Dina Horwedel

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Location

Colorado, USA

Birthday

October 23

Bio

I spent the first 20 or so years of my life spelling my last name for teachers. I always knew that it was my turn for the roll-call when a teacher’s face would contort. My last name was not difficult to pronounce because it was Italian, but rather, because it is a German moniker that I inherited from my father. My first and middle names came from my mother, who named me after a World War II Italian resistance fighter. I always felt like a square peg growing up in Northeast Ohio: huggy in a place where the staid German and English descendants didn’t show much affection; effervescent where most people were quiet; and loving a good party where most people’s definition of a good time was watching Wheel of Fortune. My Italian family gatherings could be heard several miles away. I always thought I was weird because I was nothing like the people in my town who said Eyetalian instead of Italian; where they made grilled cheese sandwiches with Velveeta. My grandfather was teased as a boy for eating pizza, which was called “Dago food” and we were outsiders in a town with no Catholic Church. I spent a summer in high school living in northern Europe. It seemed so familiar… threads of the Germanic culture that were woven into that of my hometown. But I never felt the desire to go to Italy. I had heard my great-grandfather complain so much about the grinding poverty in “the old country” that I didn’t see the point. Why would I ever want to go to Italy? After all, he escaped. After I went to college, where for the first time I was exposed to many Eyetalian-Americans outside of my family. At one of my first jobs as a journalist, I was surrounded by Eyetalian-Americans, and it was one of the best jobs of my life: laughter filled our offices, we lunched together, invented and wrote and edited and dreamed together. After law school, I moved West, then overseas, working in Afghanistan, Africa, and Armenia, combining a journalism and communications background with a law degree. I used my overseas work as a launch pad for visiting other countries, and eventually found myself in Italy. I wish I could say it was love at first sight. I fought it at first. I never saw the point of stiletto heels on cobblestones. The echoes of Vespas bounced off of ancient stone buildings droned like swarms of wasps. And how productive could a country be when everything shut down in the afternoon? But over time Italy seduced me… the rolling fields of Tuscany, the terra cotta roofs of Florence, the purplish hues of the ocean in Cinque Terre, the slapping of water on the canals of Venice, and the simple mindfulness and presence I felt as I sipped cappuccino or ate and ate and ate some more, that for the first time in a long time I wasn’t mindlessly scurrying about, but was seeing and tasting and living. I understand why my great-grandfather came to America. There was opportunity for his family and there still is. But I realized after visiting Italy that I wasn’t weird, I was just Italian! I didn’t have to leave la dolce vita back in Italy. I am learning how to live the sweet life (while still bitching about it like a real Italian), right here in the land of Velveeta.