“Come sta?” my Italian 101 professor asks me one Friday morning. I respond, “Sto bene, è tu?” in my best imitation of an Italian accent, with vowels stretched as long as the upcoming weekend and in an octave above my normal voice.

I’ve said this phrase a million times in class; however, I still need to remind myself to pronounce the è  like eh, instead of my typical midwestern ee. It’s a frustrating process; I’ve never been very good at learning new languages—pronunciation is my weakness. Though, if my family had chosen to keep different traditions, I could have been fantastic in Italian.

I’m a second-generation Italian immigrant. I grew up eating lasagna and filling cannolis with ricotta cream in my grandmother’s kitchen, yet I never learned to speak a single word of Italian. Since starting college, I’ve completed Italian 101 and 102, but I can’t stop wondering why we keep the traditions that we do.

How come my grandparents never taught any of their children Italian, but still keep other traditions, ones we would consider far less substantial? Is there a tradition that connects all of the others?

My grandfather was born in America and my grandmother was born in Augusta, Sicily—a tiny fishing village on a triangle-shaped island off the coast of Italy. While Italy is typically regarded as a beautiful country with a luxurious heritage, Sicily is regarded as peasant country.

A family photo of the Dichiaras while they still lived in Sicily, estimated date is around 1950. My grandmother, Virginia, is on the left.

The island’s claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of the Italian mafia and ricotta stuffed cannolis. My grandmother, Vincenzina (Virginia) Dichiara, left Augusta with her father, aunt, and two of her four sisters in 1955 on a ship called the Andrea Doria; they couldn’t get Visas for the entire family until five years later. None of them ever returned to Sicily. When they left, her family left much more than their home; they left some of their traditions behind as well.

In an effort to Americanize future generations, Italian-Americans typically do not teach their children Italian. During the 1960s and 1970s, my grandparents (and others like them, not just Italians) believed that monolingual children were the key to success and assimilation in America. It was as though they were still on the Andrea Doria, leaving Sicily behind a little more every day.

Furthermore, they abandoned certain cooking traditions. Since leaving Italy, nobody in my family has cooked with garlic. Along with not wanting to speak like an Italian, they did not want to smell like one either. At restaurants, my mother and grandfather will both claim that they have a debilitating garlic allergy to avoid the taboo herb. However, in spite of the efforts to become Americans, there are several odd traditions that my grandparents—and many Italian-Americans—choose to keep.

Never taking plastic off of furniture

For as long as I can remember, my grandparents have had the same oak chairs with green floral cushions. To this day, those chairs are covered with plastic. In the living room, the plastic on the thirty-year-old beige couch has worn away, so my grandparents cover the couch (and the equally old surrounding chairs) with a pink patterned bed sheet, just like they did in Sicily. Yet, while I assume the practice is to keep the furniture clean, my grandparents don’t seem to understand their own reasoning; it’s an old habit they keep without understanding why. They keep plastic on the furniture because that’s how it has always been, that’s how it always will be, and that’s the only way they want to live.  

My grandfather and I on the couch in my grandparents’ living room. The couch is almost 30 years old and is still protected by a pink sheet.

Having two kitchens in the house

In almost every Italian immigrant’s home, there are two kitchens: one in the basement and one on the first floor. The kitchen in the basement is typically used for heavy cooking: making pasta, roasting a turkey, or broiling a roast. The one upstairs is for lighter, day-to-day tasks, such as making toast or a grilled cheese sandwich.

My grandmother’s favorite things to make in the upstairs kitchen were rice-krispie treats, which are far less messy than they seem. The kitchen upstairs often has several towels that are for display purposes only; my house has three—on the oven, the dishwasher, and the toaster oven. Sometimes the towels have puns, like “Oh, kale no!” or “I donut care.”

If a person in the house tries to use one of these said towels for a normal purpose, like drying your hands or taking a hot tray out of the oven, an elder Italian will hit you with a rag (one that’s not for show) and yell, “Don’t touch the nice towels!”

In Sicily, a family was lucky to have one working kitchen. In America, a family has the chance to have two. Perhaps Italian immigrants kept (or made up) this tradition because it reminded them of how much they had overcome and sacrificed on their journey to a new home. On the other hand, perhaps Italians just like cooking twice as much as the average person.

A photo of me (2001) in the upper level kitchen of my grandparents’ house, likely eating a homemade rice-krispie treat.

Pasta, Pasta, Pasta

Unsurprisingly, Italian-Americans can’t and won’t forget about pasta. It’s one of our most prominent and important traditions. In the past eighteen years of my life, my grandmother has never greeted me with the word “Hello.” Instead, she asks, “Sofia, did you eat yet?” Even if I say “Yes,” she doesn’t believe me, and then usually tries to get me to eat pasta.

When I was in elementary school, on Mondays and occasional Thursdays, my grandmother would make a batch of pasta sauce and send my grandfather over to my house with about five bowls of fettuccine and ten meatballs. Pasta is more important in my family than most; in fact, pasta is the reason for my existence.

My grandparents met working at the Prince Macaroni factory during the 1950s—my grandfather helped make the pasta and my grandmother packed it into boxes. Eventually, my grandfather worked his way to the top of the pasta food chain and ended up managing the factory. As a result, my family is excellent at making pasta—from scratch. We have a stash of semolina, the type of flour needed to make pasta, at all times in my pantry. I used to spend the day before Christmas Eve using a hairdryer to dry the dough for dinner the next night.

My cousin Lena and I making pasta the night before Christmas in 2007.

No matter what traditions we keep, or don’t, Italians cherish family and love above all else. In a sense, that’s what pasta is: A way for parents, grandparents, and children to show their love for each other, even if they can’t understand the Italian instructions on the back of the bag of semolina.

In many ways, tradition is an involuntary reflex. It’s living in a way you understand, no matter if it’s in Italy, America, or some far-off place in between. While I wish I spoke fluent Italian, mostly to ace my Italian 102 class, I can see why Americanizing felt more important to my grandparents struggling to adapt in a pasta factory.

I can understand why they didn’t teach me Italian—for them, it was more important to blend into American society, by being monolingual, than to honor their native language. I can understand why they only kept the traditions that no one outside the house would notice. I’m sure that it must have been more difficult than I realize.

However, no matter if we are sitting around a table in a basement kitchen, or in a thirty-year-old chair covered with plastic, Italian families love each other fiercely. We don’t always comprehend our behavior, but we know that caring for each other is why we are still here, why we survived and why we are able to carry on our customs to the next generation. Isn’t that the most important tradition of all?