Today my baby turns 17.  Wow.  She is studying for her finals and we've started packing for the summer in Maine.  We are very excited to get home.

For her birthday dinner Grace is deciding between sushi and Mexican.  When I first came to Italy, 30 or so years ago, the only "foreign" cuisine was very bad Chinese food.  Now the city and even small towns offer a selection of eats from all over the world.  There are approximately 5 million immigrants accounted for in Italy.  Those are the people who are in some way registered, residents or new citizens.  That doesn't include the thousands that arrive weekly on the southern shores and islands.  In a country with fewer than 60 million people, that number is huge and rising exponentially.  Italy, and to a lesser degree Greece and Spain are carrying the brunt of an epic exodus from Africa and the Middle East.  I can't speak for other European nations, but Italy is losing it's Italian-ness.  I suppose it's the nature of progress, but I find it a little sad.  Italians are having fewer and fewer children, with most families in the north having only one child.  Many of the babies born here now are to Romanian or African parents.  Torino has the largest population of Romanians outside of Bucharest!  There is an entire area of the city where you hear only Romanian spoken.  Beautiful little tradition wooden churches (Eastern Orthodox) are popping up in vacant lots between old brick and stone buildings.  The large park outside the city where GP and I have taken to walking is where the Romanians congregate to picnic on weekends, hold weddings and other celebrations.  They gather by the hundreds.  The old market area where once the workers from Southern Italy lived is now mostly Africans, Middle Easterns and Asians.  The pizza places have been replaced by kebab shops and Chinese restaurants.  The market sells all sorts of spices and food products from far and away.  As immigrants moved in, Italians moved out and the vacuum was filled by more immigrants.  There are old women from Syria making and selling their yummy flat bread still hot from the griddle and Nigerians selling gigantic bunches of good smelling herbs I can't identify.  It's become quite exotic and interesting but has lost it's old Italian charm.  As happens, the immigrants are doing all the jobs the Italians no longer want to do.  They are the domestic workers and street cleaners.  Unfortunately the numbers are so large and so frequent, there has been no time to absorb them all.  The country is saturated and is throwing it's hands up.  I wonder what the European landscape will be in another 20 years.  For dinner we've decided on Mexican.  Have to make a reservation. xxoo me