On a cliff to the north of Florence, overlooking the Arno River, there’s something absurd afoot. Look hard enough through the mess of towering cypress trees and brush fire smoke, and you’ll see what I mean. In a Tuscan neighborhood accustomed to showcasing its villas with a view, there are watchtowers, olive trees and ten-foot high rock walls to guard against anything that doesn’t belong in these expensive havens of Italian culture. But right now, at Villa Le Balze in Fiesole, Italy, streaks of yellow and white zip through the air. There’s the sound of plastic rapping plastic, there’s good-natured taunting and well-intentioned teaching. Wiffle Ball has invaded Italy.
Last January, unable to shake the adolescent American mindset, I decided to sneak some Wiffle products into Italy. Bringing the bat and ball was an idea originally founded in the fear of homesickness. What better way to comfort myself than to listen to the sound of cutting the wind with my banana-yellow bat for an afternoon? Even the solitary hitting-out-of-hand method would suffice, I told myself.
Then, somewhere between Nantucket and Ireland, a combination of the airplane’s cabin pressure and its chocolate mousse had me hallucinating to the point where I thought I could change Italian recreation forever with my bat and ball (a combined weight of about six ounces).
Once settled in my study abroad setting, rocking in the Cradle of the Renaissance, my anticipated homesickness never set in. But the urge to wave that yellow wand and pound the holey plastic pill into next week kept nagging. So, along with some other lovers of the whiff, we discovered a perfect diamond-shaped section of our villa’s garden with attainable homerun walls covered in ivy. But Wrigley Field it was not. A garden normally meant for ogling, with tulips strewn throughout, perfectly hedged greens and a massive fountain-turned-potted plant where the pitcher’s mound should be, this place had surely never borne witness to a Wiffle Ball game before. But we were hell-bent on trying.
Of course, it should be expected that playing ball at an Italian villa features more obstacles than the set of Nickelodeon’s Double Dare. February and March turned out to be Tuscany’s rainy season, which normally wouldn’t be enough to squelch my Wiffle Ball whims. But then came some truly foreign reasons for cancellation. Where else but at an Italian villa would a game be cancelled due to lemons? The pestering potted citrus trees-about two dozen of them-invaded with the help of the gardeners just as the weather began to turn. Then, there was the problem of a spoiled Italian Daschund. He chewed the Wiffle Ball, tearing the eight holes designed to make it curve into one gaping fissure, rendering it useless.
With two new balls, thanks to my habit-supporting parents, our games really took off. We weren’t spurning our newfangled Italian immersion; we just wanted to move around outside. Since we started playing, and forgave ourselves for the few bent tulips (“We’re paying for these anyway!”) everyone wants in. Former high school tennis players, figure skaters, and Egyptian-ratscrewers are all in on the act. We aren’t forever altering Italian leisure time, as I’d hoped, and sometimes we whiff even more than the game would suggest, but we have a grand old time all the same.
It’s a real possibility that the memories of Wiffle Ball will overwhelm the facts we’ve memorized about Baroque painting or Renaissance architecture. If that makes us Ugly Americans, so be it.
