My Italian grandmother sits on the swing outside the house she’s lived in for over two decades, in the lake town she was born in more than ninety-three years ago, in the place she gave birth to my father almost fifty years later. She is silently watching the people pass by; and occasionally comments on her neighbors.  Romano who went to the mountains for vacation, about the neighbors to our left she hasn’t seen for some time — all the while rubbing her right hand with her left and smoothing the folds that wrinkle her worn skin.

We’re in Desenzano del Garda, a town in northern Italy, surrounded by the sparkling blue of Lake Garda, and I’m sitting next to her, asking to hear stories of her life once again, of the decisions that eventually led to me — an Italian American — to be with her on that swing in the middle of a hot July Italian summer.

It was the 1940s when my grandmother Rosa locked eyes with a handsome man from across the pews of a church in Desenzano. His name was Giovanni, and these lustful looks lasted for some time until he waited on the church steps one day for Rosa and asked if he could accompany her on her Sunday walk home, through the town’s square, or piazza, and down the roads to her house. She said yes.

Little did she know she would marry this same man a few years later, in the same town in which they met, and she would give birth to their first child, my father, Raffaele, shortly after. Giovanni then made a name for himself as a successful Italian tailor hemming and mending the suits for the important people of the town, and Rosa left her job at the post office to take care of my father.

Though Giovanni’s business was going well, and Rosa loved her home country, they contemplated moving to America only a few years later. After failed attempts at having another child, and after knowing many who immigrated to America, to Rosa and Giovanni, this seemed particularly appealing. So the family boarded a ship, their six-year-old son in tow, and left.

Just like that, Raffaele, born Italian, became an Italian American. Many years after the ship had landed he would move to New York City where he’d meet my mother and have three children: my older sister, my younger brother and I.

Being the children of an Italian, our ancestry seemed to permeate everything we did: We attended the Catholic church across the street every Sunday, we ate meals rich with pastas and bread and breaded chicken and we would even fight like the Italians we were — fervently, passionately and stubbornly.

The summers we spent in Italy visiting family just reiterated our ethnicity even more. They were filled with the stereotypes many people deem true when they think of the country of gelato and Dolce & Gabbana: the colorful fruit vendors on every street corner; the angry gesticulations; the gelled-up, tanned men; the accordions sitting on the cobblestones — and this all felt so traditional, so beautifully old and somewhat sacred.

Then, in high school, I lived with my grandmother for seven months. (My grandmother had moved back to Italy for good after her husband retired), and it was during those months that I began to understand subtleties about Italian culture I hadn’t before — subtleties I couldn’t understand solely by wandering the cobblestone streets. I saw Italy in the way she insisted I wear socks in eighty degree weather because there was a slight breeze and she worried I’d catch a cold (Italians don’t see relief in cool breezes on a hot day; they see pneumonia). I saw it in the anxiety she would express when I’d leave the house, never afraid to voice her dislike when it came to what I was wearing or what I was doing, or both (did I mention that Italians are as passionate with their food as they are with their anger?). And, most of all, I saw it in the way she valued her routines: The 12 p.m. lunch she had every day of either pasta or meat; the way she, and I, watched the Italian equivalent of “Deal or No Deal” every night.

It had been two years since I’d been to Italy when I returned this past summer, and I was hungry for more of her stories, always yearning to find the parallels between her world and mine. So I listened and went to where she had once been: The church in which she met my grandfather, where I gazed at the al fresco paintings that aligned the grandiose walls, the ones she must have looked at before her eyes met his. I went to the pebbled beach with my friends and sat in the same area she used to lay with hers. I went to the castle near our house that overlooked the sparkling lake, thinking of her doing the same — forty, sixty, eighty years ago.

And I did this with the thought, the knowing, that even though I can’t know all the stories of her life, Italy is a part of her, and the Italy she knew is not much different from the one I know. It’s still as much a country of tradition, of beauty, as ever before.

So as we sat next to each other on that swing in Italy in the middle of July — a ninety-three-old woman and a twenty-one-year-old woman, our lives swayed in a steady rhythm, as close to being in sync as we possibly be.