If this was America…

IN SCOTLAND, people think I’m a reasonably clever guy. In Italy, they think I’m an idiot. It’s a language thing. Both my mother and father have Italian as their mother tongue, and in my youth it’s all we ever spoke in the house. As a result, I grew up with a good accent. It was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is obvious, the curse less so. It stems from the fact that, like any language, the Italian spoken at home has a limited vocabulary. Words which Italian children learn in the playground, the workplace, in academic textbooks and at the cinema, were rarely if ever used.As a result, when summer came and I found myself trying to impress girls at Onesti’s cafe in Barga, I came across not as a cosmopolitan Scot with a remarkably good grasp of the language, but as a home-grown plodder, unable to discuss anything other than pasta or football.The predicament might have…