Oriundo…
An Oriundo is a person of native origin, i.e. a person whose ancestry is Italian in as my case… it was/is a terminology used by soccer players to allow them to join the Italian national team…
It also was a proof of my Italian roots… it gave me a sense of belonging… it was strange because until that moment I had lived in a city who was cosmopolitan “par excellence”… Yes, I was both Italian and Jewish and I identified with both… at times.
Luckily my father, who had been living in Milano for two years, had already arranged for me to get an Italian passport… because it had been impossible for me to get one in Alexandria since I was born during WWII, and Egypt was at war against Italy, it was impossible to register my birth in the closed Italian Consulate
Everything was OK except my father indicated my birthday to be on June 18th, instead of June 28th. It took some twenty years to get that birth date rectified, but everyone knows that bureaucracy in Italy is slow…
So now I was Italian, 14 and spoke barely the Italian language… which was a problem when deciding what school to go to.
It appeared that my mother was moving to Greece because her husband Guido found a job with an Italian company in Athens… leaving me in limbo in Milan, where my grandfather (and father) would take care of me…
Schooling was another issue… where and what school.
There was in Milano a vocational high school called ORT… they had a three year program in electronics. I remember looking at a textbook in electronics at the school and the first lesson spoke of electrons… it reminded me of chemistry, which used to be my favorite subject in Egypt… so I accepted going to ORT. The school had a boarding house and we lived and ate our meals there…
An Oriundo is a person of native origin, i.e. a person whose ancestry is Italian in as my case… it was/is a terminology used by soccer players to allow them to join the Italian national team…
It also was a proof of my Italian roots… it gave me a sense of belonging… it was strange because until that moment I had lived in a city who was cosmopolitan “par excellence”… Yes, I was both Italian and Jewish and I identified with both… at times.
Luckily my father, who had been living in Milano for two years, had already arranged for me to get an Italian passport… because it had been impossible for me to get one in Alexandria since I was born during WWII, and Egypt was at war against Italy, it was impossible to register my birth in the closed Italian Consulate
Everything was OK except my father indicated my birthday to be on June 18th, instead of June 28th. It took some twenty years to get that birth date rectified, but everyone knows that bureaucracy in Italy is slow…
So now I was Italian, 14 and spoke barely the Italian language… which was a problem when deciding what school to go to.
It appeared that my mother was moving to Greece because her husband Guido found a job with an Italian company in Athens… leaving me in limbo in Milan, where my grandfather (and father) would take care of me…
Schooling was another issue… where and what school.
There was in Milano a vocational high school called ORT… they had a three year program in electronics. I remember looking at a textbook in electronics at the school and the first lesson spoke of electrons… it reminded me of chemistry, which used to be my favorite subject in Egypt… so I accepted going to ORT. The school had a boarding house and we lived and ate our meals there…
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