Looking back on a very special year of living la dolce vita in Padova

We recently had the chance to revisit some places dear to our hearts in Padova and reminisce about the year we spent there that served as a launching pad for our ongoing adventures in Italy.

In 2001-02, I took a leave of absence from teaching high school in Gig Harbor to teach fifth grade at the English International of Padua. Experiencing life in Italy had been an ambition since my teen years, but I had to wait until I was in my late 40s to realize this dream. With Lucy and our two youngest (and reluctant) daughters, we packed up more than a dozen suitcases and moved to Padova in the fall of 2001, about a week before the tragedy of 9/11. Our story is told in my book An American Family in Italy: Living la Dolce Vita without Permission. Since that time, we’ve had more than enough adventures in Italy for me to have written one or two more books, but the truth is, we’re having too much fun. I don’t want to sit still long enough to write more books!

We lived up there! Photo by Rosemary

Meanwhile, my brother and his wife arrived in Vicenza just a couple of days before we were scheduled to leave Montecarlo for our other life in Washington state, so we decided to meet up in Padova. We went back to look up at our top floor apartment on the edge of the Arcella district. It still has a terrific glassed-in balcony that we enjoyed on days both cold and warm, but the mailbox labels indicate it is no longer owned by Massimo Maggiore, whom we rented from, nor is his mom Gianna living in the adjacent apartment anymore. Then we walked around the Prato della Valle, a 90,000-square-meter elliptical square that is the largest in Italy. It is surrounded by a canal and two rings of statues. Roger and Rosemary danced to the music of a street musician, and we lunched at one of the piazza restaurants, probably not the most economical of choices, but the pasta alla carbonara that three of us ordered proved to be possibly the best any of us had ever tasted.

Fratelli! Roger and Paul at lunch in Padova.

Angela, the rudder who keeps
the EISP on the right course.

Later, Lucy and I went alone to peek in the windows of our old church, International Christian Fellowship, pastored at the time by two dear friends, Steve and Patti Gray. Sadly, they are no longer with us.

My favorite reminiscence came on a visit to the school where I had taught. Suzye and Lindsey also frequented the school to do their online high school classes in the computer lab. To my surprise, my friend Angela still works at the school, though both the school and her responsibilities have multiplied in the ensuing 20-plus years. Shortly after I left Padova, the school added a high school, and she oversees programs there as well.

Angela told me a story that I should have included in my book, because it actually happened during the year I taught there. I had been hired by the late Lucio Rossi, a shrewd businessman who founded the school and did not always follow protocol 100 percent. The very fact that he hired me, an American without a work permit to teach in a certified British-Italian school, is an example of how he sometimes skirted regulations to his advantage.

In my old 5th grade classroom.

I have fond memories of Lucio, a lively and excitable character who found us an apartment and bought us a washing machine and oven when he learned that they were not included. He paid me with cash, warning me not to tell the other teachers how much I was being paid, because he was paying me extra so I could support my family. How nice! Yes, so I thought, until the end of the year when I learned from Angela that he was actually paying me less! Well, that was a part of “Lucio being Lucio,” Angela said, and I have absolutely no resentment, because without him we never would have able to live in Italy during that special year.

Fond memories! A photo from 2002 in my classroom.

While I primarily taught 5th grade, I also taught journalism and information technology in the middle school, which was under construction during my year there. Some of the classrooms were completed part way through the school year, and Lucio was anxious to move students into the new building, even though the construction had not been approved by the building inspectors.

Roger, Rosemary and me at the gelateria
where I took my 5th grade class to celebrate
the last day of school in 2002.

You can’t move classes in without approval, Angela reminded him. But true to character, as Angela related to me, Lucio said it would be okay. Which it was—until the inspector showed up unexpectedly. Angela received an urgent phone call from Lucio: “You have to evacuate the middle school.”

“I said, ‘Okay,’ when?” Angela explained.

“Right now!” he answered. And so she did, telling teachers and students to grab their things and get out, to move to the elementary school, presumably. But she couldn’t tell them what was going on, as she and Lucio didn’t want to advertise the fact that they had been illegally occupying the building.

“Unfortunately, we still got in trouble, because teachers left all their materials on their desks, and there were other obvious signs that classes were being held there,” Angela said. “But this was the way Lucio sometimes ran things in the earlier years of the school. Now that we’ve expanded, we have to follow all the regulations scrupulously.”

Which means that even if I wanted to, I could never go back to teach there again. No, I’m happily retired and yet still plenty busy, so I’m quite satisfied simply to enjoy the nostalgia.