By Anne W. Semmes
Features Reporter
Wherever they go, the Fenili sisters, Donatella, Luna, Marea, and Aurora, are asked whether they are two sets of twins.
“We say we are quadruplets, and people are amazed,” says Luna. “At the supermarket, at the airport—it’s always the same story.”
The Fenili quadruplets, brought by their parents this year from Bologna, Italy, to live in America, are 17-year-old seniors at Greenwich High School who love their new hometown.
“The strangest thing is seeing squirrels and deer,” says Marea, perched with her sisters in the family condo on the Mianus River in Cos Cob. “In Italy, you have only pigeons.”
“People here are so welcoming,” Marea adds. “On the street a stranger says hi. In Italy no one does this. They’re diffident in Italy.”
It was the need for a translator of Italian that brought the discovery of the Fenili sisters, through the GHS Student Employment Service, when Aurora and Marea signed on: “So you are twins?” “No, we are quadruplets.”
And here they tell of the near miracle of their birth; they were born three months early, weighing two pounds each. “Together we weighed a normal baby of eight pounds,” says Aurora. “My father’s wedding ring came up my upper arm.”
“My heart stopped working,” says Luna.
“The doctor pricked her feet,” adds Donatella, the firstborn.
They were born American citizens, in Los Angeles, where their mother, Evelina, was getting medical help to get pregnant. “It worked pretty well,” says Luna, smiling. “It worked too much!” says her mother, passing by.
The Fenili girls are a team. They go to school together, have class together, lunch together, are the best of friends. Brave-hearted will be the boy who first comes calling on a Fenili sister. “No one has been with a boyfriend,” confides Aurora. “We’re always together. When we moved here, we never felt alone. If we make friends it’s grand, but we always have each other.”
They marvel at the diversity found at Greenwich High School. “In Italy we’re all Italian, says Aurora. “Today, at lunchtime the Japanese taught me how to write my name in Japanese.”
But speaking and understanding English has been a challenge from their arrival in June. “In Italy we studied English, but they don’t teach you to speak it very well,” says Donatella. “Speaking it is something you have to do every day.”
Arriving at their senior year brought another challenge: the race to get into college.
“In Italy we were very good students,” Luna says. “In Italy a C is like an A. But when we transferred here we had C’s and a B, so we had a problem.”
They were advised to aim for a community college with a possible transfer in their junior year. “We all decided to apply to UConn Stamford or otherwise Norwalk Community College,” says Aurora. She noted the cost of $10,000-plus for a year at UConn compared to the $2,000-to-$3,000-a-year cost of the University of Bologna, “one of the oldest and best in the world.”
The Fenili sisters do not yet drive, which doesn’t seem stress them. “In Italy you drive when you are 18, here 16,” says Luna, who is now taking driving lessons. Aurora will soon have her permit, but Marea is “waiting a while.”
Marea has her own sense of timing, which earned her a nickname from her sisters— “gatta morta” in Italian. “It means literally ‘dead cat,’” says Marea. She tells of only starting to speak when she was four or five “because my sisters were talking for me.”
But Marea knows her strength in the sister lineup. “I’m also the smartest. I love history and geography.”
“She’s a cultured person,” agrees Luna, who identifies herself as “second smartest in culture.” “In Italy, you have to do a lot of languages and history,” she says. “Marea is the one who likes to talk about it.”
Luna is a self-proclaimed “practical person, and stubborn.”
“Luna is the one who kicks us to do things,” says Donatella. Marea confirms, “We are always full of bruises.”
Donatella is a computer lover and video games enthusiast. All the sisters are tech-savvy, and they introduce to this reporter their “Quadruplets” videos found on YouTube that run from 5 to 15 minutes. The “Moving to America” one tells it all. The one in Italian is a hoot, with the Fenilis being Fenilis.
Aurora calls herself “the most mature.” “I like to manage things,” she says, and she loves to cook. But Luna is the baker, regularly baking “healthy” biscotti for their breakfasts and their mom’s unbeatable chocolate cake. “It’s like a brownie, but Italian style,” she says, adding that it seems impossible to replicate outside the family.
With each daughter assigned chores by their mother, Luna also cleans “the whole house, the bathrooms, and the floors.” Marea does the laundry. Aurora cooks the meals and cleans the kitchen, and Donatella minds the kitten-sized dog named “Kitty” and takes out the trash.
Mother Evelina has her job as accountant in her husband Fabio’s Cinius interior design company.
Favorite family outings include Tuesday nights at the cinema. With the shocking sight of $12 a ticket—double the cost of movies in Italy—they choose to go on half price night. “It’s crazy to spend so much money on a flick,” says Donatella.
The Ethiopian restaurant, Teff, in Stamford is another favored Fenili destination, ever since the restaurant owners learned their last name. “Our dad’s father moved to Ethiopia when it was an Italian colony,” says Luna. “The family made Fenili wine—it was a famous wine company.”
The Fenilis are returning to Bologna for Christmas. “On Christmas Eve we eat fish,” says Donatella. Some 30 family members will gather at their maternal grandmother’s house in the center of Bologna. “Her name is Franca Samoggia,” says Luna. “She has a wool shop, Casa Della Lina, under those arched porticos.”
The girls have missed that “medieval architecture and atmosphere of Bologna compared to “pretty modern” Greenwich. And they miss Italian food, especially that gelato. “The ice cream is really different here,” remarks Donatella.
A Fenili Italian Christmas comes with a southern Italian tradition, a presepe or manger scene. “There is a little presentation of Jerusalem,” says Marea, “with a miniature city, farmers and cows, and the manger. From Christmas to Epiphany our mom moves the kings closer each day to the manger.”
Aurora can recall those early Christmases when, she says, “There were so many presents around the tree you couldn’t walk on the floor. When we got bigger, the presents got smaller.”
In the New Year, they’re looking forward to celebrating their 18th birthday in the city of their birth, Los Angeles, with a visit to Disneyland. “We love Disneyland,” they say in unison.
“We feel we are very lucky,” says Aurora. “We are appreciative to be quadruplets.” And they have pride in being Americans. “It was our dream from the beginning to come to the USA,” says Donatella. “Every Italian dreams to come to the USA, to have a better future.”
