Bari Canaglia was so very young when I knew her in Kansas City; so very young and enthusiastic and casually sexy that when I lunched with her I felt compelled to tell friends who happened by why it was we were having lunch.

"Work."

At the time Bari freelanced as a graphic designer, a good one at that. She worked on several projects for me and my clients.

"Yea sure, Jack, work, whatever."

Three years ago, Bari gave up her career. In fact, she gave up her life as she and I understood it. Brimming with excitement about worlds yet explored, she left the United States with her husband and two children to open a restaurant in the foothills of the Italian Alps, 1500 stunning, vertical feet above the town of Piovene. But real life is never quite what it seems in the travel books. As Bari soon realized, this journey would take her places she had never expected to go and lead her to discoveries she had never expected to make.

A little too contemporary to be quaint, Piovene is the last stop north on the Autostrada, about a 100 miles northwest of Venice (a one hour drive, Italian style). To reach the restauarant we finesse our way through the town and up the Via Dell'Angelo, a road so breathtakingly steep my kids scream for fear that the car will fall over backwards.

We have no trouble finding the restaurant. It sits in near isolation on a ledge next to a neat, white church roofed in red tile Mediterranean-style. A small park with a kid's playset stretches out in front of the restaurant. Beyond that the ledge falls away quickly to reveal the vast plain below, a stunning view even when shrouded in the morning mist. Hiking trails extend up and down the thickly-treed hillside from the park, trafficked by the occasional hiker or hunter.

Save for the church and a reclusive neighbor or two, the restaurant is removed from the world, suspended almost magically above it. The church was built more than a century ago on the site of a cholera hospital to thank the Blessed Virgin Mary for her help in wiping out a cholera epidemic. This explains why they built anything at all on this lofty perch; harder to understand is how.

Overly stringent environmental laws assure that Bari and her family will have no new neighbors. Were this Bari's odd summer "under the Tuscan sun" or her picturesque "year in Provence" she might welcome this regulation. But for a family with one car and two young children isolation is not necessarily splendid, nor is the European experience as sensuous and self-congratulatory as the travel writers would have one believe.

When Bari greets us, she speaks slowly and cautiously, as though straining for clarity. Forgetting almost that we are native English speakers, she uses an Italianate cadence and almost no idioms. This constant effort to be understood has siphoned the spontaneity out of her conversation. There is nothing flip or casual about her speech, nothing perky about her style.

The excitement about moving to a beautiful, exotic country has long since worn off. I remember in the states attending a 60's party in which Bari, always ebullient, came as a flower child, a role in which she seemed fully comfortable. The Bari we meet in Pioevene has no flowers in her hair, real or otherwise.

She and her husband, Mauro, and their daughter, Chai, now six, and son, Cirano, four, have embraced not a dream, but a life, complete with all the enduring trials and occasional triumphs that life entails. In the real world, families worry less about the taste of the grapes or the quality of the sunlight than they do about the health of one's children or the survival of one's business. In her life, as lived, Bari also has to cope with the nettlesome local authorities, the literally alien local school system, a multitude of in-laws she had never known, and a language she still does not fully understand.

As Bari quickly learned, no one rolls out a red carpet just because an American has moved abroad. It is obvious to me within moments that the move has pushed Bari beyond her girlhood and seasoned her beyond her years, leaving her wearier, a little bit wistful for the life she left behind, but all the wiser for her experience.

In Kansas City, Mauro worked as a chef for the Ritz-Carlton, one favored stop on a twenty year culinary oddyssey. He had left Northern Italy in his mid-teens and returned only after mastering his art. Friends from America might find him a different person as well. He has come home, settled in, relocated his center. Yet, Mauro too had grown used to the simple logic and relative freedom of American commercial life. There is much he misses.

At The Traittoria De'll Angelo, Mauro Canaglia is the master chef, Bari the hostess. When speaking of Mauro as cook or manager, Bari uses superlatives like "fantastic" and "fabulous." About this, there is no dispute. The restaurant offers an ecelectic menu of Northern Italian and international delights. The food is superb.

Without Bari's deep respect for Mauro's abilities nothing else would work. In an exclusive restaurant like The Traittoria, the chef has the implicit authority of a captain at sea. The great majority of decisions are his to make. They can not be negotiated, American style. If upset at work, Bari has to grit it out. There is no running off to Ward parkway to shop; no sharing a beer with a trusted girlfriend. At the Traittoria, disputes have to be endured, managed, resolved.

If adaptation to a foreign country is difficult for any American, it is particularly difficult for an American woman, especially in a Latin country like Italy. To be sure, the North of Italy today is closer in spirit to America than it is to the Italia of our and Mario Puzo's imagination. But differences endure. Bari notes the distinction in little things like the impropriety of a woman extending her hand upon meeting a man. But as she knows, differences run deeper than that. In my week on the road, for instance, I can not recall seeing a woman drive in the fast lane on the Autostrada. Certainly, none passed me. Literally or metaphorically, the fast lane in Italy is largely the reserve of its men.

When first she assumed her new role Bari would muse, only half in jest, that she had abandoned her promising career as a graphic designer for the prosaic one of waitress. But in truth, she is more than that, and she knows it. On the two nights I watch her work, she greets the guests and introduces the menu with brio, like an actor on stage, stylish in dress, elegant in manner, her enthusiasm of yore channeled and focused. In the European tradition, exceptional restaurants feature service that borders on the dramatic, and at the Traittoria, Bari's role is to provide it.

The restaurant is at the center of her life. For no reason anyone can understand, the Canaglias must keep the restaurant open for six days and eleven meals a week. They would love to suspend their unprofitable lunch time business but, by law, cannot. The Canaglias take Sunday evening off and all day Monday, their "sacred day." To the degree that they have a life beyond the restaurant, it is sluiced into those precious hours. Mauro's golf clubs gather dust in the garage; he no longer has time to play. Bari now hires out her graphic design work; she no longer has time to maintain her equipment or her skills.

The family lives above the restaurant, in quarters tighter and lower-slung than in half the boats that ply Smithville Lake. During our visit, my wife and I and our two daughters stay in the ample guest quarters beneath the restaurant. For some unknowable reason, local authorities prevent the Mauros from from remodeling to take advantage of this space or even from installing a bathroom for those few guests they have. Accordingly, my wife and daughters choose not to drink for several hours before bedtime. Yielding to male European custom, I presume to take advantage of the sylan isolation.

In fact, Bari and Mauro spend so little time in their own quarters that they scarcely notice its confinement. Before lunch, the family has the run of this cheery, sun-drenched restaurant. When I talk to Bari in the morning, before the noon meal, she works as she talks, setting the tables, opening the shutters, starting the fire in the fireplace, preparing breakfast for the kids. She and Mauro had finished cleaning up at 2 A.M. the night before. The kids have to be at school by 8 A.M. Supplies have to be bought and food prepared. Guests arrive by noon into a dining room that will, as always, be spotless. if Italian life is "voluptuous," as Frances Mayes claims in her best seller, Under The Tuscan Sun,. it is people like the Canaglias who make it so.

Chai, the older daughter, dresses pertly in her school uniform. Her English remains natural and spontaneous. Bari works hard to keep it so. One senses that the fair-haired Chai could move back to America next week with little adjustment. Not so for Cirano, ther son. Only two at the time of the move, he calls to mind Dondi, the Italian waif of comic strip and film, big-eyed, half-Americanized and mischievous. Although Cirano understands English, he sometimes pretends that he does not. He is very much at home in Piovene.

Like any grandmother, Barbara Lowry of Independence would have grieved a little if her only daughter had moved to Paola let alone to Piovene. On one level, the one she can control, she wishes only for the family's happiness and takes pride in Bari's and the kids' ability to adapt. On another level, the more instinctive, the widening cultural gap between herself and her grandchildren unsettles her. Separated by distance, Barbara would prefer not to be separated by language and identity as well. No grandmother would. But she understands the fate of extended families in an increasingly global world and graciously has come to accept it.

Language, in fact, complicates everything. On arrival, Bari spoke no Italian. Neither did the kids. Since the area draws few foreign tourists, not many of the locals speak English. Those who think it would be fun to immerse themselves in a new language should imagine applying for a driver's license or negotiating medical care for a child in a language they don't understand. They should consider the frustration of spending hours in rooms full of in-laws who, however well intentioned, weary of repeating the most basic sentences at quarter-speed. The experience of being a stranger in a strange land leaves one sympathetic to the travails of all immigrants everywhere.

To the untrained ear, Bari's Italian now flows mellifluously, but she is not at all pleased with her progress. One of the few luxuries she affords herself is a tutor, a wise old linguist and archaeologist who confides in me that Bari is a perfectionist.

"She wants to learn everything all at once," he laments.

"Americans are like that," I respond. The tutor shakes his head in puzzlement. Americans confound him.

About once a week, he comes to see Bari. Given her responsilities to her children and the restaurant, not to mention the distance from town and the daunting road that leads there, Bari spends little time away from the restaurant. When I ask her what her future holds, she describes it in relationship to the restaurant: expanding the living quarters, opening up the kitchen, perhaps one day, authorities permitting, adding an albergo, a small inn.

Bari also takes great pleasure in the cooking classes she and Mauro arrange for people in the area, especially as the classes have evolved into something like clubs. These too help her narrow the distance between who she is and where she is.

Of late, Bari has found considerable comfort in an informal English-speaking woman's group that she more or less stumbled upon. One of the great, guilty Anglo-American pleasures throughout the world is to get together almost conspiratorially and dish the locals. It takes years, even decades, to feel comfortable in a foreign culture, but only minutes to feel at home with fellow anglophones abroad. The fewer there are in a given area, the tighter the bond.

Still, it remains to be seen whether Bari Canaglia will ever be at home in Italy. "She's not there yet," says her mom, who has watched her progress over the years. But, she adds, "I'm very proud of her, of her love for her family and her husband."

A generation wiser, Barbara Lowry understands implicity what Bari is still learning: that when all is said and done, the only "home" that matters is one Bari creates with her family. It trumps all others. Lacking real family, the famed travel writers focus on the superficials--the weather, the lay of the land, the food, the wine. But as Bari has come to learn, these are all backdrops, colorations. Unlike the dilettantish Ms. Mayes who lives in " Cortona, Italy and San Francisco," Bari lives only in Piovene. She has to make it work.

Such is the irony of her life: Bari Canaglia has migrated to a land that to the casual tourist seems Edenic. But the real Eden, she now knows, can be found only at home, wherever home may be. Her move to a foreign country and the metamorphasis from independent woman to full time wife and mother have added pressure to her new arrangement, pressure she and her family never would have experienced in Kansas City. But if the hazards are greater--and Bari has already experienced many of them--so too are the rewards.

Told by the media since childhood that she "has come a long way, baby," Bari has had to double back the other way. The journey to Italy was just the beginning, the opening of a door. The real journey takes her within, to her own center as matriarch of an intimate, fully integrated, traditional family. Today, few American women get this opportunity. Bari is just beginning to count her blessings.