Why I learn: finding home in heritage
Read this story of how learning a language formed bonds that were physically lost for one Italian-American.
Our Why I Learn series features stories from real people about why they decided to learn a new language and how language learning has impacted their lives for the better. Are you learning a language? We’d love to hear your story! Submit it here.
By Anthony Spirito
I studied Italian for three years in high school when I lived in New York many, many years ago, and I stopped studying it after.
I am an Italian American, but I didn’t necessarily know what that meant growing up. I didn’t until I visited the land of my ancestry for the first time. And it was like this light flipped on, and it opened this whole new world for me — this whole new interest in Italian culture, Italian language, and the people of Italy.
It was like this light flipped on, and it opened this whole new world for me.
Learning Italian is a way for me to connect with my heritage, which is more important to me now than it was before because a lot of my direct links to my heritage are gone.
My parents are deceased, but about 35 years ago, my father traveled to his father’s place of birth in southern Italy. My father and my mother ended up traveling to Italy many times. They could not stop raving about it, and all of their fondest travel memories involved Italy. At that time, I was in my 20s, and I had other interests. I thought it was great that my parents went to Italy, but that was about where it began and ended for me.
I’d seen most of Europe before I went to Italy for the first time, which was three years ago. I’d been to Spain, the U.K., Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Belgium. I’d even been to Paris, and I still hadn’t gone to Italy.
Just for the sake of going, to say that I’d gone to Italy, I did. My first trip was to Rome, Venice and Florence. I went into it thinking it’d be just like any other trip, but I wasn’t prepared for the kinds of emotions that came up when I arrived.
I wasn’t prepared for the kinds of emotions that came up when I arrived.
Beneath it all, it was a realization that I was not just an American. I was an American whose ancestors came from the country that I was visiting. That was a massive revelation to me. It was also a revelation to experience the culture in Italy, the people. I was fascinated by their culture and their mannerisms and their emotion; the emotive ways that they spoke. Their expressions, and the simplicity in their everyday living, that we here seem to miss.
From then on, I was fascinated with the country. Fascinated with the geography. Fascinated with the history. Fascinated with the language. Fascinated with making connections with people there, who I could talk to and continue to learn from, aside from, you know, whatever information that I could glean from books. It’s always interesting to get first-hand information from somebody who knows. That’s how it began for me.
When I came back from Italy, everything that I read, most of the media that I consumed, I tried to consume in Italian. And Babbel has been a really spectacular tool for me to sort of springboard deeper into that interest.
Then, when I had the opportunity a year later to go back to Italy, I did, and I went to Tuscany. I went all over Tuscany. There wasn’t a part or province that I didn’t see in the region of Tuscany. I saw every inch of it. My fascination only deepened.
Now I have a dream to go back for a third time, but this time, I want to go to southern Italy, which is where my roots are from, and I want to see the town that my grandfather was born in and grew up in, where my grandmother grew up. I know that it’s going to be a very emotional experience for me, but it’s one that I’m really, really looking forward to.
-Anthony Spirito, Jersey City, New Jersey
Inspired yet? Try a free language lesson with Babbel.
