Deracinées. That’s what my co-author Yang-May and I were called in a recent review of our book.

The word has always intrigued me. But it was only recently, during a vacation in the mountains, that I was able to understand where my true roots lie.

It’s people that define them not geography.

On a gorgeous Saturday morning in August, I took a chairlift up the Dolomites to accompany my old friend Thomas and his friend Norbert on a mountain walk with a purpose.

For the past 20 years, Thomas and Norbert have been fighting greedy developers for the preservation of this unique section of the Alps. Recently, they used the internet to collect signatures from all over the world to prevent the construction of a sky resort in a particularly vulnerable part of these mountains.

Thomas and Norbert looked happy that morning. The Dolomites were about to be declared a United Nations World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The ceremony would take place in the Italian region of Friuli a week later.

While hiking up, I couldn’t stop observing Norbert. I remembered him vaguely from my days at Innsbruck University where the three of us studied. And I must admit, my recollection was more than vague due to what he calls “excessive partying”.

Norbert is a force of nature. His way of fighting for the environment feels strangely familiar. It is too similar to the nagging feeling I have had for years that if you believe in something, you have to stand up for it.

I guess this is the story of how I discovered one of my roots in someone I barely know and had not seen for years.

In case you were wondering…. Cross-cultural communication is to me what the Dolomites are to Norbert.

I will be thinking of him on Wednesday when Yang-May and I will present  International Communications Strategy in London.

I used to be terrified at the mere thought of travelling by train in Italy.

I hated the old carriages and the frequent delays.

My trip last week across Northern Italy was quite different though …. almost soothing.

I left from  the southern shore of Lake Garda and travelled to Piedmont to visit friends.

On the way, I had to change trains in Tortona, in the heart of the Po valley. I arrived around noon when all Italians are at lunch. I was alone on the platform with the exception of a gentleman immersed in an animated conversation in Mandarin on his cell. He wore bright orange pants and T-shirt with a giant shamrock. 

The situation was so pleasantly surreal. I felt suspended in time. The heat was turning the tracks into a Fata Morgana.

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The train to Alessandria finally arrived and I got on. I was indulging in more day-dreaming when I was rudely brought back to reality by an agitated dialogue between the train conductor and a passenger sitting next to me. The poor guy had not stamped his ticket…. The machine at his station apparently did not work. So “what was he supposed to do?” The conductor was adamant. He would have to pay a fine.

Quickly, I realised that what I was observing was a typical power show by an Italian train conductor. It wasn’t the first time… I had forgotten all about them. What made the situation even more absurd was the fact that this particular conductor had a Piedmontese accent like a character in The Leopard. The one who tries to explain to the Sicilian prince the advantages of the reunification of Italy and ends up looking like a caricature.

I often wonder. Is it because Italy was invaded so many times over the centuries that its civil servants always behave like the country’s worst nightmare?

I drifted off further in my thoughts… my fellow passenger meanwhile was standing his ground and refusing to pay. The conductor had handed him his paperwork and had left with a proud sour face.

The train reached Alessandria. Time for the agitated passenger and me to get off. Before parting, we exchanged a last knowing smile…. Italy’s only weapon against train conductors on a power trip?!?

I do some of my best thinking on planes.

I was lost in deep thoughts once again on Friday, when my BA flight took a sharp turn over Lake Garda before landing in Verona.

I’ve always believed that Lake Garda has a soul. It was left behind by a melting glacier millions of years ago and its depths feel mysterious.

I remember swimming in the lake at night the summer after graduating from high school. Surrounded by darkness, I went under water and listened… There was this strange humming sound…the voice of the lake.

Lake Garda was so dear to me while I was growing up in Italy. I remember waterskiing just before sunset and getting very close to the rocks that plunge into the water. It was such a powerful feeling… as if the mountain was transmitting all her strength to me.

I watched the opening scene of the new Bond movie the other week and recognised them right away ….those amazing cliffs in the north of the lake.

The day after my arrival I had another comforting experience.

I hate to rush around shopping malls on a Saturday in Italy. But this time I left with a smile on my face.

I looked around at the shoppers and realised just how multicultural Italy has become.

There were people from North Africa, Eastern Europe, Sri Lanka, etc. It made me feel less strange and turned the trauma of not remembering the names of half of the products I had to buy into a funny exercise.

Who says that things don’t change for the better?!

When I was growing up in Italy, it was summer that felt like the end of the year not December 31st.

It was so hot in July that you would have thought that the world had come to a standstill.

Unable to sleep, my father and I would sit in the living room late at night, all windows open and the lights off, listening to Prince Igor. Longing for the cool air to reach us from the snowy Russian plains….

Summer used to be a time for pausing and reflecting on the future.

It was like being suspended in time, cradled by the unrelenting heat and the sound of cicadas.

I indulged in the same feeling last weekend at my parents’ house … only to be brought back brutally to reality at my return to London.

While I was slaving away at my desk yesterday trying to fight hay fever, I couldn’t help thinking of my friend in Verona. He shuts down his office in July and August. When I saw him on Friday, he was sporting a wonderful tan and radiating energy.

Is there something we are doing wrong in our manic, 24/7 business culture? This is the question a friend of mine was asking today.

I don’t know the answer but I do miss listening to Prince Igor.…terribly!

Photo: thanks to danielstephenjohnson.blogspot.com

I went home last weekend. To Prague that is, the home of my spirit.

Prague is the place where my spirit can roam free …tourists allowing.

I could not believe the masses of tourists on the Charles Bridge…and this in April.

So, I decided to wait until after midnight for my usual walk. No people in sight, just a half moon in the sky and the glorious might of the Prague Castle in the distance.

I began walking on the bridge and… it was like entering a cosmic cathedral. The beauty of the city is so overwhelming that I felt like a visitor from another planet discovering the shapes of a primordial world.

The statues on the Charles Bridge, dark and austere, blended into the night sky. They take my breath away. They look like silent mementos.

When I walk through Prague, the streets speak to me. I tune into the aura of the city. I observe the details on the facades of the Art Deco buildings and empty my mind. After a couple of minutes I have become part of Prague.

I am so good at it that every time I do this …a local comes up to me and asks for directions….

Like on Sunday morning, when I was waiting for the underground at Mustek station. I was a little bored so I did my tune-into-the-spirit-of-Prague exercise.

Less than five minutes later, a guy came up to me and asked in Czech how to get to Cerny Most. I remembered that it was at the end of the B line so I told him. I don’t look Czech and I definitely sound like a foreigner when I speak Czech, but that man was absolutely certain I could help him…

Mysteries of Prague…

Frank Kafka wrote in a letter to a friend in 1902: “Prague doesn’t let go of you. It doesn’t let go of us two. This little mother with claws. You have to adjust to it or else…You would have to set it on fire in two places, Vysehrad and Hradcani and this would set you free….”

I don’t want Prague to let go of me and… it never will.

photo: thanks to angelfire.com

I will be flying to Africa tonight.

To keep me company, I will take my grandfather’s book. The one he wrote about his travels to the Belgian Congo in the 1950s.

I will close my eyes and see him sitting on a window seat of one of the first Sabena planes to fly from Europe to Africa.

He would smoke a cigarette, drink a Martini-dry and look out into the dark, mysterious African night. People he would never meet were sleeping in its sweet embrace on the ground. And the plane was flying over deserts, mountains …breath-taking sceneries he had only seen at the movies or read about in books.

My heart stood still the first time I read this sentence. I would have used exactly the same words. The old pages of this book, which are slowly turning yellow, seem such a fragile link between me and a man who played such an important role in my life and left me far too early.

I also expect Africa to speak with a voice of another man in my family, this time one I never met.

I am excited to finally be flying over East Africa. My great-grandfather spent 16 years there in the early 20th century after running away from home in Naples and boarding a ship to China. I will image him sitting next to me on the plane in his beautiful uniform, the one that made my great-grandmother fall in love with him.

Tonight I will be going “home” to Africa.

I read somewhere that when the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti traveled, he took no money with him and would rely on the kindness of strangers.

I do not go that far, but I am certainly aware of the enormous difference kind people can make these days when you go through airports.

I was therefore both relieved and grateful yesterday when, while checking in at Gatwick Airport for my flight to the US, instead of the usual litany of questions that never fails to make you feel like a criminal, I experienced human kindness.

“Chocolate roses…,” the guy at the US Airways counter was ecstatic. “My wife works for an Italian chocolate company and sells their products to British supermarkets.”

I was also ecstatic at the interesting reaction a look at my passport had triggered.

Next thing I know, my new friend is asking his colleague if they still have some of the chocolate he brought the other day and …would like to give some to me! There was no chocolate left but the lovely experience had triggered enough endorphins in my system to make me board the plane with a smile…which came back when I went through immigration in North Carolina. For the first time in ages, I experienced a human being….

I am aware that one could write an encyclopedia about the A-word. This is why I really enjoyed Yang-May’s podcast on her two voices.

I have always been fascinated by accents until they became such an integral part of my life that I started developing a love-and-hate relationship with them. I now refer to them as the A-word. Speaking five languages has done interesting things to mine.

This is why I was not surprised when, last year, the A-word followed me all the way to Norway.

I was sitting in the cozy lobby of a hotel in Lillehammer, talking on my mobile phone in an agitated German about the fate of a friend in Prague. Across the coffee table from me, two Israeli grandmas were debating the pros and cons of braving the snow outside to go buy souvenirs in town. But something more interesting came up…. One of the two understood German and began translating the contents of my anguished monologue to her friend.

When, at the peak of the outrage, I uttered the word Schweinerei (how disgusting..), the two ladies really got into it, with a passion I thought they would reserve only for their favorite Polish soap.

At some point in my frantic conversation, the battery of my phone decided to give up on me. I sighted and stood up to go continue the live commentary of my friend’s destiny in my hotel room.
“Sind Sie aus Wien?” (Are you from Vienna?), one of the ladies spoke a very sweet German from a world that, unfortunately, is no more.

I answered that I wasn’t, but that I had studied in Austria.

The other granny threw me a serious look from the middle of her wrinkled face : “Yor akcent gives ya avay!”

Does it?

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a function in the European Parliament sailing my way around the buffet, when I got introduced to an Irishman. A handshake followed by the usual pleasantries.

“I thought you were Italian…You sound like an English oppressor”. His face twisted in semi-horror.

“You don’t know how happy I am to hear that…”

His look escalated into full-scale horror.

Actually, it did make me happy, but for reasons that do not have anything to do with centuries-old blood feuds, ships sailing to America or leprecauns.

For most of my life, my father (who used to teach English) has had this infatuation with British accents. He gave up on me years ago when, after a long summer spent in the US, a friend told him I sounded like his next-door neighbor from Jacksonville, Florida.

My fellow raider-of -the-buffet at the European Parliament really made my day that evening and filled my heart with joy - an emotion seldom encountered in the sterile halls of the European Parliament.

However, sailing under the wrong flag has its limits.

Last winter, I was having dinner with an English friend in Paris, in one of those bistros with tables so close to each other that you could try on your neighbor’s shoes without much effort. And I would have loved to do so, since sitting next to me was a very fashion-conscious couple from Rome.

I have this tendency to get sucked into other people’s conversations (I worked for too long as a journalist: once an observer, always an observer…). The Romans were carrying on a conversations about the virtues of the thermal waters of a town on lake Garda where I used to be sent to as a child.

“Are you still taking the Acqua di Sirmione…? Your snoring is getting better…” a perfectly manicured hand patted the proud husband’s cheek

Half of my brain was looking forward to the rest of this conversation. But my face must have revealed the painful effort of retrieving pictures of muddy waters from the most remote corners of my memory. The couple sensed an energetic wave of inte
rest coming from our table.

“Ma, ste’ qua so proprio inglesi” (These two are really English), the hand made a gesture in our direction revealing a rather expensive ring.

The husband raised his head, took a good look at my face, swallowed a piece of shrimp rather abruptly and did not return to the subject of his nocturnal musical performances…

So much for the lure of the A-word!

Having to explain what public relations is to a US immigration officer after an eight-hour flight to Texas is not the easiest task in the world.

Every time I fly into the US, I am asked about my profession and, over the years, I have tried different versions of the same answer. I gave up “business communicator” a long time ago. I seem to get a lot of blank looks and than the usual question comes. “What is that?” You can almost see their brain visualizing rows of computers connected to each other. For some reason, communications makes them think of IT.

So when I entered the US at Dallas airport a couple of months ago, I thought I would go straight to the point. “I am in public relations.”

I would come to regret it. The guy raised his eyebrows and gave me a suspicious look. I went on to babble about the meeting I was going to attend in California but the suspicious look did not leave his face.

“So what is it that you guys do?”

Ok, I thought searching my brain for a “slow and dummy” definition of our so often misunderstood profession. “We organize press conferences, write communications strategies, organize events”

A look of relief brightened up the guy’s face. “Oh, I thought you were the guys who make bad guys look good!”

I had landed in Texas, Enron country. How could I have forgotten that!!?

I found the guy’s line so great that I told him I was going to use it for a keynote I had to give in Paris the week after. This elicited another blank look. But never mind; I was asked to place my fingers on the counter for prints. And a couple of minutes later, I was free to rush to my flight to San Diego (not before having stopped at the souvenir shop for a Texan string tie for my father). His idea not mine.

I did use the guy’s line as an introduction for my speech in Paris. It is a terrific line. It shows so brilliantly how misunderstood our profession really is. I’d be happy to hear from my fellow communicators about similar experiences they have had. I might even start to collect crazy definitions of business communications.