L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano PAGE  22 DOT ANDERSON Most people don't go to Italy specifically to shop, but if you're out to snag some hot designer fashions plan an early 2013 trip to Italy to get your New Year off to a fashionable start. From January 6 through mid February Italy beckons like a magnetic force field to shoppers who crave the famous Italian brands. Get together with a group of girl friends and jet off to Milan to spend your Christmas bonus, but just make sure that you each have different styles, wear different sizes or be prepared to share, so that the friendship remains intact after the shopping venture. Although all of the major Italian cities have chic shopping areas lined with designer boutiques, none has the variety and number of outlet malls that you'll find in the Milan area. It is after all Italy's fashion capital. You'll find designer goods from Roberto Cavalli, Dolce & Gabbana, Etro, Gucci, Loro Piana, Marni, Prada, Valentino, Versace and more. You can choose from the designers' own direct outlets or from outlets that carry a number of different designer brands. Online sites such as itravelishop.com provides a list of some of these with details such as where they are located and examples of the brands they stock. Just as in America, many of the larger outlet malls are on the outskirts of town, but there are also some designer outlets almost hidden in off the beaten track places in the city. A case in point is the Marni outlet that is squirreled away in a residential neighborhood in the in Italian travel. Of course, regular fashion boutiques and department stores also have sales with much of the winter season merchandise priced 30 to 50% off. So it is possible to burn off most of those holiday calories while tracking all of the values that Milan offers. Trying on clothes in this city, not to mention all of the walking, qualifies as an aerobic activity. Milan is a virtual mecca for fashionistas. It also has what every hard day of shopping should end in and that's a spa. Milan features some excellent ones including Bulgari and Gianfranco Ferre each have their own luxurious spas. The former is located in Milan's Gianfranco Ferre boutique and the latter in the Hotel Bulgari. The luxereview.com has information on these with links to their websites. Another hotel with a beautiful full service spa is the Four Seasons Hotel in Milan. In planning a trip that highlights shopping, it's a good idea to spend a little time shopping around for a great airfare to leave more money for your shopping fund. You'll find deals for around $1,400 per person via United Airlines, Air Canada and Lufthansa with departures from LAX to Milan. These prices were available late November through edreams.net, but I also suggest checking the sites for these airlines as well as kayak.com, which searches multiple airlines to let you compare and find the best prices for the time you want to travel. You wouldn't necessarily think that Milan, a city known for its contemporary design aesthetics, would be a good place to shop not, and will never be natively ours. So how could it sound so completely his? As a child acquires his first language it's easy for parents to feel that he's becoming more fully a part of the family, expanding his range of participation in it. Becoming, as we say, "one of us." In the case of a second language, though, in which neither you nor your spouse is comfortable, your eagerness as a parent to see your child well underway with it can turn into a sense that he or she is being carried off on a stream whose force you've rather badly, and perhaps a little sadly, miscalculated. It gave me new sympathy for immigrant parents everywhere who must watch with a mixture of pride and some slight unease California speaking only Italian. My parents never talked about what that was like for them but, perhaps as a result, neither of them ever saw any value in teaching me or my four siblings their mother tongue. In fact the only remark my father (or mother) ever made that could be construed as relating to their first years of school was when my father mentioned at the height of the Iranian Hostage Crisis that during his boyhood in the small town of Newman, California "Italians were about as popular as Iranians are now." Sandro does not face similar sentiments. Unlike the unfortunate case of a Romanian boy we've met here, the son of two educated and successful parents who refuses to speak his native tongue because of widespread Prada store in Milan northeast section of Milan. The MaxMara factory outlet is near Piazza San Babila. In fact you'll find tons of shopping and great buys in Milan itself. So to leave time for some of the city's sites Us, Them, and Our Son STEVEN VARNI It was a brief throwaway exclamation that made me realize my 3 1/2-year-old son had become one of them. I'd left him alone in his room for less than a minute, where he was trying to build a gravitydefying skyscraper out of Legos, and as I returned I heard him blurt out, "Ma dai!" His accent, his intonation, his particular relish of the words on his lips, were exactly that of the adult Italians who live all around us on the island of Sant' Elena in Venice. He could have been our neighbor Fabio at his workbench, just down the viale. Instead, he was the only child of two mostly monolingual Americans who'd spent the first year and a half of his life in Asheville, NC, the next year in Brooklyn. My wife Jen and I have lived in Italy with our son Sandro since November 2010. Sandro started public pre-school here a week after we arrived and readily took to his new tongue. Soon, you may want to focus on only one or two of the large outlet malls. Some will require a car to reach, so this is another consideration. Shopping Italian outlet malls and designer outlets, is such a big deal that some tour companies offer guided group or private shopping tours of Italy. In fact, Fidenza Village outside Milan offers its own tour packages on its website fidenzavillage.com. It even offers shuttle service from Milan to reach it. You'll also find information on shopping tours on the following sites: Lifeinitaly. com, milanshoppingtours.com, and viator.com as well as from travel consultants who specialize while Jen and I still had to mentally rummage among our store of Italian vocabulary for the right words, Sandro seemed to lightly carry a bunch of the most useful terms in his front pockets, tossing them out as needed like bright small change. His first sentence in Italian was "Non si fa". One does not do that, he told Jen, wagging his index finger exactly as his teacher must have often done at school. At this point he still seemed to be borrowing phrases more than possessing them. And we knew that if we moved back to the States he'd drop them even more quickly than he'd picked them up. But that exclamation of "Ma dai!" uttered in isolation and with complete spontaneity marked a new phase. I realized right then that neither Jen nor I, no matter how long we live here and how much our Italian improves, will ever be able to say that without self-consciousness. It's a wonderfully satisfying phrase to pronounce, but it is THURS DAY,   JANUARY  10,   2013 Christmas tree shopping in Venice as their child is swept into the linguistic current of a new (and foreign) culture. It gave me new sympathy for my own grandparents, whose own children—my parents—entered school in Italian prejudice against Romania, Sandro's land of origin is generally admired and its language considered essential in this tourist-based economy. Moreover, Sandro is not being for antiques, but it has several markets worth checking out, because you never know what you'll find. These include Viale Papiniano and Via Fauche, both of which carry shoes and clothing and are open every Saturday. Milan has a wide selection of cool hotels to suit any taste and location need. Once you've decided how you'll spend your time, besides shopping, you can better decide where to stay. Hotels.com and venere.com can be helpful in sorting out locations and ammenities in a range of prices from under $150 to over $300. If shopping is your idea of a great way to start the New Year, then by all means book a trip to Milan. Although malls and outlet malls are much the same the world over, you will find outlet stores there that you don't find in the states and you can top that off with shopping in downtown Milan, which is an undeniable shopping mecca experience. carried off by a strange new language into a strange new land— as my parents were—but by the mother tongue of every generation of my family except my own, into the native land of every generation before my parents. In an essential way, my son has more in common with my deceased grandparents and my father than I, who grew up with them, ever had. His native sense of the language makes him one of "them" in a way I never was. And never really will be. For I come to the language from the outside, as it were, consciously, as something to to be studied and learned, rather than something grown up with, something lived into. Something nearly as natural, or nearly as unconscious, as breathing. And I know this makes a difference. As the American linguist Benjamin Whorf wrote: "Language shapes the way we think and determines what we think about." As the great Italian director Federico Fellini said: "A different language is a different vision of life." So what vision of life will Sandro derive from the two languages he now comfortably speaks? There's no knowing. It's said that Children are the Future, and no matter how we might try to dictate that Future it's always ultimately uncertain. But as Sandro's life moves inevitably forward I'm struck by how, without any special effort on his part, or even awareness, it also circles back in unexpected ways toward origins that my grandparents had resigned themselves to leaving behind forever.

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