Prato is to Florence what Cambridge is to Boston --- a bustling city in its own right of about 180,000 people just northwest of its better known neighbor. It was there during World War II that my father, a U.S. Army counterintelligence officer, set up local headquarters in the home of the Giuseppe Rosati family. He became friendly with Mr. and Mrs. Rosati and continued that friendship with the Rosatis' daughters, Rosalba, Giuseppina and Margherita, and their grandson, Federico Cianchi. I had last seen Federico in 1981, when he was 10. He is now a lawyer and starting a real estate agency with a business partner, planning to marry next year and maybe even honeymoon in the US.
We had arranged to have dinner this evening with Margherita, her husband, Marcello, and Federico and met them at their home in Prato, where we renewed our Christmas-correspondence friendship in person and reminisced. Federico even produced postcards that my dad had sent him in the late 1980s of scullers on the Charles River in Boston and from a ski area in Vermont.
Interestingly, they took us to a restaurant in the mountains about 25 minutes north of Prato in an area that Sarah said reminded her of New Hampshire or Vermont. There were no tourists here, though; only locals enjoying the remains of a day off in the middle of the week with barbecues by the stream that flowed past the restaurant.
Our dinner conversation was an amusing and joyous linguistic stew of broken English, broken Italian, fluent English and fluent Italian as we compared mundane things like work and school schedules and daily routines, bemoaned the price of real estate, which is about the same in urban Italy as it is in Boston, and discussed global warming and its effect on Italy. It was an evening that was over all too soon, and Federico offered the most profound observation of the night:
"The time spent with good friends is never enough."
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