An Italian-American love affair

Valerio Martinelli was having a simple dinner at Sesto Senso near Dupont Circle during his summer 2006 visit to Washington when an attractive brunette caught his eye. Martinelli, an Italian citizen who was visiting friends in the U.S., wanted to approach the woman but hesitated.

“I was looking at her, but to tell you the truth, she approached me because I didn’t have the courage to approach her,” says the 23-year-old while sitting in a lounge at the office of the D.C.-based law firm where he is now an intern.    

Martinelli and Laura Maristany, an aide to Resident Commissioner Luis Fortuño (R-Puerto Rico), began talking.

Despite the language barriers — Martinelli spoke little English at the time, and Maristany spoke Spanish and English but not Italian — they enjoyed their conversation.

“You have to know a little bit of history of the women in my family to understand it,” Maristany tells The Hill in a phone interview. “It’s been like this for generations.”

Her grandmother and grandfather had a similar instantaneous connection when they met at a ball in Cuba.

“When she walked in the door, she saw him, and she told her sister, ‘I’m going to marry that guy.’ And less than a year later, they were married,” she recounts.

Maristany remembers the first time she saw Martinelli similarly.

“When I opened the door, I saw Valerio talking with some friends. And when I saw him, I told the girl next to me, ‘That’s the one I want,’ ” she says. “I ended up dancing with him, and at first I started speaking to him in Spanish, and he was sort of freaking out.”

They went out several more times before Martinelli had to return to Italy 10 days later.

“Two weeks later, I bought a ticket to go to [Italy for] Christmas. This was in August,” she says.

“I told him, ‘You know, I know I’m not your girlfriend and if you get another girlfriend that’s fine, but just know that I’m staying at your house because I only had money for the ticket.’ ”

In the meantime, they talked on the phone daily. She had a $2,000 phone bill the first month. Maristany talked the phone company down from the high charge, but she still was paying $600 and $700 phone bills during the months they were apart.

A little more than a year and a half later, Martinelli, now married to Maristany and fluent in English, continues to adjust to his new life in Washington. The two had a legal ceremony here in January because he was on a fiance visa, and they will have a religious ceremony on June 28 in Puerto Rico.

Martinelli moved here in January, not only as a newcomer to the U.S. but also as a beginner’s-level student in American politics, not to mention a husband of a Hill insider. His perspective on life in D.C. is similar to what he thinks of American pizza: different but good.

He gave up a projected career in law in Italy to move to America to be with Maristany.

 “The fact is that we didn’t want to stay [in Italy] because we thought that here there were more opportunities for young people,” Martinelli explains. But that meant he had to withdraw from his first year in law school in Italy.

Martinelli made peace with that decision because he saw something in his new country that he says isn’t as prevalent back home.

“What I love is that … young people here are really the engine of the country,” he says. “And there are a lot of opportunities for young people and for the people that have skills.”

As for his opportunities, Martinelli quickly learned the importance of networking in D.C. He used a connection through his wife to land an internship at the law firm Lasa, Monroig and Veve, working on federal grants for Puerto Rico.  

More confusing for Martinelli has been the U.S. political landscape. He can’t help but notice how different American politics is from Italian politics.

“The political debate they do here is completely different from the one they do in Italy,” he says. “I wish in Italia we had Republicans or Democrats, because from my point of view, both of them, they have good points — compared to the politics in Italia.”

That said, Martinelli is proud to be Italian and happy to learn from American politics. He is also happy to try American pizza, much to the surprise of some of his countrymen.

“I don’t agree when people say, ‘They’re American, they don’t know how … to make the pizza,’ ” he says. It’s just that Americans like a different kind of pizza, he says — a “fatter” pizza with more toppings than those served in Italy.

He recently went to the California Pizza Kitchen just a couple blocks from his Connecticut Avenue office and gave it this assessment: “It wasn’t bad.”

He also enjoys what to others may seem like the more mundane aspects of American life.

“I like that the bus in the morning is always on time,” he says.  

Still, Martinelli gets wistful for his family in Rome and for the old-world, historic atmosphere of his home city that he sees as lacking in a newer city like Washington.

“This is a completely different world from the world I left in Italy,” he says.

But he was willing to make the move for his wife. He told Maristany that he would find a way to continue his studies and pursue his professional goals in the U.S.

The calm Martinelli says he reassured Maristany with these words: “I said, ‘I can move. I’m willing to do [it], and I will keep studying there. It will not be a problem for me.’ ”