By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
It's been almost 40 years since Italian exchange student Mario Marzani spent the 1969-70 school year living in Dowagiac with the Phillipson family and playing football for the Chieftains.
He had never played football before and went out "just for the fun of it. It was a social activity."
Marzani, 56, who was visited by Herb and Eve Phillipson in 2006 and has also backpacked with them out West, is not only in Dowagiac for Christmas on his way to Washington and Vermont, but his wife, Fiorenza, and daughter Silvia accompany him.
Silvia, 21, is an architectural student.
She became friends with the Laing daughters and even spent some time with them at a camp in Minnesota.
Fiorenza teaches junior high. He met his wife on a train between Bergamo and Milan when they were university students.
Marzani, who keeps up with Dowagiac reading the Daily News online, said its physical size has not change much since his year here.
He uses his considerable photography skills to not only publish bound picture books about each event, but he also produced a 2009 calendar featuring the stunning vistas of his homeland.
Each month is devoted to a different valley, since there are 12.
His snowy photos look more like Switzerland than Italy, since his country shares its rugged northern border with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia.
Marzani, a civil engineer who employs about 20 people, lives in Lombardy, one of 20 regions. Milan is its capital. A sixth of Italy's population lives there. "It's pretty crowded" in comparison to Dowagiac.
About a fifth of Italy's gross domestic product is produced there, including, judging from his oversized glossy calendar, lots of cheeses.
The region is further divided into 12 provinces.
Lombardy grew to more than 1 million inhabitants and 244 municipalities in the 1950s and '60s because of immigration from southern Italy.
In the 1980s and '90s, population growth was generated by foreign immigration.
Today, more than a fourth of all foreign immigrants in Italy live in Lombardy – 7 percent as of 2006.
Bergamo, where the Marzanis live, is 40 kilometers northeast of Milan.
The foothills of the Alps begin a mile north of town. Mario said he doesn't pursue mountain climbing anymore, but he enjoys pointing out a man in one photo who scales the sheer rock without benefit of ropes.
Marzani said from October 2000 until May 2001, 15 feet of snow fell and didn't fully melt away until August. They fit their skis with "leathers" to climb up mountains, then remove them to ski down. Avalanches are a constant hazard – particularly when the weather warms.
While his wife and daughter decorated a Christmas tree at Phillipson's, Mario said Nativity scenes are a "typical Italian expression" of the holiday in the Catholic country. Christmas trees were imported from other parts of Europe. "Father Christmas" is the equivalent of Santa Claus.
In his region each town is "remarkably different from one to another" in cuisine and dialects spoken. He said you can tell where someone is from just listening to them talk.
Apart from his engineering career, Marzani spends a lot of time at mountain "huts," which show up especially well in his book about the helicopter trip he sponsored for his co-workers on Dec. 1, 2007.
Another book shows a triple waterfall which, when the dam opened on Sundays from June to September, a show was organized for more than 1,000 people who hiked into the mountains to enjoy lectures and fireworks.
Arrayed across green knobs in the Alps, with visitors in yellow shirts and the staff in orange, it looked like Woodstock, although beer and wine were prohibited in the interest of incurring litigation.
The July 19 event brought together the mayor and singers at a facility built into a cave called the observatory.
Another festival Sept. 21 used a cable car to move goods into place for dancing in native costumes.
"I'm compelled to do other things than my job," he said.