June 14, 2025

Weeks 27 & 28.5; 3-5-2022

Hello friends,


It feels like this newsletter is right on the heels of my last one. I thought about waiting another week to send out more updates, but this feels like a good checkpoint, and I have much to share. It has been a delightful week and a half. I spent most of it with my friend Sarah who visited Mondragone for a few days before we went together to Liverpool. It was my first time in an anglophone country in 6 months -- while little things like bookstores and food labels in grocery stores were much appreciated, what I'd missed most was the ease with which I could strike up a conversation with a stranger. I also got to reflect on which elements of my experience in Mondragone are cultural/geographic and which are strictly linguistic.

I am now, as I said in my last newsletter, well into the final third of my grant period. More importantly, I'm rapidly approaching the end of the academic year with my students. So while my grant period goes until late July, my life and routine as I have known it since I got here will be over in a few weeks. Tourism is a significant part of Mondragone's economy (along with mozzarella production, which together cover most of it), and the town is already beginning to change in preparation for the summer. I'm going to share some photographs of little corners of Mondragone that I fear will change, or that have already changed, in these early stages of the alta stagione. And lastly, I'm finally going to share some reflections on friendship and social life that have been marinating since I got here. (But with the caveat for myself and for you that, as I remind myself every time I sit down to write this, none of my thoughts are official, final, or claims to knowledge on this culture, but rather are a synthesis of my own experiences in this moment.)

 

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Flying out of Napoli -- realizing how connected I am to this city. It feels just as much like home as Mondragone does. I could look down at different suburbs and neighborhoods and think o



The view from a bench where Sarah and I sat and talked until late at night. It's much colder in Liverpool than in Mondragone!



A very kind old man took this photo of us (in the O's!). I was a little worried he was going to drop Sarah's phone into the water. He could not figure out which way to point the phone at first and asked where the 'viewfinder' was.



Did we really come to Liverpool if we didn't pay tribute to the Beatles?



I took this bad photo of this pub to commemorate a very sweet and quintessential interaction we had on our first evening. We were sitting at the pub for a drink with one of my friends from Mondragone who'd moved to Liverpool for work (the day before, what a coincidence), and this older man next to us leaned over and asked if he could jump into our conversation. He explained that he has a background in literature and history and now teaches English to non-native English speakers. Their discussion topic for the week was emojis, and he asked us what the teleology of emojis is. It led to this beautiful, rambling conversation about written vs spoken communication across generations, how connotation is lost when something brief is communicated via text rather than via phone call, and the importance of slowing down. At one point, he turned to me out of the 3 of us and asked when I last handwrote a letter. I started laughing, pulled my journal and pen out of my purse, and said that I'm an anomaly in that I send my friends letters all the time and I'm a fanatic of handwritten communication. My goodness how I've missed spontaneous connection (and access to my full linguistic capacity). Oh, and it was his birthday!! 



Me moments after proudly asking Sarah, "Do you know... the muffin man?"



Sarah had much more success at the cat cafe than I did.



But I think I appreciated cafe culture way more than she did (even if I drank mostly espresso).



This was my one non-espresso coffee; Italy has officially converted me to espresso. But, this was handed to me with a heavy Scouse "Enjoy, my love," and I now forever want my coffee handed to me that way.



Very disappointed that we did not see any humped zebra. 0/10 for the humped zebra.



I got GF food at a restaurant that was... not a pizza!? While Italy is amazing when it comes to Celiac awareness, I'm missing other cuisines.



Spotted at a coffee shop.


 

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Word Pictures

• I bloodied my (new, white) sneakers. I'd reached for my house key too quickly, while trying not to drop the 26 lb case of water I'd just carried 600m, and nicked one of my fingers. The sneakers are clean, but my finger took almost 2 weeks to heal.

• A "your mom" joke, in both Italian and English. I made a groupchat with some of my students to plan an afternoon at the beach, and I did not see that one coming!

• While running I witnessed a falcon swoop down to catch a mouse/other rodent. I mentioned vultures, avvoltoi to my students a few weeks ago, and they said that here they have more falcons than vultures. I almost didn't believe them!

• I mentioned in my last newsletter that the street was blocked off for an Easter procession, which included many of my students. This week I was at the grocery store and while my card was in the chip reader, the marching band went past. The cashier got up and walked away, leaving me at the counter. After 2 minutes, I took my card (the transaction had gone through) and started to walk home. But I was following the band! They were blocking the entire street, this time without police escort, which the cars were not happy about. So the band stopped, at which point my students noticed me trailing behind them, and we had a lovely spontaneous chat!

• Similarly, a student who was so willing to talk with me that he joined me for part of my run (while not dressed to run, and with a backpack on). After running along with me for 2 blocks, I said "we can walk," and he replied "si, sto morendo / yes, I'm dying." And we walked the rest of the way to the beach together! It was lovely.

• Lila, the kitten that I live with, has decided that the garden, with all its new growth, is her new playground. I watched her take a running jump onto a fern -- it was cartoonish.

• Explaining to the hairdresser that I'm American and immediately being asked asked if I came to Mondragone for love, because there's no other reason that Mondragone is worth coming to from America. When I explained that I'm most certainly not here for love, she responded that I'm brave for being here.

• "Fare il ponte" -- to do the bridge. With the timing of the Easter holiday and liberation day, we had 2 long weekends back-to-back with only 2 days of school connecting them. All of the students skipped school. Four out of my six lessons for those 2 days were cancelled because the classrooms were empty.

• Sarah and I went for a walk with some of my students. We taught them about spiked seltzer (not a thing here) and tried to translate "here for the vibes."

• All 3 nights that Sarah was in Mondragone, there was a weird white haze that made the sunset look like a moon rise -- beautiful in its own way, but not the Mondragone sunsets I'd been talking up.

• The most chaotic flight boarding experience of my life. Long lines to get on the plane (lines turned into clumps when the room was too full of people for us to stand in order). Multiple delays for multiple reasons. A very transparent, communicative pilot (first delay was the documents, second delay was about queueing up for takeoff, third delay was also about documents, fourth delay was because they changed our disembarkment gate; we got allll the details). And finally, arriving at the airbnb after 11 hours of travel and finding that we needed to carry our suitcases up 4 flights of stairs.

• (This is maybe my least original word picture). Almost colliding with people on the sidewalk because I'd never actually experienced driving and walking on the left side.

• Drinking gin & tonic out of a can in honor of Fleabag.

• Being asked where I'm from every time I bought coffee because it took me a long time to figure out what the values of the different coins were. A fun conversation starter.

• Walking into the hostel and being greeted simultaneously by screamo rock playing behind the check-in desk and a man playing the guitar while drinking prosecco out of the bottle.

"Guest Wpix from SGG"

Hello to Antonella's fans! Sarah GG here for some guest wpix (I just learned that abbreviation woohoo). Massive shoutout to Antonella for hosting me and being my travel pal this past week! I'm genuinely so honored to have been able to see a glimpse into the Mondragone lifestyle and to now have this space to share:

• Getting off the train at the Mondragone stop and being surrounded by lush greenery, high humidity, and lots and lots of birds chirping. I was alone on the train platform, with no other people or buildings in sight. I described it to Antonella as my 'Hannah Montana: The Movie moment,' and I stand by that.

• When Antonella and I met up with a few of Antonella's students, we got (non-alcoholic) drinks at some random restaurant. I speak zero Italian (as was made clear to me throughout the trip), and one of the students ended up ordering for me. I was so touched to hear her confidently tell the waiter that I needed a Coke that was specifically *in a can* because I *had allergies.*

• On Saturday Antonella and I climbed up the mountain and I thought I was going to die, but then I didn't, and we made it to the top (well kind of the top). Along the way up and all the way back down, we took photos of SO many wildflowers that we found. 

• Fast forward to Liverpool! Going into this MASSIVE bookstore that was unbelievably cozy and so colorful.

• A round of applause to Antonella for accompanying me to the Little Mix concert (shoutout to my fellow Mixers!). A scene that will forever live in my brain was when the group first appeared onstage. They looked so beautiful, and there were so many bright and happy colors (I may or may not have cried....). 

• The best and last wpix: hearing an announcement as we were about to board our flight back to Rome that there had been a spill of jet fuel on the tarmac and we subsequently all had to wear masks when we boarded. Shortly after they came back on the intercom to say that we weren't allowed to use our phones on the tarmac either, due to the spill. Can confirm it looked and smelled like a jet fuel spill.

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Again going out of order - we were in Mondragone before we were in Liverpool. Selfie on Sarah's first night! (feat. the infamous pellet stove, for anyone who's not seen it yet).



Naturally I showed Sarah the BEST part of Mondragone - the mountain. Sarah was such a good sport. I'm lucky to have so many people in my life who love me enough to be dragged up this mountain.



We wore our Jonas Brothers t-shirts.



Happily pointing towards the castle that we did not go all the way to!



I was very, very happy about this wildflower. It's my new favorite.



The picture on the right is how Sarah actually felt about climbing the mountain.



I should make an album of all the photos of me journaling in different places here in Italy.



A little snail friend! Makes me think of the Peroni bottle snails I saw back in December. Themes are beginning to emerge more clearly as I approach the end of my time here.

 

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Learning to knit: Italian social fabric is woven differently from American social fabric
Alternative title: "Having A Social Life???" A semi-organized brain dump on my social interactions here so far. This feels very vulnerable! Living out those guidelines!

I will start by sharing where I'm at right now: I've been in Mondragone for 6, almost 7 months, and I have no meaningful friendships. But not for lack of trying. I had 2 meaningful friends (a few weeks ago, when I wrote that alternative title), but one moved away and one turned out to be not a good friend. And I've had 2 more superficial friendships that fizzled out promptly once other social and familial obligations arose. While I did learn a lot in those interactions, they were fleeting. So right now, in this very moment on May 2 the night before hitting send on my 12th (!) newsletter, I feel very alone (not lonely, throwback to newsletter #2). And, at the same time, my time here is coming to a close and I have some lovely travel planned for the coming months.

I've oscillated between spending lots of time in solitude and then hosting or visiting people for days on end with little alone time. When I'm with other people, I'm euphoric, especially when it's somebody I'm very close with. And my word choice there was intentional because I also experience heavy withdrawal when I return to my solitude after said social-induced euphoria. I've noticed a big shift since I got here: before Fulbright and before the pandemic, I needed alone time to recharge for social time; now, I need social time to recharge for alone time. I draw infinitely more energy from other people than I used to. And I am unsure what to make of that.

My moments of solitude vary. There are the days when I'm content to read and journal and hike and run, and sing and dance around my apartment while I cook, all by myself. There are the days when I watch the clock, agonizing, waiting for it to be an appropriate hour in America to call my friends. There are the days when the weight of the distance to the closest person I love feels crushing. And there are the days when I feel so secure in my decision to stretch myself in this way, when I feel comfortable expanding into the new space I'm taking up. And there are the days -- most days -- when I think of the line, "For women, too often, I think what we mistake as resilience is actually just endurance" (NYTimes Modern Love), and I ask myself if this is something that I really need to be enduring, or more constructively, if this is something that I need to continue enduring after my grant ends.

I've been grappling with this since the very beginning. Within a few weeks of being here I outlined the following barriers to a friend on the phone. In the 6.5 months since then, through many many conversations, I've only found support for my early observations:

• 1) There is a de-emphasis on platonic social bonds. Romantic and familial relationships take precedence over everything else. Friends are simply less important! I cannot fathom that, as my friends are absolutely everything to me. And most people in my life know from experience that once I get up on my soapbox about society's fixation on romantic love, it's very difficult for me to get down. One of my co-teachers, who had previously introduced me to her daughters (both in relationships, fun to talk with but not looking to hang out much), introduced me to her niece and said "Oh, she's not in a relationship so you two can become friends!" As though it was a given that being in a relationship means not making new friends?

• 2) Vulnerability manifests in different ways here. To put it more explicitly, vulnerability does not manifest in explicit ways. And I am a very explicitly vulnerable person, especially in my friendships. However, there is a level of authenticity and rawness to which I'm not accustomed. If shit is going down in a given moment, even with guests or newcomers, it will go down and be dealt with as though everyone present is on the inside. There is a lot less privacy, and nobody puts on airs. However, disclosing challenges from the past, or giving context for something happening in the present is much more difficult. There is an assumption that no context is necessary because everyone has always been present for everything, because everyone knows everyone and nobody moves. As somebody who does not know everyone, was not present for everything, and did move here, that makes it really difficult to get close to people!

• 3) There are simply fewer young people here. There is no university in Mondragone, so anybody who is a student taking in-person classes is elsewhere most of the year. And, in Italy, most people are in undergrad until they are 24 or 25. And many people go on for graduate degrees immediately after, or take internships (lo stage), which are also not in Mondragone! AND, once they finish these degrees, they take jobs elsewhere -- a phenomenon which I've already written about. And yes, there are obviously many young people who do not fit into those categories, but as I outlined in #1 and #2, they are immersed in their high school friend groups and their families and their romantic partnerships, and are not looking to make new friends, especially not at the level of closeness that I'm seeking.

I do not share these as excuses, but rather to clearly distinguish the contours of the social landscape here from that of, say, a city where many young people fuori famiglia, away from their families and home lives, are also looking to spend time with new people. And, consequently, my relationship with myself has taken precedence in a tiring but important way. I was on a Zoom call last week with a mentor from Vassar, with whom I'd not spoken since 2020. I shared that my Fulbright experience so far has been almost on the level of my car accident year in terms of introspection, solitude, and paradigm-shifting reflection... and quickly followed up with "I'm not sure that is what most people say about Fulbright grants." The mentor replied that it is classic Antonella for me to walk out of a Fulbright grant with that level of introspection and closeness with self.

 

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I am trying to get better at stopping to take photos of things. I think I am worried that taking photos makes me look like a tourist/negates all the time I've spent [struggling and working] making Mondragone feel like home. I walked past this flower with the steeple in the background and did not take the photo. But I'd really wanted to. The next time, I did (here it is). But then the next time I walked by, the flower had been cut down. A good, timely reminder to take the photo!

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Phew, I'm not sure I have much else to say in closing, except that I'm looking forward to the coming weeks. Here's to leaning fully into the full affective experience!

Con tranquillita`,
Antonella


 

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Appendix: Ground Rules

1. This is a time for me of reconnecting with a number of practices that have been interrupted by the pandemic; by the 3-part-time-jobs, recent-humanities-grad, gig-economy work routine that I've just left; and by the inevitable ebb and flow of intersecting needs. This is just that -- a practice, a practice of connection, a practice of reflection, a practice of synthesis, a practice of perspective.
2. This is not meant to replace my 1:1 interactions!
3. This should serve me. There is no right or wrong way for me to structure these. Like my bullet journal, if the structure becomes cumbersome, it means my needs are shifting and I need to re-evaluate what I am including and how I am preparing to write.
4. This is not a finished product, ever, by any standard. I will not fret over punctuation, word choice, or syntax. There are many spaces in my life where those things do matter, quite a lot, but they are not a priority here.

In case you missed it!
Here is the link to the archive of my past newsletters