What's in a Name?
somewhere in Puglia...
DuoLingo tells me I’m 12% fluent in Italian after one month in Italy. This means if anyone asks me if I speak Italian, “Parla Italiano?” I should still say “No.” Besides reading a seafood menu and asking where the nearest beach is - important vacation skills - I learned a more important word. My own name.
PERTOSO
I am Italian-American and grew up in predominantly not-so-ethnic town where most surnames ended in clean consonants like Reynolds, Hanson, and Smith. In elementary school I was Lisa Pizza (not amusing), Lisa Leaning Tower of Pisa (sort of clever with some art history knowledge), and Lisa Potato Head (plain stupid). My high school gym teacher who knew me for four years changed my surname whenever she felt like it during roll call: Lisa Presto was my all-time favorite.
The American truth of our name is that my grandfather landed at Ellis Island in the early 20th century and changed it from Pertosa to Pertoso. The family story is that he wanted a more masculine name for a strong new start in a new country, not knowing that English doesn’t bother with gendered to words. Sometimes people do mistakenly change the ‘o’ to an ‘a’ and I can’t blame them as it rolls off the tongue more gently.
After a lifetime of my last name being misspelled with an extra ‘r’ and being mispronounced (you should hear a robot try to say it) Italy set me free. I said my name out loud and watched people write it down with ease, no questions asked, no corrections needed. I never had to spell it using the military alphabet (P as in Peter, e as in echo).
Instead the Italians taught me to correctly pronounce Pertoso with an Italian mouth rather than the flat American accent I’d been born speaking. “Per” sounded like “Pear” and the “so” like “zo”. I’ve never loved my name but going back to my roots helped me find hidden beauty.
That’s the thing about travel. It takes you outside your comfortable zone. New language and culture flips your perspective upside and shifts your long-held beliefs, the ones you thought were set in stone, and smashes them into sand.
Grazie, Italia.