A Name

      Is there nothing in a name? Is it really true that a rose would smell as sweet whatever you called it? 

      I've got my doubts. 

      Just how much my name, Daniela, is a part of who I am was brought home to me with a serious splash yesterday afternoon at a water aerobics class I've found here in my little Italian town.

      In an afternoon awash in throwbacks. 

      First, the class was held at the pool of a little hotel we stayed at for three summers in a row when we came from the States 13, 12 and 11 years ago while we were building our side of the hill a few miles down the road.

      The hotel, a modest, sprawling, family-run place with little cottage-style rooms with porches, suited my husband and I like no hotel we've stayed at in 31 years together. 

     The family who owned it had three sons, two of whom were near the age of our young boys, so we got to leave our kids there every afternoon -- to swim in the pool, play cards, kick a soccer ball around -- completely happily with the boys who owned the place while we ran around town trying to build a house on a two-week vacation. 

      Both the Italian boys, now men, were there yesterday afternoon since well, the family still owns the place and hot summer afternoons are still spent lying around the big pool in the sun (day after day, year after year, season after season, the comforting, rigid rhythms of Italian life). 

     Water aerobics there are new in Italian terms though. They've only been doing them for three years. I just found the class yesterday.

     Hadn't been back to the hotel in a decade. (Went back a lot that first summer we finished our house, since our boys were traumatized to be staying in an cavernous empty villa with no furniture, overhead lights, closets, toys, or anything at all really, rather than there. We were too.) 

    Back to water aerobics. 

    At a certain point during the class, the teacher, a sleek, young, tanned, toned Italian woman with a ready smile and thick brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, was calling out encouragement to her students, pushing us all to keep going, to keep breathing. 

    "Forza, Dani," she said to me, smiling, using the common diminuitive of my name. 

     Nobody besides my family has called me that in decades. And it sounded just like my mother used to say it. I could barely keep my legs moving under the water for her.

     I was Dani all of my childhood, until I went to college, far from home. That was my Italian nickname. And it was the name I adopted for my American friends too.

    Daniela was just too hard for most Americans then. Three syllables. Especially when you had to say it with my last name, which started and ended with a vowel and had two other vowels in between. 

    Daniela Angiolamaria Iacono. Try carrying that around in 1950s Virginia. 

    And so I was Dani, even though my American friends pronounced it in a different way than my Italian family. I always liked the Italian Dani better. She felt cuter, sunnier, full of lemons.

     When I went to college, though, feeling all grown up and itching to start my life, I wanted to be Daniela, the name I was given, the name I loved. But I knew the problems well. So I started off in college, for the first few months, telling people I met that my name was Danielle. (Only two syllables instead of three, so easier to say, I found.).

     "Danielle?" my mother exclaimed when she first heard someone call me that. "Who is that?"

     I explained the dilemma, how I was sick of being Dani, wanted to be Daniela now, like I was in Italy and at home, but nobody could pronounce it, especially with Iacono, so I had given Danielle a try instead.  

    "That's ridicolo," my mother huffed. "That's French. You have a lovely name."

    "Dio mio. You're Italian. You can't be Danielle."