Back to Italy

When I was not even one, my father, mother and I sailed on the Leonardo da Vinci from Naples to New York. It took five days, and my parents enjoyed it immensely, and also introducing me to life aboard a transatlantic vessel.

They were in a lather of excitement, as the reason for our voyage was to see the Broadway adaptation of my father’s novel, “The Crime of Giovanni Venturi”.  The musical had opened months before, and seemed to be doing so well.  Cesare Siepi, the celebrated operatic bass, played Giovanni : what was there not to love ? And yet when we arrived in New York, a cable awaited my father. “Bravo Giovanni !” after a run of 76 performances, had closed the day before.

We had come such a great distance, and our primary objective was thwarted. My parents were enormously disappointed, but resourceful : we would stay with family and friends in New York and Massachusetts… for a short time. And then it was “back to Italy”.  “Back to Italy”… the fabled saying of my family uttered once again, easily for the thousandth time, spoken by eight of us over four generations.  For one hundred years my family has been saying it.  “And then we are back to Italy” or more often “Back to Italy”.

After a few days immersed in American family life, in places dear for the connections there but fundamentally unfamiliar, my Rome-born mother was Rome sick. And equivalently Romesick was my father, Roanoke, VA born but as tightly connected to Italy as is a caper in the Aurelian wall.  Rome was where he landed with the OSS in 1954, where he lived in an atmospheric medieval castle on the old Via Cassia, where his three daughters were born, and where, in 1959, he wed my mother on Rome’s Campidoglio.

My parents’ wedding day, 1959 on Rome’s Campidoglio, with my Nonna at their side

And so I, who could not talk, but from the earliest age, loved to listen, heard again and again, When are we Back to Italy ?  Back to Italy indeed we were, resuming our Roman life a mere two weeks after sailing into the Port of New York.

Saling past Gibraltor, 1963 : Back to Italy !

With interruptions, as circumstances have brought them, back to Italy continued as long as they lived, the theme of my parents’ long lives. Rome was, just as she had planned it, where my mother was born and where she died.

“There is no other place for me, really, Lovey, you know that” said so often, spontaneously, my mother, sometimes when we were out to dinner in Rome, as I was growing up, and she looked around a scene — a piazza that she loved and had admired for all of her life — or when we emerged from a church or a museum or some place of exceptional beauty that moved her heart and spirit.

Or even when we were, both of us so happy, at the market buying artichokes or very ripe black figs or her favorite tomatoes. Or years later, as she watched my children at play in the very park where she, 70 years before, had also splashed in the same fountain, gathered pine nuts, made little boats of walnut shells and floated them down a little gutter. ” It is always Italy for me. ” Always Italy.

And so too it is for me.

My first Roman childhood home

Back to Italy. No matter if I am away for just a day — a train trip to France or Switzerland —  or, as happened during Covid, kept away much longer by circumstances. When I return, there is within me a chorus of voices, including voices I have never heard, calling out happy :”Back to Italy !”. The booming voice of Algernon Ashburner Osborne, who brought our family to Italy in 1919,  and who with my Nonna, made it clear that he would only leave Italy if he was forcibly removed.

Fascism alas intervened, and he and his three Italian-born children and my grandmother left in tears and with steamer trunks. But nearly everyone made it Back to Italy in future years, and resumed a love affair born of familiarity but nurtured by all that Italy continued to provide.

Algernon Ashburner Osborne who brought us to Italy

I hear the distinct voice of Nonna who, after her children were grown, lived happily on West 12th Street in New York but all the while was planning her own Back to Italy. And most of all I hear my mother, who gracefully endured suburban Virginia while I attended university, but never stopped anticipating the joyous day when we both were Back to Italy.  Then she never left again.

With my Nonna in Piazza Navona in Rome, 1965

And to this day, the tradition continues with my young adult children, born in Italy (well almost, one arrived at six weeks, so he considers himself as Roman as his sister.)

My children in 2006 at Santa Cecilia in Rome

Today too I am returning to Italy.  The trip is short, from Amsterdam, and not by ocean liner, but by ITA, surprisingly comfortable and very short.

Me in Circo Massimo in Rome, March 2025

On train or plane when back to Italy, you will always find me by the window, and always with maps, the same big green Touring Club Italia atlases I send you, or if pressed by my children (“you can’t keep carrying those huge encyclopedias, just use your phone !”), the smaller regional maps I send you too. I notice, however, that whenever I announce, looking alertly out the window, that we are approaching an Italian border, the children draw close to me, and my maps, and want to know exactly when and where we are home.  What will they eat first ?  What’s happened in their absence in the Lazio region soccer classifica ?  What’s the weather on Sunday, are we going to the beach ? They are on their phones, planning. I am thinking about the friendly but abandoned cats at the end of my street, and the gattara whom I entrusted with enough food to supplement the pasta she feeds them twice a day. I am thinking about the swifts that fill the sky with their cries — and as they have every summer now for my 60 years, have moved my heart and soul.  I am thinking of all that I love, and all that Italy is to me.

Home, Back to Italy.

Marjorie Shaw

July 23 2025

www.insidersitaly.com