I grew up in upstate New York where we always had two cats and two dogs, a motley crew of males and females. It drives me crazy whenever I walk my dog in Rome and have to fend off the furrowed brows of other dog owners who hold back their panting pups from mine with diffident questioning: “E’ maschio o femmina?” I’ve never seen this is the States. Perhaps I hung out in the wrong pet circles. But where I lived, cats and dogs played together and they all followed us on family walks. No one barked or hissed at each other but, instead, loved each other’s company.

As a freelance journalist, I work long, lonely hours out of my house in Rome. My husband’s job keeps him in the office until at least nine o’clock every night. I decided, therefore, after a year of being married to him, that I wanted a dog that would keep me company while working, and give me an excuse to get out of the house and exercise.

I knew I wanted a Labrador, since I grew up with three of them. I answered an ad posted in the park for a one-year-old golden Labrador available. Her owners were giving her away because the wife was expecting a baby and couldn’t handle two dogs (she had another Labrador, too). In her Sophie’s-choice-decision, she decided to give up the rowdier of the two. The dog barked and jumped up on us for the entire hour that we spent with her. We decided she was not for us. Meeting her made us realized how much we wanted a puppy, a dog we could train ourselves.

A cousin of my husband works as a veterinarian in Rome, and told us about a litter of yellow Labradors looking for parents. There was only one dog left, a little girl, in the litter of twelve. Instantly, I was skeptical, wondering why she was the last to go. Then, I discovered she’d actually been one of the first chosen but was eventually returned since a member of her new adoptive family was allergic to her. At two and half months old, she was fast asleep when we first met her but her face was irresistible. We both fell in love with her immediately, and especially liked the nurturing spirit of the woman who had raised the litter. We paid a small sum for her, again a sign that the owner was not in the puppy exchange business for the money. She told us she wanted owners who would take care of the puppy as she had. And she trusted we would.

We decided to call her Brie, since her fur is the color of the French cheese and since we’re foodies. We also thought it was a universal name that would be pronounceable in any language. When she was six months old, we organized a family reunion with her father, Orso, and her mother, Joy, in addition to a brother of hers, Lazaro, and a sister, too, named Nina. We continue to reunite Brie with her relatives, especially her sister Nina, and they roll around for hours in a nearby park. We like to think they recognize each other.

She’s multilingual, and has been from the start. When she was a puppy, we left her with a German friend of ours for a week. Therefore, when asked to lie down, she responds to either “Down” or “Platz.” If we go away for the weekend, we often leave her with a French friend. So, she responds to a few “viens ici” on demand, too. I speak to her in English and my husband speaks to her in Italian. But we both go back and forth. As the dog of a diplomat, she already seems very adaptable to multi-lingual situations.

Through my dog, I have found walking partners, gotten to know my neighbors, started excercising regularly, met foreigners I never even realized were in the neighborhood, and even had a spooky encounter with Sadam Hussein’s lawyer (whose dog lives on my block). I was more eager to own a dog than my husband was. But he is now the first to admit that one of his favorite moments of the day is coming home to Brie’s “butt dance,” a tribal rite she performs to express her delight in seeing him.