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Salvatore, though, I worried about the negative preconceptions I had about Italian men. Weren’t they all macho and didn’t they all cheat on their girlfriends? Cynthia was single, but I’d seen her with several different handsome Neapolitans at events at the Consulate.
    “Well, is he a nerd?” she asked.
    I didn’t know. He was Italian—how could I tell if he was a nerd or not? There weren’t many cultural indicators I could read. How did he dress? Like an Italian. How did he express himself? Like an Italian. I couldn’t use any linguistic or cultural markers to evaluate him.
    “Because if you want to start something with an Italian, he
must
be a nerd. The others are slick and sleazy womanizers, and the nerds are handsome and charming anyway. Trust me.”
    “He lives with his parents and studies a lot,” I offered.
    “Good sign.”
    Soon, the washing machine beeped, and I thanked Cynthia.
    As I was leaving, she put her hand on my shoulder and asked, “Are you really into him, honey?”
    I wasn’t sure exactly what I was falling for. Was I infatuated with him, or his family, or both? But I was starting to realize that maybe it wasn’t so important to put a name on it so that I could put it away in a little category in my brain. Maybe I was being fed and loved and the rest would take care of itself. Luciano De Crescenzo, a Neapolitan philosopher, once said that if the Lord wanted to take everyone in Naples to heaven, all He would have to do is pull one line of laundry and the whole city would come with it, because all the buildings in Naples are connected by hanging wash.
    My intimate robes had been spinning in an enormous American GE washing machine, but De Crescenzo’s image of the laundry lines of Naples was a more accurate picture of the connections that were forming in my heart.

N eapolitan
ragù
is so central to the culture and the base for so many recipes (including lasagna and
sartù
) that Eduardo De Filippo, a playwright and poet of Neapolitan dialect in the last century, wrote a poem about it. A husband tries to reason with his wife that what she has made is nothing close to his mother’s recipe. The poem is a worshipful ode to
ragù:
’O ’rraù
    ’O ’rraù ca me piace a me
    m’o ffaceva sulo mammà.
    A che m’aggio spusato a te
    ne parlammo pè ne parlà.
    Io nun songo difficultuso;
    ma lluvàmmel’ ’a miezo st’uso
    Sì, va buono: cumme vuò tu.
    Mò ce avéssem’appiccecà?
    Tu che dice? Chest’è rraù?
    E io m’o mmagno pè m’ ’o mangià…
    M’ ’a faja dicere na parola?…
    Chesta è carne c’ ’a pummarola.
    Here goes with my translation (De Filippo is turning in his grave):
Oh ragù
    the ragù that I love
    was made only by Mommy.
    Since I married you
    we’ve talked about it, but the talk is just words.
    We shall talk of it no more.
    Whatever! You decide about the ragù.
    I don’t want a fight.
    But tell me, you really think this is ragù ?
    I’ll eat it just to fill my tummy…
    but will you let me say just one last thing?
    This is simply meat with tomatoes.
    The key to cooking real Neapolitan
ragù
is to let it
pippiare.
This onomatopoeic verb in dialect refers to the
pi pi
sound of bubbles popping when the sauce is on a low flame for hours and hours. (Shouldn’t I be doing something to it?
“Lascia stare!”
Raffaella told me. Leave it! Leave it! Why do you have to be doing?) Raffaella’s mother, Nonna Clara, who had raised eight children in postwar Naples, used to cook her
ragù
for at least twelve hours. Any less and the sauce would be bright red. “You never want your
ragù
to be red, in Naples it must be closer to black and so dense that it’s hard to stir,” Raffaella told me. Stirring
ragù
for ten people in an earthenware pot for twelve hours: Nonna Clara must have had biceps to rival Rocky’s.
    I had been to the Avallones’ numerous times for dinner. Thanks to the
ci sentiamo
mixup, Salvatore and I talked on the phone almost every day. There were