231. Italian Culture Club

One of the beauties of working at a place for thirty years is that you feel perfectly at home, and perfectly entitled to raise your hand and say, “Why not me?” Sometimes you win; sometimes you lose, but so what? It’s always worth a try.

So when a colleague told me she had started a Disabilities Employee Resource Group, I got that “ping!” that means “Why not me?” I would try to start an Italian Culture ERG. Wouldn’t it be fun to get together periodically with other Swarthmore College employees and share our mutual love of Italy? Surely there must be a half-dozen or so colleagues who would be interested in participating.

I was a little apprehensive, given that the ERG program is under the Equity and Inclusion umbrella, and I would have understood if I had been told that my idea wasn’t a good fit. But the director thought for a moment, and said to go ahead and give it a try. All I needed to do was make sure it was open to everyone and met at least twice a semester. We even got a little pot of money to fund our activities.

So I put a notice out to the campus, and I must have inadvertently fulfilled an unmet need because, Boom! Within a few days, I had twenty responses from faculty and staff eager to participate for all sorts of reasons. Many were people of Italian descent; others had studied there decades ago and never gave up their love of the country; one was marrying into an Italian-American family; one was actually from Italy; one was about to retire and move there permanently. We had an organizational meeting, and came up with a long list of possible activities.

Swarthmore doesn’t have an Italian department, but Bryn Mawr, its sister school, does, and I soon heard from Luca Zipoli, an Italian Bryn Mawr professor from Rome, wanting to know how he could participate. I had seen Luca speak about Italy’s influence on Philadelphia architecture, which seemed like a perfect topic for this group, so for our first activity, he came to campus and we had a wonderful pizza lunch and lecture.

A half dozen of us wanted to improve our Italian language skills. So a small group now meets every few weeks to speak Italian over lunch. We range from native Italian-speakers to those who did study-abroad there, to those who have taken the language up online, to me, by far the worst, who has struggled to attain basic competence since I studied it freshman year fifty-six years ago. We enjoy our language lunch so much that several of us will continue to meet throughout the summer.

Our final activity of the year was a pasta-making class in the teaching kitchen of Swarthmore’s beautiful new dining commons.

Twenty of us from all over campus, both those in the group and not, joined together to knead, roll, and cut the dough. Some of the group were already accomplished pasta-makers; others remembered their nonna making it, rolling it out on a big table with a long wooden mattarello. Everyone vowed to keep making it at home.

As far as I’m concerned, our Italian Culture ERG has been a hit far beyond my original modest expectations, not just because the activities seem to have gone well, but for the general sense of community it has engendered. We have all met people we would probably not have known otherwise, and shared a common enthusiasm. It has been such a joy that I have delayed my planned retirement date by six months so I will be here for the fall semester and can make sure the group is fully established before turning the organizational duties over to someone else.

What’s next? Someone suggested a pot-luck, and collecting the recipes into an on-line cookbook, so that might be a good kick-off for the fall. There was a lot of interest in a wine-tasting, but my initial investigation showed it might be difficult with our available budget, but someone might have a better idea how to pull it off. Definitely, I think we should do another Italian cooking class — perhaps pizza next time? Maybe the what is less important than the who. In this era of virtual friends and chat bots, nothing beats a group of people joining together to share commons interests and enthusiasms.