Gotta say, this reverse immigration is a kick. As if I didn’t have enough to do—you’d be amazed at how complicated it can be to register a dog with Italian health authorities—I look at this thing we’re doing as if it were a multi-faceted model, turning it upside down and spinning it around to get a better look. Even my dreams get complicated, with people speaking different languages, and different shards of my life crashing into one another.

Most of the time I’m pretty comfortable being here. I almost lost sight of that over the summer’s hot spells, which kept us literally in the dark for hours during the middle of the day, after which we’d try to cool off with a swim, or go somewhere for a drink in the shade. It felt isolated and more than once I started to think I didn’t have to move thousands of miles/kilometers to live this life. But when it cooled down some, we started taking walks again and our neighbors would stop and chat. It felt good to be babbling in Italian, setting up coffee or dinner dates with the sweet people who live along this road.

I can only imagine how my father felt when he moved to New York back in 1955. He had the support of my mother’s family, but he didn’t have decades of rehearsing for the move, like I did. For my dad the move was a sudden plunge into the unknown, and that showed. He never quite understood how his new country worked, and why Americans didn’t take to the streets for economic reasons.

He clung to his culture. My sister and I would buy him Italian pop music albums for Father’s Day—one was a bunch of songs from Italy’s San Remo Festival, sort of a precursor to today’s Eurovision song contest. That album supplied my sister and me with a good sense of camp. Cynically teenagers brought up on The Beatles and Rolling Stones, we laughed at songs like this, by a character who called himself Little Tony. That bass line’s pretty catchy, though.

When my parents bought a decent stereo, my dad did what every respectable Italian in New York would do and bought some opera albums. Naturally, they were Italan operas: Cavalleria Rusticana, by Mascagni, about a Sicilian Easter Sunday that goes very badly, La Traviata by Verdi, a prostitute who dies alone without her client-lover; Aida,also by Verdi, two ancient Egyptians who meet a tragic end in a temple vault, and so on. (Hey, there seems to be a common thread here.)

The one exception to all of this was Dad’s unexpected love of the Supremes. When they came on The Ed Sullivan Show, he was under Diana Ross’s spell, uttering every so often, “She’s beauty.”

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH me? Music. I’ve gone pretty native in most ways; it wasn’t that hard to do. I’m down on “Italian” food—hey it’s just food that people eat here. My accent’s gotten better; no one offers to switch to English or complement me on speaking the language, a sure sign that you’re not doing too well.

But the one time I feel almost totally American is when I listen to music. In particular, R&B and anything that’s got that on-the-1 thing going on. Think James Brown, Funkadelic, Prince. Sure, we listen to Italian pop music up on the hill here. But that’s in addition to our usual stuff. I started thinking about this the other day when I first heard the new song, Angry, by those old guys The Rolling Stones. They may be Brits, but they swing like Americans and have done so since they were kids. Take a listen:

It’s not that I dislike Italian stuff; still, it’s more “in addition to” rather than a substitute. American music is what I grew up with. Certain rhythms and chord progressions resonate with me. We grow up with the three-chord blues progression, and that Chuck Berry chunka chunka riff is almost embedded somewhere in our brain. Even younger artists who don’t know from blues progressions or the Beach Boys have the music as a cultural background. There’s a certain way Americans and their British followers sing and play and it’s definitely a part of anyone for whom music is a big part of his or her life.

Fandom enters into it, too. Even hipster fandom. The other day I was reading the coverage of the rerelease of the Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense and noted the relieved tone that a lot of the articles were written in: Look! They’re talking to each other! Hey, I felt relieved, too. They were a big part of my youf.

We’re trying to catch up on cultural references and the like, but it is a learning curve. I also think there’s a difference in how Americans and Italians play their instruments. If you listen to the bands behind Italian singers like Eros Ramazzotti (shown here in a cool live performance with Tina Turner) or Laura Pausini, they’re terrific. Every note’s in place and their sense of drama and dynamics is spot on, But in some ways they’re almost too good. Americans, at least when machines aren’t taking over, have a wilder edge.

Of course, I’m talking in generalities. Italian rappers get it, and performers like Mamood definitely use rhythm more than melody to power their songs. And Matteo Paolillo has become a breakout rap/pop star because of the TV series Mare Fuori, and his moody, rap-singing in Neapolitan deserves to go international. And one older guy, Zucchero, might as well be a big star in the U.S.—he’s got a great band that’s really beat-friendly. (By the way, take a look at the show Mare Fuori, soon to appear on the U.S. streaming service Mhz Choice as The Sea Beyond.

But I’m talking about me and The Spartan Woman. We’re lucky in a way to be living here now. With streaming services at our voice command, we can listen to anything we want. And while we’re listening to more Italian stuff, sometimes you can’t beat Marvin Gaye, you know? We didn’t have to ship boxes of CDs over; in fact as of now we’d have nothing to play them with. We have smart speakers, and when the ‘net goes down as it does every so often,, we can stream cellular data from our phones to a couple of Bluetooth speakers.

The music thing may sound pretty minor, but I have a soundtrack going on much of the time. If I’m not listening to something, I’m playing or arranging songs in my mind. I wake up most days with a tune in mind and often, even before making coffee (Italian coffee culture may be one of the biggest reasons for being here), I’ll have to tell the speakers to play the song lest I go insane. I associate places with a certain kind of music. Montréal, for example, for moody French pop or that Franco-Mali music that you hear on the radio there; Palermo, Sicily, for a North African-Sicilian hybrid, and so on.

And what do I think of when I think of Perugia? Right now, it’s mainly one of the hits of the summer, bellississima by Alfa (see below). Radio here is pretty eclectic, our car’s screen describes most stations as “vari” or hit radio. Last year it was all about Dua Lipa. It’s harder to say what was big this year; probably a mixture of Paolillo and this song, which comes on the car radio pretty often.

I’m still working all this out. There’s a long history of people from English-speaking countries being expats in Latin-speaking ones. My experience and perspective is a little weird because I grew up somewhere over the Atlantic to begin with. Right now a big part of me just says enjoy and tell Siri to “play music that I like.” Maybe that’s the best approach.