1988

29 years old. D'Elia srl days.

Betty's cousin was married to a man named Roberto who owned the best modern furniture store in Modena, and he had a professional photographer friend named Cristiano Casolari who they sent me to see for a job. My Italian was still very primitive at this time, but I could get along a little, so he recommended me to a studio that gave him a lot of photography work, Studio D'Elia.

The tiny offices of Studio D'Elia were located in the courtyard of a beautiful 15th century palazzo on Via Santo Stefano in central Bologna. It was perhaps the most run-down palazzo in all Bologna, which suited my romantic, 18th century fantasy of ruined magnificence quite nicely. There were nice frescos peeling off the walls and the dust of centuries in every unswept corridor stretching off into the dimly-lit gloom of the twisting depths.

Renato D'Elia hired me as a full-time freelancer and I started designing catalogs and advertising for the ceramics tile industry. Renato taught me a lot of Italian. He was intelligent and patient enough to explain anything he said until I could understand it.

We moved into Via Savani, 20, in Modena after Betty's Mom bought us a condo. It was a beautiful apartment, full of light, just outside of the city center, with a deep terrace (5 meters, at least) that ran the whole length of the apartment. We spent a lot of money furnishing it, splitting all the expenses equally between us.

Betty had lots of friends, and most of the time when we went out nobody spoke English to me. So when her friend Nadia invited us to go to Corsica to spend a vacation with her and her boyfriend Stephane Leveque, I was delighted to meet someone who spoke Italian as poorly as I. Corsica was lovely. We stayed at La Casa Di Musica in a tiny jewel of a town perched on a steep mountain top and drove down to the beach or up into the National Forest where Stephane worked as a forest ranger.

My Grandpa Abling died late in the year and I found it very difficult to mourn him in Italy, far from my family. We went back to the US for our Christmas vacation and I finally found some peace about it after being able to talk with my family about it for a while.

That winter I met Dean Sulimay, a hairdresser from Florida who spoke with a soft Philadelphia accent and was a body builder. He helped me work out at our gym and we got to be buddies. He and his brother Joe both warned me that my wife didn't love me, which I was starting to have to admit, as hard as it was.

Meaningless pseudo-Italian hand gesture with X-Acto knife