Today I interview a couple who have three international identities! Elena (from Bologna, Italy) and Marcus (from Salt Lake City, Utah, USA ) who make their home in Switzerland. Elena answers the questions with wit and humor!

I love hearing her stories. I hope you enjoy them, too!

We met at the Italian Alpine Club in Bologna, Italy. We were both interested in ski touring. Marc asked me, in Italian, how much the course cost. What a winning pick-up line! Then he asked for my phone number. I’m not sure why I gave it to him!

He called me a few days later and asked me if I wanted to travel to the Alps with him for the weekend and go on a ski tour together. I was very skeptical. So, I called my big brother and told him about this American guy. My brother blurted out, “But Americans don’t know how to ski!” We didn’t know yet that Marc was from Salt Lake City and came from a family of amazing skiers.

Before we met, Marc had lived in many places around the world – using his college degree in Biology from Stanford – teaching in Skagway, Alaska; Quito, Ecuador; and Turin, Italy.

I didn’t go skiing with Marc that weekend. But hundreds of ski tours followed that first rejection, and we still go ski touring to this day.

After we started dating, Marc and I lived in various places while we pursued further education. I got a PhD in Botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and did a post-doc at Washington State University.  Marc finished his PhD in Environmental History in Madison then had a Fulbright Scholarship in Italy. We moved to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks for our first faculty jobs and then to Zurich for our current faculty jobs.

We got married in a small village of the Apennines near Bologna. Marc comes from a non-religious family, and I come from a very Catholic family. We are both agnostic, but Marc loved Italian churches and understood that getting married in a church was very important to my parents. We had a joyful ceremony in a country church, with a lot of Italian family and friends and a good representation of Americans: Marc’s parents, his two sisters, one of his nieces, two of his friends, and even a couple of his sister’s friends. My niece and my sister-in-law’s sister played the flute. An American couple of artists who had lived in Florence for decades, did the church readings in English.

When the priest asked Marc whether he wanted to marry me, he hesitated, thinking that this slight delay would add gravitas to his answer. But I thought that maybe he had not understood the question, so I whispered into his ear “Devi dire di si’!’” (“You must say yes!”). Which was obviously extremely funny and remains one of our family jokes to this day!!

One of Marc’s old friends from Salt Lake City made quite an entrance. We were already having the post-wedding lunch in a local country restaurant, with two villagers playing traditional tunes at the accordion and the guitar, when we saw this taxi pulling over. It was surprising to see a taxi in this tiny hamlet. And, lo and behold, Marc sees Perry coming out of the taxi! He was at an astronomy conference in Germany, had jumped on a plane to Bologna and taken an hour-long taxi ride all the way to this small village! Ah, questi Americani!

‘The Americans’ managed to set up a car, according to American tradition, with tin cans attached by strings to this small FIAT500. They spray painted on the car what they thought was the translation of “Just married”.

The problem was, they wrote “Quasi sposi”, which means “Almost married”, instead of “Appena sposati”, the proper translation of “Just married”. So, I guess that, even before my wedding day was over, we had already run had two cases of “lost in translation”, which continue to this day on both sides of the language divide to comic effect.

We spent our wedding night in a tent we pitched in the yard of my family’s country house in the Apennines, because the house was full of guests. And we spent our honeymoon on a multi-day hike through the Alps with Marc’s parents, one of his sisters, and her teenage daughter. It was a lot of fun and we hiked through “vie ferrate” that I would never dare to even touch with a ten-foot pole nowadays as it is way too exposed!

There was a funny one on Marc’s side when we were eating figs with my mother in Bologna. Marc was remarking on how delicious those figs were. Unfortunately, nouns are gendered in Italian, and, if one turns “fichi” from masculine to feminine, one finds oneself in a hilariously embarrassing situation. I cannot repeat here what that change of noun gender means in English. My mother, a very proper but good-natured woman who never said a bad word in her life, could not help but laugh a bit, quickly recognizing the linguistic faux pas.

I have another funny one! Italian is a phonetic language, meaning that you pronounce words the same way they are written. Most of the times. One of the few tricky things about Italian spelling is the double consonants, which Americans have a hard time discerning from single consonants. So, once Marc sent a postcard to my parents wishing them Happy New Year in Italian. The correct spelling is “Buon Anno”, but he spelled it “Buon Ano”. Even my father laughed at that, despite being a serious guy (but with a funny bone deep down)!  I think I do not need to translate “ano”, it’s similar to the English word! I’ll leave it to the imagination of the readers. File another one for family lore!

I also remember a funny one on my side. When I visited Marc in Wisconsin for the first time, I told him what I thought were the very romantic words “You are my sweet beer” to obviously comic effect. The diversity of sounds that two different consecutive vowels can produce in the English language never ends to amaze me! Anyway, those words are also part of our family lore! Together with the fichi and the ano!

That it a tough question. We are an Italian-American couple who lived the first two years of our relationship in Italy, the following 11 years in the US, and the past 21 years in Zurich, Switzerland. So, I think that the most surprising and challenging aspect of our marriage has been to constantly negotiate not only our two cultures and languages (Italian and English), but a third and even fourth one (German and Swiss German, the local language spoken informally in Zurich and Eastern Switzerland).

What’s one part of your spouse’s culture you’ve chosen to embrace?

The first thing that comes to mind is that I have embraced the outdoors and sport activities that Marc and his entire family love. Before having children, I went on adventure trips with Marc and his parents, including several backpacking trips to the canyons of Southern Utah, the Wind Rivers, the Tetons, and two river trips in the wilderness of Alaska, with a small plane dropping us off in the middle of nowhere in the Woodtickchick Lakes the first time and the Noatak River the second time. We had kayaks to assemble and our tents. We paddled down the waterways for ten days each time, then the same small plane picked us up. We had no cell phones, but Marc and his parents marked a specific sand spit on a map and told the pilot to pick us up there on a certain day. I would never do this again nowadays, but it was truly exciting back then. We saw several grizzly bears. I was scared then, but now I would be positively terrified.

My parents were not adventurous, they were very duty-bound, super-dependable and hard-working, but did not have much time or money when they were young for recreation. So his family life had been very different than mine. Despite the obvious differences, both Marc’s and my parents shared a strong commitment to their spouses and children and a focus on core values, rather than superficial, consumerist ones.

I think the biggest struggles for us have been linked to navigating a third country, Switzerland, and additional languages: German for official communications in Zurich, and Swiss German for everyday life in Zurich.

We have two boys who were both born in Fairbanks, Alaska. They are very proud of that!

Raising our children in different cultures and languages was really challenging. The boys attended Swiss day-care centers when we first moved here, then they moved to bilingual schools (German-English), then to an international school. They speak English and German fluently, converse with their Swiss friends in Swiss German (or, rather, Züri-Düutsch), speak imperfectly fluent Italian with my relatives, and learned French in school.

Aldo, our older son, speaks Italian better than his brother Alex. He took the International Baccalaureate Diploma here in Zurich with both English and German at mother-tongue level,

Alex speaks French better than his brother Aldo. Two of Alex’s friends had French parents who spoke French with him. Alex moved back to the US to attend a school for skiers in Utah when he was 16, so he did not do the IB.

The other challenge for me has been being a professional woman who works full time in Switzerland. I am a professor of Biology at a university here in Zurich, a country where most working mothers work only part time, and still quite a few mothers do not work at all (although this is rapidly changing). Indeed, women only got the right to vote in Switzerland as late as the 1970s, and I feel that this still reverberates through Swiss society in a thousand little ways that I think most people here do not necessarily recognize.

It was also difficult finding two academic jobs on the same side of the ocean. At one point, when our kids were still in elementary school, Marc had a tenure-track faculty position at the University of Utah, his dream job, and I had mine in Switzerland. We went back-and-forth for three years, which was very hard for every member of our family, until eventually Marc was also offered a full-time academic job in Switzerland.

Both of our sons, Aldo and Alex, learned to ski from Marc at a very early age.

One became a very skilled snowboarder.

The other one has been on the US National Freeski Team for several years, participating in the Winter Olympics Games 2018 in PyeongChang, Korea.

Our children have navigated three countries: Italy, USA, and Switzerland. They have lived with the multiple languages of English, German, Swiss German, Italian, plus French throughout their lives. Because they were born into this multicultural context, I think for them it is somewhat normal, also because most of their friends are on the same boat. It’s their only reality, they do not know what it means to be born and raised in a single country from parents who belong to that country and speak the same language, which is the way Marc and I were raised.

Our older son, Aldo, went to college in the US, finishing in three years with a double major then did an internship with a Swiss company in the US. He came back to Switzerland for a master’s degree in international relations at the Federal University (ETH) here in Zurich, so he’s the one straddling the two continents. I think Aldo feels a bit more European, but these things change all the time.

I think our younger son, Alex, feels very American, since he has lived in the US since he was 16. He’s now 22, although he constantly travels across many countries in America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand for international freeski contests. His multilingualism certainly helps him in his travels, and even when he visits Spanish-speaking countries he can tap into his Italian to communicate.

Both boys have had American girlfriends for a few years, so it will be interesting to see how they navigate issues of where to look for jobs, where to live, etcetera.

It keeps you on your toes. You can’t take anything for granted. You need to work hard at navigating differences and trying to reach across languages and cultures to understand where the other is coming from.

What we really appreciate about Switzerland is the amazing landscape: we go to the mountains every weekend for hiking, skiing, kayaking, biking. We live in the hills near Zurich, which has been great when we were still working remotely, for it allowed us to go on pleasant daily walks with view of the Alps and the lakes during lunch break. We also appreciate the excellent infrastructure, public transportation, and salaries. And being in the heart of Europe with an airport that connects us to all parts of the world.

Pre-Covid we used to travel to the US at least twice a year to see our kids, when they are there, and Marc’s parents, who, at 96 and 98, are still going strong, still skiing, still traveling, still biking, still hiking. Now we still do, but less frequently. I can jump on a train and be in Bologna in six hours, which I do about once a year.

Our sons have both Italian and American passports, so they can easily travel throughout Europe and the US. I have only the Italian Passport but have a very good visa for the US, although under Covid I need to show my marriage certificate to enter the US. Marc has a US passport but applied for Italian citizenship two years ago (it takes four years to get an answer). We call each other via FaceTime quite frequently when we are in different parts of the world. Both Marc and I call our Italian and American relatives, respectively, quite frequently as well.

Be ready for a lot of work and a lot of excitement. Be ready to think hard about all angles of every problem, trying to see it from multiple sides. Be ready to spend some periods of time apart from each other, sometimes for months. Be ready to struggle to find two jobs in the same country. As the saying goes “No pain, no gain”.

A big, big thank you to Elena for taking the time to talk about her cross-cultural life and marriage. It made my day and gave me many smiles.

Thank you, Elena!!

To all my readers, also a big thank you, for your interest and reading!

I hope you are thriving and well.

Love always,

Jill