“I speak Italian,” she corrected primly, knowing it would not have any effect. Italian-American tourists all felt they spoke Italian no matter what wretched sounds they came out with. It offended her sense of things that they should connect her Italianness with theirs. “I’ve lived here for years and my father is from Venice,” she went on compulsively, showing that she could have no possible kinship with meridionali like them (and feeling like Peter denying Christ as she wiped out, with her snobbery, all her mother’s Calabrian ancestry). Her father occasionally spoke Veneto. She loved the sound of it—the lilting cadences of a dialect imbued with sea motion, but it was the language of doges and artists, not some southern pastiche from ignorant mountain recesses.

Oblivious, friendly, expansive, the man went on. “My father was from Fudge.”

“Fudge?”

“Don’t you know where that is? Down near Bari.”

“Oh,” Tina gasped, “Foggia!”

“Yah, Fudge.”

They were ruining her morning, Tina thought sourly as she ate her würstel and sipped at the cappuccino. She thought of herself in the States angrily explaining that she was not Italian-American. My father is Italian and my mother is a third-generation American who never heard Italian until she got to Italy to study; I am part Italian and part American, not Italian-American. It was a splitting of hairs that convinced no one, not even Tina. But she felt obliged, each time, to put up her defense against being merged in the ethnic mess she saw and despised in the States. She thought of a bumper sticker that disgusted her: “Mafia Staff Car, Keepa You Hands Off.” She looked around, wanting to get away, as the man said, “Guess you know this town pretty good, huh?”

“Jason!” Tina called out, beginning to wave frantically. “Jason Jowers, over here!” She beckoned to a figure crossing the piazza not far from the caffè until he turned, squinted in the light, recognized her, and came over.

“Ciao, Tina,” Jason said as he came over, and kissed her on the cheek. He was dressed in an Indian shirt and was carrying a shopping net full of peaches and rolls. “What’s up?”

“Let’s get out of here,” she said quickly in Italian, counting out change that she left on the table, “before I get involved with these deficienti. Andiamo.”

“See yuh,” waved the man from the adjoining table.

“God!” she muttered, and took Jason’s arm, steering him through the tables out into the piazza.