Pur saresti men severo, se vedessi questo cor

One of the few things that can lighten the study of statistics is the raucous fun you can have when you graph two unrelated trends together and draw conclusions. For example, over the years, television watching has increased in proportion to birthweight. All that TV must be making big babies! Often there is a third factor for such phenomena. Ice cream sales, for example, increase with murder rates. The third factor is the summertime: tempers rise as does the temperature.

In Rome, lets just say that ice cream sales have been brisk. That is, it's hot. (Maybe there have been more murders too, for all I know.) Friends have reassured me that I've only barely tasted the true heat of a Roman summer, which can apparently be even worse than the relatively mild one we've had, but to this pampered, A/C adjusted American body, it's plenty hot.

The effect on me, and I dare say the rest of the residents (amici italiani non mi odiate!), is something of a cooking of the brains. I feel that it's a struggle to maintain whatever I've been able to accomplish with Italian. I'm speaking better than ever, but all too often I'm tripped up by the stiff American mouth we've been cursed with. (Say drawer, realty, and seersucker and you'll know what I mean.) The heat seems to make things worse, and even though my social life has been in an upward spiral, I'm frustrated no end by not being able to get the words out of my mouth as clearly as I should.

"Non ho capito." A harmless way of saying "I didn't understand," but when you hear it a few times a day, it's a rattling percussion that shakes you to your bones. Or at least nervous me. When I'm stammering in front of someone, feeling like an idiot, the communication gulf between us is as thick and heavy as the summer air itself. I certainly had my problems getting German to fit into my mouth, but at least I made it work after a while; at the end of my time there I was able to convince other Auslaender that I was a native, and people still complement me on my accent.

No one will ever mistake me for an Italian. Certainly never from appearance, and at this point not from the way I speak. I just watch my friends speak and marvel: the stra, gli, sfi, emm, and those glorious double consonants that bubble from their mouths like water from a Roman fountain.

I console myself with the fact that even if I trip up my own broken Italian sentences, I can at least sing other people's words with passable convincibility (or convincing passability?). The title sentence, for example, comes from Mozart, and has helped me figure out the congiuntivo in Italian. As much as I'm enjoying my time here, I'm looking forward no end to returning to the land of awful American accents to begin my graduate studies in singing. Digging into any of my favorite canzone is as dolce as any gelato.