With a Guide Dog in Italy

From a Notebook, 1998: 

In the hotel Visconti I told a waiter my dog’s name was fortune. Somehow in a Milanese restaurant “fortunato” sounded better than Corky. The waiter liked the name. “Bunoa fortuna,” he said. “Good luck.”

 

Working a service dog in Italy wasn’t easy. Italians had three kinds of responses to a guide dog: disinterest, hostility, and lovey dovey. The first two were most common. Our first morning in the hotel the maitre de refused to seat us for breakfast. An unruly conversation ensued. The manager was called. There was a lot of cliched hand waving and rapid fire Italian. I stood straight before them with my obedient dog. All around us people sipped blood orange juice and coffee. Finally the manager took my elbow and said “sit sit” as though I was also a dog.

 

More hostility came our way at the Santa Maria delle graze. A nun refused to let me in. Her umbrage was sizzling. Like Peter in “The Last Supper” she might have been pointing a knife. “No no no no!” she cried. I urged Connie to go in alone while Corky and I stood outside in a shaft of mid day sun. As I stood and rubbed Corky’s ears I had to laugh. The nun had made a gurgling noise like an angry swan. But still, the larger picture wasn’t funny. Guide dog acceptance among Italians was clearly conditional. At the Duomo a machine gun carrying guard waved us straight into the cathedral. At “La Scala” the opera house, no one said a thing about Corky. But I never knew, step by step, whether we’d be accepted or dismissed. Italy does have a guide dog school, “Scuola Nazionale Cani Guida per Ciechi di Firenze-Scandicci” (National School of Guide Dogs for the Blind in Florence-Scandicci). There are guide dogs in Italy, and there are laws protecting the rights of guide dog users to travel everywhere the public goes. But somehow the word hadn’t penetrated everywhere. “You know,” I said to Connie, “when the law isn’t understood, then you’re traveling on sufferance. Which in its way is a kind of sport. Will you strike out, or get a hit? You just don’t know.”

 

If disinterest and hostility were problems they paled when met by the lovey-dovey. Strange, perfumed women in fur coats would throw their arms around Corky’s neck and sing nursery rhymes to her while I stood helpless. Happy people are the world over gifted musically. What else can you say?