(Italian or German)
When one of the Savage women took the 23-and-Me test, not one of my in-laws wanted to believe the results.
“It said we are German,” one of the Savages spit out like a bad piece of fish.
The rest chimed in with a chorus of rejection and explanation.
“We are Italian,” the wife stated with the conviction of an executioner. “Don’t care what the test says.”
For nearly a decade I believed her. That test is bullshit. Take it again, and it might say you are Norwegian.
Her aunt’s are small and dark. Dark hair, brown eyes. Her uncle was born in Pieve Vergonte, Italy.
The family recipe is raviolis.
The wife has green eyes.
“These are my father’s eyes,” she has told me since 1984. Her father is the white Mormon boy who married her little dark Italian mother. “No one else in the family has his eyes.”
Convincing– very convincing.
Then we went to Italy to meet these relatives. Her grandmother had a sister and a brother who stayed home. The Trivellis. Several Trivellis married Tomalas.
And 3 or 4 or 5 generations later there’s almost every last name ending in a vowel you can imagine claiming a connection to these two sisters and a brother.
“I don’t think anyone on the American side has met the Trivelli brother’s side before,” the wife said. “I didn’t even know there was a brother.”
We took the train from Milan headed north to Basel. Just before the Swiss border, it let us out in Domodossola.
A small town, a region really, about 11k south of the Alps. Good red wine. Great white wine. Apparently good cycling, but I didn’t try these steep hills and narrow roads. (This trip).
Sarah, we will call her a “cousin” because the actual relationship would take too long to track or name accurately, met us at the station.
“I recognized your green eyes,” Sarah told the wife. “Just like my mother’s.”
Sarah’s eyes were kind of hazel.
She drove us down the highway toward the more remote hills where the cousins had a meal planned for us in one of their houses back in the little town where the wife’s grandmother, grandfather and uncle were born, Pieve Vergonte.
We ate and drank and ate and ate and drank and drank (“mongia, mongia” culture is real and lives in all sides of the family even across an ocean.)
More and more “cousins” arrived until there was about 30 of them sitting in a tight semicircle around us. Staring at the stuffed and buzzed Americans like they should recognize “the Italian one.”
I looked around and started counting eye color. 4 blues, 6 green, 2 hazel, 2 gray, 2 some light color that defied my description.
Ohh over in the corner was 3 or 4 brown-eyed girls.
“Our mother is Sicilian,” the youngest one — who did most of the translating for us — said. “We got the brown eyes and brown hair.”
Jesus. I hadn’t even looked at the hair… but the ones who hadn’t turned gray yet, there was a lot of blonde. (A bit of purple and green too — but that was just to match the tattoos.)
I tapped the wife on the shoulder and whispered in her ear.
“You know that DNA test your family hates… it’s looking pretty accurate to me. There’s a lot of blue-eyes Germans in this crowd.”
I must have whispered a little too loud
“Italiano o tedesco?” the brown-eyed girl asked the crowd.
They all spit out “tedesco” like a bad piece of fish.
But they all laughed about the blue eyes.
That two hour train ride from this part of Italy through Switzerland has been carrying people and goods for nearly 200 years.
I’m not making any accusations, just an observation: Pretty easy to let that DNA spill across the border too.
