As I write my final column for the semester, I am currently recovering from my weeklong Italian food coma.  For my final travel break, I toured Italy from Milan to Rome, including a few destinations in between, with two of my Georgetown friends, Sydney and Megan.  Although all the places that we went were breathtaking, I think the highlights of our trip were the dinners with my family.

Quick backstory: I was adopted from South Korea by an Italian-Chinese father and an Italian mother.  My paternal grandmother was born and raised in Lucca, Italy.  Fast forward to today: I have a lot of second cousins who still live in Italy, right outside of Lucca. I’ve met three of them before, and had plans to stay with one of them, Gigliola, and her husband, Claudio, for four days while we took day trips from our base at their Tuscan countryside villa.  My only request, as suggested by my dad, was to have a family dinner so I could meet all of my relatives.

On our first day, we arrived in Pisa Centrale train station approximately 50 minutes late because of unknown train trouble.  I hadn’t seen Claudio in years and he was the one picking us up.  Dazed and confused, I was saved by the familiar presence of a small Italian woman named Gioia, Gigliola’s sister and my other second cousin, who I also had previously met and luckily remembered.  Our journey was not nearly close to being over, as we had to drive past aqueducts and through a mountain to arrive to Gigliola’s home.

The drive was probably no more than 30 minutes, but the language barrier was quite apparent. My high school Italian skills were not as sharp as they once were, and their English was only slightly better. The only conclusion that we came to during that ride was that we liked pizza and that we would go to Gioia’s house on Tuesday to eat pizza. From then on, Gioia’s house was known as

“La Casa di Pizza” (The House of Pizza) and Tuesday’s plans were shaped around pizza.
When we entered Gigliola’s house, we were greeted with ciaos, double cheek kisses, and the amazing smell of homemade lasagna. We were immediately escorted from the doorway to the large dining room to find our plates being filled with meat lasagna and a spread of homemade bread and olive oil on the table. For those unfamiliar with traditional Italian dining, pasta is only the first plate. I tapped out at one plate of lasagna, knowing that there was more to come, but Megan and Sydney had no idea what was in store. Plates of meat and Tuscan-style potatoes, as well as multiple desserts and many bottles of wine followed.

Communication was a little uncomfortable at first, but food and wine have a way of easing things for all.

By the time “Pizza Tuesday” rolled around, we had already been eating some of the most delicious foods of our lives, but we were still looking forward to La Casa di Pizza. Unfortunately, we arrived to find no pizza or even any signs of pizza. Little did we know that Gioia had a brick pizza oven downstairs and was just getting started with rolling out the dough.

If you have never had homemade brick oven pizza, then you need to drop everything and book a flight to Italy immediately.

Life-changing is the only appropriate phrase to describe it. Add a little bit of prosciutto or speck on top if you’re feeling adventurous and you’re at a whole other level.

The only things that could possibly make the pizza better were the company and the wine. Now that we were past the initial meeting, everyone was much more comfortable and more talkative. Although we’ve only met a few times and are not blood related, we still felt like a loving family. It was the prosciutto to my homemade pizza: everything I could’ve ever wanted and more to top off my study abroad experience.

Christina Wing is a junior in the McDonough School of Business studying abroad in Copenhagen. This is the final appearance of  Damsel In Denmark this semester.