La Dulce Viterbo

When we arrived in the small town of Viterbo, Italy, we were worried that we would stand out as glamorless Americans in our shlumpy clothes, especially when we wore our shirts with English phrases.
As it turns out, wearing shirts with English words emblazed on them is the height of cool here, especially when the words make no sense. One morning my tiny, blonde, eight year old host-sister came downstairs in a bubblegum-pink shirt that read “Ghetto Princess.”
Her other “cool” English shirt says, “Girls love funky and soul” in multicolored writing on a purple background.
But these nonsensical shirts aren’t confined to small children. One of the worst offenders I’ve seen was on the bus the other day: a twenty-something woman standing in front of me, wearing a transparent white T-shirt with small print on it. When I looked closer I noticed the writing was a description of a torrid sex scene, except every few words there was one that was completely made up.
Sometimes, they’re flat-out wrong. The same eight year old has a notebook with a large, adorable kitten on the front, with “I love puppies,” written in cutesy cursive. Silly kitten.
We make fun of some of the Italians’ mistakes in English, but it’s horribly embarrassing to think of the ones we’ve made in Italian. For instance, on one of my first days here, I ordered fish ice-cream instead of peach: pesca versus pescha.
Eggs and grapes, ouva and uva, are also easily confused. Even today, with more than a month of Italian experience, one of my friends ordered a sandwich with pommeriggio (afternoon) instead of pomodoro (tomato).
We also came across a café called “Hemmingway,” with the subtitle, “an American Bar.” When we talk normally we sound pretty dumb, as we haven’t even learned the future tense.
This stage of learning a language is called interlingua. An example of this would be the sentence “Oggi I walk to la casa, on the way compro molto molto gelato, and tutti bene.” “today I walked to the house and bought a lot of Gelato, and all was well.” Side note: this is a typical day in the life of an School Year Abroad (SYA) student. Good stuff.
Walking around the streets of Viterbo, we notice that there’s the same high volume of graffiti as in any other city. But the graffiti here has a different general feel than in America.
Instead of tagging everything with swear words, slurs or poorly spelled criticisms of society, people immortalize their love in spray paint all over the city walls. “Ti amo” means “I love you” and those are the most common words written, closely followed by “principessa” (princess) and “tesoro” (treasure).
Also the occasional badly translated song lyric, as well as a couple swastikas, which we don’t like so much. Maybe at the end of the year we’ll feel comfortable enough with our Italian to leave a little message of our own, a love note to Italy.