Ciao, America An Italian Discovers the U.S

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April Our house is made of white wood and faces west. The black-painted door has a fan carved above it and the shutters of the three windows are nailed back in case some prudish European should think of closing them at night. At the back, hidden from the street, is a garden with an ivy-covered lawn. In the midst of the ivy, like a mermaid rising from the waves, is a concrete cupid. The owners may have hoped that Washington winters would make it look antique, but if that was the case, they are going to have to wait a little longer. For the time being, the concrete cupid still looks like a cupid made of concrete and continues to pour imaginary water from a concrete jug while staring in open hostility at the world round about--squirrels, blackbirds, and the occasional Italian tenant. The house is on Thirty-fourth Street, which runs one way downhill through Georgetown. Actually, Thirty-fourth Street itself is a curious thoroughfare. It's only busy from four to six in the afternoon, when the massed office staffs of Washington descend toward M Street and cross the Potomac over Key Bridge on their way home to the immaculate suburbs of North Virginia. For the remaining twenty-two hours of the day, Thirty-fourth Street is a quiet road of brightly painted houses where people call each other by their first names and pretend that Georgetown is still the sleepy village that used to make a living from the tobacco trade at the time of the Revolution. Apart from a certain number of lawyers, who in America are practically ubiquitous, our stretch of Thirty-fourth Street, from Volta Place to P Street, boasts an allergy specialist, a clerk at the World Bank, the daughter of a former CIA agent, a senator from Montana, and five exquisitely polite students from New England, whom I have unsuccessfully encouraged to behave like John Belushi in the film Animal House. Dave, their spokesperson, gently hinted that it would be undignified for a young American to humor a foreigner's fantasies. Georgetown is known officially as West Washington, a name that is used by no one. It extends over one square mile and has had a checkered history. When there is a Democrat in the White House (Kennedy, Carter, Clinton), its stock rises, only to fall when the Republicans move in (Nixon, Reagan, Bush). Conservatives prefer the quiet of the suburbs to the Bohemian lifestyle of the center. In the western part of Georgetown, near the river Potomac, lies the university, founded by Jesuits in the eighteenth century. To the east, beyond the lights of Wisconsin Avenue, the houses are larger and older. In the center are the dwellings that once belonged to artisans or traders. We live in the center. These cramped, dark houses with their steep staircases are about as un-American as you could possibly imagine. A farmer from Oklahoma might use one for keeping poultry. In fact, Washington's propertied classes do exactly the same thing, only their chickens come from the far side of the Atlantic. Yes, we Europeans love houses like these to distraction. In a detached suburban house, we might risk feeling we were actually living in America but the tiny rooms and woodworm-riddled floors of Georgetown serve to cushion the blow of moving from the Old World. We are prepared to pay a premium for inconvenience of this caliber. The agencies know it and take full advantage. Finding a house with just the right degree of discomfort among so many inconvenient homes was not easy. Knowing that we would only be staying in the United States for a year, our first thoughts were to go for a furnished residence. These do exist in Washington but the problem is the furniture. In the course of a week-long search--in the company of a certain Ellen, who kept telling us not to worry, thus increasing our anxiety--we inspected a number of bizarre places. Selected highlights include: a basement flat decked out like a Bavarian castle, complete with hunting trophies; a