idea what I’d said, which was cause for great hilarity. I tried teaching Pina the phrase in my language, but there was no way she could wrap her Italian tongue around the English word “plunged,” and we all ended up teary-eyed from laughing.

When I showed interest in the pasta she made from scratch with no recipe, Pina said she would teach me to make gnocchi and gave an impromptu cooking class. She expertly mixed the ingredients without measuring and showed me how to knead the soft, silky dough, all the while dictating the instructions to Valeria, who wrote them down in English so I would be able to make gnocchi at home in the future. The dough was separated into quarters, each quarter was divided into several long rolls, and those in turn were cut into bite-sized pieces. Then the fun part -- rolling the pieces of dough over a fork to make ridged, hollow little barrel shapes. I was eager to try, but first Pina motioned for me to fetch my camera from my room. When I returned she had a portion of dough on the board in each stage of the process so I would have the complete lesson in one photo, her hands poised in gnocchi-rolling position. The last instruction in my recipe, as translated by Valeria, is “refer to the photograph!” Once the instructions had been written down, we rolled the rest of the dough together. At dinner that night Pina announced proudly, if inaccurately, that I had made the gnocchi by myself -- a teacher boasting of what her student had accomplished.

When I think back on my time in Italy one of my strongest memories is of Pina, and not just because I spent a significant amount of time with her. In Pina’s bright kitchen, overlooking sloping vineyards and the houses of people who have lived there all their lives, she taught me more than how to make gnocchi. Pina welcomed me with her generous spirit and sense of fun, and showed me that people don’t need to speak the same language to communicate. Since that trip I have taken classes in Italian. I often imagine going back and surprising Pina with a fluent Italian greeting. Although it may be some time before I can amass the funds for another European trip, I plan to return one day and make gnocchi again with la mia mamma italiana.

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