This is Me.

I’ve been surprised to get quite a few messages asking about who I am – I’m not that interesting, I promise you.

I work in the music industry and have worked for the same company for the past 10 years, since my sophomore year of college. For the first 8 of those years I had not for one moment turned off my cell phone or been unavailable to clients, my boss, partners – anyone, really. Then right at the beginning of 2011 I finally got burnt out and called my boss with the start of a nervous breakdown. (Well, that’s what it felt like, anyway.) He urged me to go take a trip somewhere – anywhere -, turn off my phone and not check email. Ugh, this was going to be tough.

I looked for the cheapest international round-trip flight and it just so happened it was to Rome. And so I went – alone, not speaking the language, not knowing anyone.

My mother’s family is Italian by heritage but my grandmother was a petite woman who waged a war on carbs (which greatly limited the Italian cooking she would agree to do) and had never learned Italian, though her parents spoke it in the house. It wasn’t “cool” to be Italian when she was growing up; everyone wanted to be American.

Since my first trip to Italy a little over a year and a half ago I’ve become a bit obsessed with all things Italian. I’m learning the language, cooking things from scratch (previously pressing buttons on the microwave was the extent of my cooking ambitions) and reading, watching and studying everything I can get my hands on. My friends and family are sick of hearing about it (I’m sure, though oddly they haven’t told me to shut up yet) and I feel a bit ridiculous spending a good chunk of my limited freetime researching and dreaming about a place I’ve only really been for one month out of my thirty year (ouch) existence. So I decided to fool myself into believing my Italian musings are constructive and put them in this blog. Because that’s what people seem to do now: blog.