“Ten Years in Italy” is a candid and often sad tale, but worth reading

Italy can be a cruel, dismal, abusive and unforgiving place for immigrants from developing countries. This was the experience of Cristina G., who dreamed of improving her conditions by escaping from the poverty of her family’s farm in Romania to Italy, where she hoped to find a better life. Instead she mostly found bigotry, misogyny, cruelty and abusive conditions that bordered on slavery. She writes about her experiences in Ten Years in Italy, Three Weeks a Human.

I’m Italian-American and live in Italy at least three months every year, and I love Italy. However, I can’t help but notice the harsh conditions that many immigrants there endure. Most of them can’t publish books about their stories, but Cristina, who lived in Italy from 2000 to 2010, gives voice to an experience that one can only hope is rare —but perhaps is too common.

Her first job as a live-in babysitter started badly. “Useless Romanian!” her employer, a countess with two children, shouted. “Stay out of my sight! You make me feel sick. You shouldn’t have been allowed to come here.”

Cristina, then 24, slept in a smelly basement bedroom, its walls covered with damp green mold. The countess made Cristina walk behind her at least a meter because “you’re not on my level.” Cristina tried to learn Italian as quickly as possible and wrote words on her hand to help her remember. The countess saw this and grabbed the pen, shouting, “Illiterate creature! You didn’t come here to learn, you came here to serve and follow the rules! You’re here because you were starving in your petty country, not to write words on your filthy hand.”

When a young man rescued her from that family, it seemed her life had taken a turn for the better. Within a month they were married, but it soon turned out that he and his mother treated her as a servant as well. Within eight months, she was back on her own again. She worked as a waitress, a woodworker and a secretary, among other things, for the next nine years, and mistreatment became the norm. Many of her problems stemmed from her attractive appearance. Men tended to treat her as a sex object. Women resented her because of the attention shown to her by her male bosses.

She refused the advances of her employers, despite receiving advice like this while working in a restaurant: “You silly girl, every man in in this room has their eyes on you. Rich men would buy you a house where you would wait for them and do nothing all day. They would pay for your clothes, food, holidays. You’ll never get out of this. You’re wasting your tremendous beauty and youth.”

Cristina reading two books at once.

She rejected this idea, but her status as a Romanian and a woman made it difficult for Cristina to rent an apartment and buy a car. She also battled ill health and depression, sometimes contemplating suicide, but she persisted. This is not an inspiring rags-to-riches success story, because in the end, riches never came. After 10 years, nearly as poor as she was when she started, Cristina wrote that “defeated in everything, without a shred of dignity left intact, I went home.” She had held only one job during her stay in Italy, a temporary contract that lasted for three months, where she felt accepted and appreciated by both co-workers and supervisors. In recent years, Cristina has found a measure of success as an author while living in England.

Despite all the difficulties, she does not regret going to Italy and says she would absolutely do it again. “It goes without saying that I would have preferred to be spared at least half of the (sufferings), but I survived. I look back and know that everything happens for a reason. I owe Italy everything I am today. I must emphasize that (my story) could have been any other country. My goal isn’t to denigrate but to raise awareness of unwitting prejudices in many of us.”

The story suffers from some grammatical and organizational errors, but Cristina’s voice is sincere and compelling. It’s likely that some of the unsympathetic characters she encountered would want to dispute some of her perceptions, but this is Cristina’s recollection. It’s not flattering to either her or Italy, but the story deserves to be told and is worth reading.