Being 100 percent Italian I deem myself an expert on Italian families, but mostly I'm just an expert on my Italian family.
1. Well, food. We love food.
Correction. We LOVE food.
2. We are loud.
We don’t think we are loud, but everyone else does. And the more of us you put together the louder we become. And our loudness often escalates with excitement and time until we get to a point where we are yelling at each other, but we still don’t notice the difference.
3. We like to make extraneous hand gestures.
If you tied up our hands, I don’t know how we’d talk. It’d be chaos. I have a confession, as a fellow Italian I have accidentally hit people while I was talking ... whoops.
4. Where you're from is important.
And I don’t just mean being Italian, but the part of Italy you come from. For instance Naples or Sicily, North or South — there are many different cultures within Italy and the dialect also differ.
5. Okay, back to food. Did I mention we love food?
Well what we love even more than food, more than life itself is pasta. We LOVE pasta! We always have a stockpile of pasta in the house. ALWAYS. And we do not grow tired of it.
6. Calamari is pronounces Galama.
Our C are hard Cs. Sometimes they sound like Gs.
7. And our Calamari is stuffed, soaked in tomato sauce and served over pasta. NOT FRIED.
8. Family.
If there is one things we LOVE more than food it’s family, and we all have big families with a popular first name. For instance, my family has a lot of Tonys.
9. Cheeses.
It’s a complicated subject. You got mozzarella, provolone, ricotta and many more. When we can't decide on a cheese we usually solve this problem by putting out all of the cheese.
10. We like to have our salad last.
11. So back on the topic of food, though I’m not sure I drifted from the subject, there is not just one course.
You have your appetizers, then you have your hot appetizers, then you have your main course, and your pasta, then your salad and finally dessert.
12. On holidays and other family gathered events calories DO NOT COUNT.
EVERYTHING. I REPEAT. EVERYTHING is calorie-free. Even the prosciutto with goat cheese wrapped around a fig. The fig cancels out all those other calories. (My cousin has tried many times to organize a family run, but we are usually too full to move.)
13. Our lives are not like the Godfather, but we appreciate the movie.
14. Tradition is important to us.
For instance we eat seven fish on Christmas Eve, and my family has Cappelletti on Easter.
15. Our grandmother’s recipes are top secret.
So don’t ask.
16. We don’t always make everything homemade. Sometimes we cheat and nobody notices the difference.
17. Because I feel like this was not stressed enough food is love food is life.
18. When you put two Italians in the same room together they start yelling at each other about being Italian.
True life experience.
19. At family reunions, you often find yourself hugging many strangers that apparently have known you since you were "this big."
20. Yelling is a form of affection.
Italian families are slightly boisterous and perhaps slightly crazy, but we are fun and willing to adopt external family members. Join us.
