I recently got back from a trip to Hawai’i, where I spent the holidays with my brother, who just moved to Kaua’i (my brother has many laudable qualities, not least of which is his predilection to reside in beautiful places). When I returned to my “hometown” of Assisi, not a few friends, after hearing me recount my absolutely perfect vacation on the Garden Isle (for which I would like to publicly thank the aforementioned Brother, who is also one of my favorite people on earth and really knows how to show guests a good time), asked me in a conspiratorial murmur, “Weren’t you tempted to move there?”
And I have to say that I surprised even myself by answering honestly and decisively, “No”.
Now don’t get me wrong, Kaua’i is breathtakingly gorgeous...but of course, I already live in a place that is breathtakingly gorgeous, though Kaua’i is all about pristine palm-fringed beaches and verdant jungles where Umbria is all about rolling wooded land interspersed with vineyards or olive groves and tiny medieval stone hill towns. However, once you live in a gorgeous place you start to get a little insouciant about the whole marveling at other places’ natural beauty thing.
And the people of Kaua’i are certainly warm and welcoming, in a very forward “ALOHA!!” sort of way. But, of course, the people in Umbria are the same, though in a much more formal and reserved “Buongiorno, Signora” sort of way. In fact, it took me a couple of days to get reacclimated to the American peculiarity of readily starting up long and intimate conversations with perfect strangers, who just minutes later are crowned your New Best Friend. I am considered quite gregarious in Umbria, but a bit stand-offish in Hawai’i.
The rhythm of life in Kaua’i is certainly a sustainable one, as is that of Umbria. These are doubtless two populaces who have not tacked up “winning the rat race” amongst their top ten life goals. Both spend an admiral amount of time doing what we humans are programmed to do: enjoying life. One dedicates itself to surfing and pimping monster trucks, and the other to truffle hunting and pimping tagliatelle, but the end product of contentment with their lot is the same.
And speaking of tagliatelle, these are also two places where one can eat wonderful fresh local food. Kauai’i has a cuisine which reflects its social history of successive waves of immigrants from Polinesia and Japan, where Umbria’s is a testament to an immobile and insular regional history, with a cuisine which has remained largely unchanged for centuries (they still eat unsalted bread, after a spat with the Vatican over the salt tax in the mid-sixteenth century. They’re not into nouvelle cuisine, here.).
In short, Kaua’i, according to all the usual parameters is, indeed, paradise on earth. I must be crazy not to want to move there, right?
The thing is, is that sometimes you move to a place for very tangible reasons...its beauty, its economy, its convenience. But sometimes you get off a plane, set your suitcase down, and in a flash, or a wave, or a slow, flowering moment you feel you have come home. It’s nothing you can really put your finger on, but instead a primordial recognition of having arrived where you are supposed to stay. I have experienced that with only one place in my life until now, and that place was not Kaua’i, or Paris, or Charleston, or Mykonos, or even Chicago, where I was born. That place is here, in Umbria.
Not to say that my life here is perfect. In the more than 15 years since I settled here, there have been beginnings and endings, births and deaths, gains and losses...in a word, there has been a life. But I have the conviction that it has been the life I was supposed to have had in the place I was supposed to be. And just that feeling of it being right is...paradise.
]]>Times when I am saturated with gratitude for the strange winds that blew me here. Times when I savor every charmed (and charming) moment, when every fabulous meal is a gift, when every bucolic vista is a discovery, when every lazy summer afternoon an epiphany. Times when I revel in my sons' endearing Italian accent, my husband's Euro-male je ne sai quoi, my mother-in-law's hand rolled pasta. Times when exploring the small, family owned shops is an adventure, navigating a government office in another language is a small victory, and painstakingly nourishing a new friendship with a local is a pleasure.
Yes, my friends, there are times when I love this country with all my heart, body, and soul.
And then there are times when my godd@!n freaking telephone line is out of service for a godd@!n freaking month, including Christmas, and I wonder what the hell I am doing in this godd@!n freaking country.
There are many reasons for loving Italy, and for loving living here. The food, for example. The history. The beauty. Fabulous telephone service (or any utility, for that matter) is not, however, one of these reasons.
All the negative, frustrating, enraging, not-the-stuff-you-read-about-in-the-Tuscan-villa-living-genre, dark-underbelly-of-the-Mediterranean-lifestyle aspects of residing in Italy seem to come together in the perfect storm vortex of evil of utility companies: aging infrastructure, lazy state employees, bureaucracy, an underlying "every man for himself" life philosophy, and an impossibly complicated legal system which does just about anything but protect the common consumer.
So, a tree fell on November 26th, and knocked down a telephone pole near our house, putting ourselves and all our neighbors at the total mercy of that perfidious organization known as Telecom Italia. Since we've been having chronic problems with our telephone line for about four years, we immediately began what we knew to be a totally futile exercise: calling the toll free customer service number from our cell phones.
The median hold time is about three hours, and nine times out of ten as soon as you finally get an operator you get cut off. But there is that one time that you actually talk to a (obviously bored, totally unhelpful, barely literate) human, and you get a chance to get your repair request logged into "the system". No one knows exactly what "the system" is, but it apparently involves long distance travel by donkey and communication via soup cans on a string.
Now, the law establishes how many days the phone company has to repair a problem, but in the 12 years I've lived here Telecom has never managed to make it in under six days. Of course, they pay a fine for every day they go over the legal time limit, but since Telecom itself establishes the damages they owe you (which only makes sense, because if I were to run down a little old lady and her Chihuahua tomorrow, I think I should be the one to decide how much I owe her), it is so ridiculously low that it pretty much makes no difference to them at all.
A week passes, but we're not worried yet. It's been raining, and god forbid the Telecom guys get the sniffles by going outside in inclement weather. At the beginning of the second week a repairman drives up, gets out of the car, takes a look around, and announces he can't do anything because he doesn't have a ladder. At which point I just stand there staring at him with my mouth open, because I think it may have been the first time I have actually witnessed a living, breathing human with no brain.
Another week passes, and we launch Plan B, which is what we've always done with pretty positive results. My husband stalks them. He figures if he drives around enough, he's bound to run into a truck sooner or later and if you actually flag them down and have them follow you to your house, you can sometimes resolve your problem. I think money may change hands as well, though I have no official confirmation of that.
But days pass, and still no truck sighting. Finally, I spot a truck, so in a wild Starsky and Hutch-esque maneuver pull around them and cut them off with my car. Unfortunately, they are the DSL squad, and since lord knows we don't get none of that high tech stuff out here in the boondocks, they aren't much help. They do seem to feel my pain (we are close to two weeks with no phone by this time, and trying to run a business with no internet, fax, or working credit card machine has complicated my life in ways that words cannot describe), and give me a top-secret-don't-tell-anyone where-you-got-this-or-we'll-lose-our-jobs local supervisor number.
Which we proceed to call for the next three weeks, and never once get an answer.
Back at the ranch, we are still phoning the toll free number once a day, as are all of our neighbors. Just because. Oh, and we've started sending registered letters, too. My husband has taken to calling these "evidence", as if there is a snowball's chance in hell we would ever be able to submit these documents as part of a successful suit against Telecom. But we all need to feel like we are doing something, and me yelling F**K over and over again doesn't seem to be making much of a difference. So we send some letters, too.
In the meantime, my telephone bill shows up. On it is a EURO 103 charge marked "anticipo telefonate". So, Telecom has essentially charged me more than 100 bucks in advance for presumed future telephone calls that will never make it on to my next statement, since I haven't had a working phone for most of the last billing cycle. I'm so punch drunk by this point that I actually start laughing. Because there's got to be a hidden camera somewhere and a new washer-dryer prize at the end of the show, right?
At about three weeks, a different truck shows up. The repairmen get out and ask what the trouble is. I say, "Well, a pole is down". And they kind of scratch their heads and look at each other, and then tell me that they are the switchbox squad. The line squad is something completely different, and may even involve another customer service number to call. I took it pretty well, because by this time I had arrived at the Fifth (or is it Sixth?) stage of grief: Calm Acceptance of Fate. Since we have problems with our phone so often, I can move through the stages in, oh, half an hour:
Time passes. Calls are made. We change our cell service so I can talk internationally with my family for Christmas (for 45 seconds). And then, miraculously, on New Year's Eve, not one but two trucks show up, and about half an hour later my phone rings. It takes me four rings to recognize that it is my telephone and not one of my sons' toys. And all of the sudden I am feeling all warm and fuzzy towards Telecom and beginning to understand that whole psychology behind why hostage victims begin to empathize with their captors.
Warm and fuzzy didn't last very long, as we lost our phone service again two days later. It's still down. In fact, I'm not sure how I'm going to get this essay online, short of printing it out and tossing it in a bottle into the sea in the general direction of New Mexico and hope that it ends up at the SlowTrav central offices somehow.
In the meantime, I'm trying hard to remember why it is I love it here. I've been really putting down the pasta. I've been commiserating with my Italian friends (all of whom seem to have a similar story involving either the telephone, gas, electricity, or water service. Man, these people are resilient.) over cappuccinos. I've been spending a lot of time watching Fox News (though, under Berlusconi, Italy ain't no Sweden).
And tomorrow we are buying a laptop with a wireless cell phone connection. Because I've discovered that being cut off from it all is only fun if you are the one with the scissors.
]]>Fifty bazillion times the guilt.
I've found that the life of a working mother of multiple children is one in which every moment of every day you feel that you should really be doing something else. When I'm spending time with one son, I feel I am neglecting the other. When I am with both, I stress about the backed up work I have. When I am working, I know I am just contributing to their maladjustment as adults. When I go to bed early, I have sweat tinged dreams of dying with fifteen extra pounds still on me. When I am up at 1 A.M. cussing my way through "The Firm's Complete Body Workout plus Steel Abs," I am fully conscious that I will be barely fit to parent the next morning at 7 A.M.
I feel stretched thin, worn out, overwhelmed. I had the thought the other day that if my husband decided to take a lover, it would actually be somewhat of a relief. Perhaps I could get her to stop by and take care of that 2 A.M. feeding, as well.
Does it sound like I'm whining? Well, I am. Because it wasn't supposed to be this way. I mean, I live in Italy. Not Milan, Italy. Umbria, Italy. A slow place. A lingering over cappuccinos in the morning place. A three hour lunch place. A napping all afternoon place. So why is it that I am up at three in the morning folding laundry and balancing the checkbook half the time?
When I moved here (over a decade ago, now; how can that possibly be?!?) I had a very clear idea of what life in the Bel Paese would be like. It was a cross between "A Room with a View" and a Campari commercial. All long, swishy skirts and big romantic straw hats covering my full head of romantic cascading ringlets by day, and hot little Versace numbers and barely-there four inch heeled sandals, flitting from hot spot to hot spot by night.
I realized almost immediately after arriving that my vision was somewhat flawed. First of all, I have lifeless, straight, greasy hair. I was born with it, and will die with it. Ringlets are, in this life at least, out. Secondly, the only women in Italy who wear long, swishy skirts and big romantic straw hats are Anglo-Saxon tourists who have seen "A Room With A View" four times too many.
My then-boyfriend-now-husband also undermined my dream. For example, he seemed to be under the impression that I should work for a living, which seriously cut into my swishy skirt daytime. Also, instead of greeting me at the airport with a huge bunch of roses, he handed me a trowel and sack of 425 and said, "Remember, Babe. One part water to five parts sand and three parts cement." A few hours later we were already laying brick for the house we then spent ten years (and counting) restoring. Let me tell you, when you've spent the day cleaning four thousand antique terra cotta roof tiles with a wire brush and acid, the last thing you are up to doing at midnight is the salsa.
Plus, who can afford Versace?
And here we have it, folks. The sad truth: life as an expat in Italy just ain't that different from life, well, anywhere.
Okay, okay. Yeah, some people leave the rat race in LA, sell all their worldly possessions, invest the money, and live off the interest and the modest earnings from their small organic sheep farm in beautiful rural Tuscany where they eschew TV, Target, and deodorant. But the vast majority of foreigners who are living in Italy are essentially living the same life they would be in Boston or Leeds or Brisbane, except the view is nicer, the food better, and the mail slower.
I can already see you out there, you who have been ferreting away articles about moving to Italy for ten years now and following the exchange rate closer than Greenspan and taping up travel posters of sunflower fields above your kitchen sink, shaking your head in disbelief and outrage. I am clearly one of those poor, sad philistines who has Italy cast before her like pearls before swine.
I offer you My Typical Day:
Up at seven with last night's mascara smeared in dark rings under my eyes and bad hair - generally resembling Cruela D'Evil, but not as thin. Twenty minutes to become human through a hot shower and caffeine administered intravenously. Then my kids wake up, and I spend the next hour dressing, feeding, and taming them. And I also try to get the beds made, the dishwasher started, and a load of whites hung out, though sometimes fate is not on my side. I take my four year old to preschool at nine and spend an hour or so running errands, which, quite like rodents, seem to mate and multiply on my to-do list during the night. By eleven I am home to put my one year old down for a nap. And then I have AN HOUR of time to run my home, business, and personal life. Then noon rolls around, the baby wakes up, my husband comes home for lunch, and pasta is made. I run out to pick up my preschooler at one, my husband leaves for work a half an hour later, and I parent for two hours. Then the one year old goes down for a nap. Then the four year old goes down for a nap. And then I have AN HOUR of time to run my home, business, and personal life. Then everyone is up, my husband is home, and we parent for a couple of hours. At seven we bathe the beasts, at eight we dine, at nine we toss them into bed. And from nine until when we collapse from sheer exhaustion around 1 A.M., we work.
Our social life revolves around preschool birthday parties, PTA meetings, and pizzas with friends. Our outings are hikes in the woods or into town for a look at the shops. Our preoccupations are our finances, our kids' health, our businesses, how to download the damn pictures from the digital camera, and where diapers are on sale. So, you people tell me, with a life like this, what difference does it make where I'm living?
Surely part of this is because we are in that thirty-something working and parenting mode. I recently read Marjorie Williams' memoir about her battle with cancer in which she says, "What you do, if you have little kids, is lead as normal a life as possible, but with more pancakes." That generally rings true for living in Italy as well, but with more cornetti.
However, for most people, this period of life essentially segues into retirement. When I talk to my Grandma on the phone, I say, "Hey, Grandma, watcha been doing?" and she says, "Oh, honey, I've just been drinking my coffee and reading the Trib, then I'm going to putz around in the yard and then head over to Field's for the White Sale and lunch with the girls" which, from what I can tell, is pretty much what retired folks do all over the world. And given the lengthy online discussions I've read discussing health coverage for the elderly expat in Italy, apparently older expats worry about getting sick and dying here, too.
Of course there are differences between the life I lead here and the life that I probably would be leading had I stayed back in the States (though life is a crazy toboggan ride, so who really knows?). I do live in one of the most beautiful places on earth, a fact that doesn't seem to count for much until I go home to the Chicago suburbs and am slapped in the face with how incredibly butt-ugly they are. I run a business I love, and which I probably would never had considered if it hadn't fallen in my lap once I got here. Filaments of history and tradition run through our daily activities in ways I have come to take for granted, but leave us much more rooted in this area than most Americans. I now know how to say things like rumble strips and stork in another language.
I think it is human nature to dream about a different life, one in which there is greener, tidier grass tended by paid help. Most of our guests who come through dream aloud about how wonderful it would be to pick up and move to Italy, where the pace of life is so slow and the pasta so perfectly cooked. I recently spent almost a month in Chicago, visiting friends and family and vacationing with my sons. My husband flew over for a few days in the middle of that time and we spent our afternoons strolling around the beautiful neighborhoods on the north side of Chicago, admiring the architecture and poking around in boutiques and cafes. Our conversation inevitably turned to what it would be like if we were to move back there. How relaxing and beautiful it was. The great breakfast places. The nightlife.
Then we forced ourselves to take a reality check. If we were to move back to the Chicago, first of all, no way in hell could we afford a brownstone in Lincoln Park, walking distance to the Lake. We could hardly afford to vacation there for three weeks. And if we could manage to live there, it would only be because we were both working sixty hour weeks, which means no time for strolling, poking, breakfasting out, or nightlife. Our little free time would be taken up with parenting and grocery shopping. So, as far as we could ascertain, we would be, once again, living the same life we do in Italy, but with a good bagel place around the corner.
Here or there, it comes down to this. We wish for more hours in the day, but cram as much as we possibly can into those we have. We look forward to a time when we can slow down and spend more time relaxing, but that seems perennially just out of our grasp. We answer the question, "How are you?" with, "Busy!". We do this here, there, and everywhere. But, some days, when the sun sets just right making Assisi a glowing shade of rose with every window reflecting blinding gold back to me, when I have a client who departs with tears of gratitude, when a complete stranger walks up to me and declares my son to be the spitting image of my husband's great grandfather, I am thankful to be harried here, and not anywhere else on earth.
]]>We’ve been at it for a little over five years now. So, who out there in the crowd would like to take a stab at guessing where we are, exactly, in the dream house construction? I hear "choosing window treatments" from the back. The little bald guy here in front says "final touches on landscaping". Well, everyone hold that thought, and I’ll get to it in a minute.
I’ve discovered that building your dream house is not all it’s cracked up to be. You see, dreaming is what happens when one is lying in bed at night, soundly sleeping. Reality is what goes down when one is lying in bed at night, wide awake.
For example, I always dreamed of owning a piece of land where I could build myself a big old house any damn way I wanted to. And the money to afford it. The reality is that we have the incredibly good fortune to own farmland in a historically protected area inside a park. On the other hand, we unfortunately own farmland in a historically protected area inside a park. So already real life starts to move at least a couple of paces away from dreamland.
We can’t build anything ex novo. Because it’s farmland, and it’s a park. We can remodel what we have, and, within some pretty restrictive limits, add onto existing structures. But that’s okay, because my in-laws live in a house much too large for just the two of them, so the plan is to divide their home, carve out an apartment for them, and take the rest plus a bit that we will build on for ourselves.
Another example of the reality not matching up to the dream thing. Never, ever, in my wildest, craziest, most terrorizing dreams did I conjure up a situation of essentially sharing a semi-detached with my mother-in-law until death do us part. Which some days threatens to be sooner than nature intended. But I’m okay with it. I have reached a place that can be characterized, depending upon one’s point of view, as bitter resignation or Zen-like acceptance. I know this because there has been a dramatic decrease over the past decade of conversations with my husband which begin with me saying the words, "Can you believe your mother just....?".
And we can’t build in any style that suits our fancy. Historically protected means that it will be stone walls, terra cotta tiles, and wooden shutters, thank you very much. Everything. Our doghouse has a cotta tiled roof. So there goes my dream of a Graceland replica right here in central Umbria, complete with the fully upholstered billiard room. (I’m kidding. Anyone else out there ever visit Graceland? My brother and I road-tripped from Chicago one crazy weekend while we were in college, a weekend which culminated in a heavy late night rap session about life priorities and facing up to adult responsibility in an all-night diner with the sum total of our remaining cash laying on the table between us, by the end of which we had managed to convince ourselves that the wisest decision was to go with the the four foot by two foot framed black velvet painting of The King (in his Vegas period) and sleep our final night in the car. The painting still resides in my parents’ basement, and every couple of years they stumble on it again and threaten to either ship it to us in Alaska or Italy or throw it out.)
So, okay. Stone, terracotta, attached to the in-laws’ house. We started drawing up blueprints.
I’ve discovered that drawing up plans for your dream house is not all it’s cracked up to be.
I’m from a culture in which your life is divided among a succession of houses, commonly located in a succession of cities or states. My husband’s family, on the other hand, can trace themselves to this piece of land we still own, based on a fragment of parchment that we just recently discovered in the local archives, to 1130. Right. Like, a hell of a long time in dog years. So let’s just say that if it were a choice between moving or giving up his kidneys, we’d be looking at lifelong dialysis for my spouse. This is paired with the fact that I, after more than a decade of building, renovating, refurbishing, and generally ruining my nails, have sworn that our house will be the last time (LAST TIME) we do any sort of construction work. Ever.
These two factors together lend more than a bit of gravitas to the whole process of drawing up blueprints. It’s not like ten years down the line we can just decide to sell our place and pick up and move on to one where there is more pantry space in the kitchen and a sunroom. This is a house we will be living in for the rest of our natural lives with little or no significant changes or additions. It gives you a bit of pause when you are deciding where the guest bathroom should go.
The process is also complicated by the fact that we don’t have a heck of a lot of money now, but we plan to in the future (who doesn’t?). So there are all these wild card spaces like a big unfinished cement basement, that for the time being will remain a big unfinished cement basement but one day may morph into a home office and/or den and/or home entertainment space and/or guest suite. And a dining room that will surely be outfitted for the next decade in plastic patio furniture until we can afford the Prairie style dining set and hutch that was in last month’s Vogue Home.
I’ve also realized that my husband is not the man I thought he was. I was under the mistaken impression that we both had grandiose dreams of spacious houses with large, sunny windows and cathedral ceilings. Having grown up in small, cramped, urban dwellings where every room was shared and multi-purpose, I want a big house. A house where everyone has a room of one’s own. And every room is dedicated to a single purpose. And you need an internal tracking and satellite communication system to find each other.
My husband, who grew up in a large, rambling (though derelict and freezing) farmhouse and who spends almost every waking hour outside tinkering with bits of machinery covered in grease anyway, dreams of a single-wide parked in the middle of the woods which has no running water and can be adequately heated with a woodstove, as far as I can figure out.
So, we have lots of exchanges that go like this: "Honey, I think we need a craft room in the basement." "You don’t do crafts." "Ah, but I would if I had a room to do them in." Or "I was thinking it would be great to have a gym where we can put our Nautilus and stationary bike." "We don’t have a Nautilus and stationary bike." "Because we don’t have any place to put them!".
I told him the other day about an article I read about the Spellings in Hollywood and their palatial home in which they have a room they use to wrap gifts in. You know, the old Gift Wrapping Room. So he gets all high and mighty about fossil fuels and energy conservation and starving children in Africa, like I wasn’t the one reading "Affluenza" out loud to him last week.
However, we managed to overcome all of these hurdles and actually came up with some working plans. Actually, we came up with about a dozen versions of working plans, but we settled on a final version that we could both agree on.
At this point, I discovered that having working house plans is not all it’s cracked up to be.
I never realized the intense bureaucratic involvement required to conceive working house plans. It apparently takes a village to raise a roof. There is the architect and the contractor, the construction company and the accountant, the engineer and the city planning board advisor. So, I came up with a plan. I figured the best way to expedite this whole process was to sleep with them. All of them. Luckily for me, they are all the same man and I happen to be married to him. And given that in 11 years of cohabitation we have only managed to conceive two children (and we use the rhythm method), my plan did not entail the massive time commitment one would have supposed.
It’s convenient to sleep with your architect and contractor. For one, it’s amazing the amount of closet space that can miraculously be added on to your house plans once you start wearing sweatpants, turtlenecks, and socks to bed. And it’s nice to be able to roll over and continue your debate regarding cotto or parquet flooring at 3 a.m. without bothering with a telephone.
I’m not the only one who disturbs our night rest like this. My husband woke me up a few months ago by shaking me urgently and saying, "You know what I really love about houses in America?" My mind raced: Refrigerators with their own zip code? Windows that slide up and down so that every gust of wind doesn’t threaten to smash the glass to smithereens? Mailboxes with little flags? No, he wants a laundry chute. I thought this was strange, because no one in my family and none of our friends have laundry chutes, but it turns out that he had just seen this B horror flick in which the laundry chute was a pivotal plot device. Of course that meant revising the current version of our house plans, because any logical place from which a laundry chute would originate in the current plans deposited the laundry either in the middle of the living room or on the kitchen island.
On the flip side, living with your accountant is not such a great thing. Every suggestion is greeted with grimaces, muttering, sighing, punching numbers into a calculator, and a stiff drink. It’s enough to drive you to agree to the single-wide.
But, with much wrangling and compromising, sighing and swearing, and facing reality, we deposited our spanking new and improved house plans with the correct municipal office to get the final stamp of approval.
I’ve discovered getting your house plans approved by the Comune is not all it’s cracked up to be.
We got a registered letter a few weeks after submitting our plans for approval, informing us that there is a road that runs through our hypothetical living room. Now, our hypothetical living room will be hypothetically located where there is now my son’s sandbox, the clothes-line, a hammock strung between two centenarian oaks, and a five foot hedge. We don’t see much traffic back there, and a quick call to my husband’s grandmother, who is 96, confirmed that no one has a living memory of there being a road which runs through the middle of our back yard for at least the last century.
Unfortunately, municipal maps have the last word, and there is, indeed, a road behind our house on the map. Thus began an odyssey lasting several months of road declassification paperwork, which had to be signed and notarized by all of the property owners along the ghost trail (none of whom, miraculously, put up a fuss) and submitted for review and approval. Then the approval had to be submitted with the house plans for approval. And in the intervening months, we had a bit of a think about the plans we had submitted originally and decided to tweak them slightly. And in the meantime the laws governing how and where you can build on farmland in a historically protected area inside a park changed.
And so, here we are. Five years later. Want to see our dream house? Well, put on your reading specs, because it’s rolled up in a cardboard tube on my husband’s desk.
]]>A sagra is a festival organized by a community, either an entire town or a smaller subdivision within a larger municipality, which almost always centers around a specific food or dish. Most of these foods or dishes are local specialties, e.g. truffles or wild boar or torta al testo (a type of flat bread), but you can find sagre featuring wild cards like beer or crepes as well.
A sagra can be one of the most fun, authentic evenings you’ll spend in Italy. Or it can be a frustrating wash-out. Here are some tips to help you get the best out of the experience.
Okay, imagine your church youth group organized a dinner and bazaar that lasted ten days and involved feeding about a thousand people a night. Total chaos would reign. Well, that’s pretty much what it is. A booth where you order your food, a big tent where you sit at long tables with complete strangers and eat off plastic plates, a couple of carnival type booths where you can shoot cans or play the lottery for prizes, and a dance floor. And hundreds of people shouting orders, bustling around with trays of food, eating with gusto, and trying to talk over each other. If you are looking for a quiet, romantic evening for two, this is not the place. If you want to really soak up rural Italy, you've hit the jackpot.
As I mentioned before, most sagre specialize in local dishes, and these are the ones you want to hit. My favorite sagre are the ones in the tiniest towns, right in the main square. I try to avoid the huge, overblown sagre held in anonymous fields outside of town. If you’re not from the area, it’s not easy to know which ones are your best bet...it’s tough even for those who live here. Most are cyclical in quality: they begin small and the food is excellent, then word gets out and they grow beyond their capacity, so the next couple of years folks don’t go and the food gets good again. When all else fails, ask a local. Sagre are publicized primarily with the big posters plastered along the roads and in the main squares, or the local tourist information offices sometimes have listings.
As I mentioned above, an atmosphere of benign pandemonium is what you’ll usually find, so the best strategy is to get there early before the place is really jumping and it is hard to find a table or your errant order of tagliatelle. By getting there when the kitchen opens, you have a slight hope of finding a decent place to sit and eat in relative tranquility, but still enjoy some great people watching. The other key benefit to being there before the sun sets is that you will have finished your meal before the band begins to play. One of the main attractions of the sagre, other than eating and socializing, is dancing. Italians are passionate about ballroom...you’ll see little old guys out there cutting the rug who you swear you just saw five minutes earlier huddled on a plastic chair over by the port-a-potties sucking down oxygen from a tank. Okay, remember that Zeppelin concert in ’73 that gave you pretty much chronic tinnitus for the following three years? Well, those guys don’t have anything on "Guido and his Ciao Ciao Mazurka Band". The louder the fox-trot, the better. It’s fun to watch, but I prefer to have already finished my meal so I feel free to head out when my ears start to ring.
If you really want to sample the fare at a sagra, but are not a big crowd and general anarchy fan, get hold of a schedule. Most sagre run ten days (two weekends and the week between them). So, first, don’t go on a weekend. Everyone and their brother dines at sagre on the weekends. Second, choose a weekday evening to go when there is no dancing. As I said before, one of the main draws to the sagre is the music, and many people actually dine at home but come over afterwards to dance and chit-chat. Most sagre have one evening a week when something other than music is scheduled, most commonly card games (briscola or scopa) or recitals by the local school kids. You’ll find the place relatively calm on those nights.
Every sagra has it’s own SOP for ordering and being served, which are all convoluted, multi-phase systems which involve at some point at least four people under the age of 12. Some have you first choose a table, then give them the table number when you order at the booth so the server can bring you your food. Some have you bring your order from the booth to the kitchen, and then just stand there until it’s ready. Or, you have to choose a table and give the table number to the kitchen and they’ll bring it to you. Or, they give you a number and read it over the P.A. system when it’s ready and you have to get it yourself. Or, you sit down and order from your table like in a restaurant. So hang back for a minute to see what other folks are doing before you dive right into the ordering line and tick the folks off behind you because you didn’t know that you needed a table number first, or some such thing. Also, don’t expect a menu in English, or even very precise Italian, so either grab a photocopy and your pocket dictionary before you step up to the window, or, if you’re feeling adventurous, just go with the house dishes (usually listed apart, or with an asterisk).
Like I said, Italy, lots of people, unpaid adolescent servers, loud Waltz music, indecipherable menus. The chances of you getting lamb chops instead of pork, or penne instead of tagliatelle, are pretty big. So, take it with philosophy and choose your battles. If things look relatively calm and you can actually track down a volunteer server, go ahead and explain the problem. If folks look harried and the noise level approaches a neighborhood under JFK’s landing strips, enjoy your lamb and chalk it up to experience. Obviously, if things have gotten completely screwed up, you think your order may have fallen into a black hole, you require something vegetarian, or some other insurmountable problem, track someone down and complain.
This is the one place on earth where I can guarantee you that someone else’s offspring will be worse behaved than your own. So go ahead and bring them. Until the band starts up, let them run completely wild with the other roughly hundred kids tearing around the dance floor, give them some money to win kitschy crap at the lottery booth, sell your soul to the devil and buy them something God-awful at the confectionary truck, let them ride the two or three rickety carnival rides set up behind the dance floor. Your most memorable experience in Italy will doubtless have to do with art, culture, or food. Theirs will be the night you took them to the sagra.
If you see lots of people waiting for a place to sit and eat, don’t linger over dessert. It’s nice to leave any left over wine in your bottle for the folks still eating next to you. Spend money... the primary goal of these festivals is fund raising for the locals for the youth groups and things. Eat, dance, and enjoy yourself.
I mentioned above that sagre tend to be cyclical in quality, so I hate to recommend any specific ones as they tend to vary in quality from year to year. But I’ll stick my neck out anyway:
Overblown, but worth it:
Small and charming:
Tiny and authentic:
To avoid:
Yes, folks, we’ve got a bun in the oven. And before I go on, let me just clear up a couple of things.
How you know this is not your first pregnancy
How you know this is not your husband’s first pregnancy
Having said that, let me clarify that we are thrilled. There was a period that we thought number two just wasn’t in the cards for us, and this left me strangely bereft. Strangely, I mean, in the eyes of many of our friends in Italy because families with single children aren’t all that uncommon here. In fact, in many areas especially the further north you go, it is more the rule than the exception.
I think that this is one of the facts regarding modern Italy that most surprise first time visitors. The world seems to have freeze framed Italy in roughly the neorealist period, where women all looked like Sofia Loren and had at least a half a dozen offspring fetchingly dressed in short pants, news vendor caps, and ankle boots. The reality is that birth rates have been steadily going down in Italy for the past three decades, and by 1988 the Bel Paese vied with China and Japan for the lowest birth rates in the world. The current birthrate has risen slightly to 1.25 children per woman, which puts Italy somewhere between second and third place worldwide, depending upon whose numbers you read.
Regardless, one of the main reasons that the birthrate has risen slightly over the past few years is because of the relatively higher birthrates among the immigrant population, which has risen proportionately over the same period. So the fact remains that more than half of all Italian couples, and more like two thirds in the center and north of Italy, choose to bear only one child.
There are various reasons for this tendency of modern Italian couples limit the size of their family. One is purely demographic: many Italian women don’t marry until their early thirties, and don’t procreate until their mid to late thirties. Many explanations are given for this delay, namely difficulty in finishing higher education and instability of the labor market. Well, call me jaded, but the majority of my girlfriends who have put off marriage have been much less swayed by Pursuit of Higher Education and Career Advancement than by Lack of Man Who Doesn’t Fall into the Even if You Were the Last Male on Earth Category. But who am I to go against the big statisticians? The bottom line is when you’ve had your first at 38 it gives you great pause to consider having number two at 40. I, for one, am planning my first uninterrupted night of sleep the day I turn 40, certainly not starting the whole business all over again.
The second reason is straightforward economics. The cost of living is high in Europe in general, and Italy specifically. Utilities are expensive here, food and clothing can be costly, and, most importantly, housing prices are sky-high, especially in the wealthier center and north. Many Italian families live in relatively small urban apartments where space is tight for a family of three, much less four. We know of at least a few couples who gave up on having a second child because there was simply no space to put him or her.
The third, and I think most compelling reason, is socio-economic. Many couples in Italy make a conscious choice about the style of life they prefer. They can either have a second child, or they can have an nicer car, a week skiing vacation in the winter and a month seaside vacation in the summer, and name brand clothes and shoes. It is easy to dismiss this as a superficial preference, but considering modern Italian history I am not so quick to disdain.
Italy was an extremely poor country until just recently. Starving poor. Approximately one tenth to one quarter of its population emigrating abroad in the twentieth century poor. It was a time that the elderly in Italy colorfully call "the years of misery", a time that my husband’s grandmother left her home in Umbria to travel to the Marche and work as a wet-nurse, leaving her newborn daughter at home who died soon after, quite probably of malnutrition.
The economic upturn began in the sixties and seventies, with a higher standard of living, industrial development, and the birth of a strong middle class. However, in many parts of Italy, including the mountainous rural areas in Umbria, this taste of the good life did not arrive until even later. My own husband did not have an indoor bathroom until 1981, a fact that he likes to bring up every time I suggest a camping vacation. As I recall, I spent the entire twelve months of 1981 bitching to my parents because I was the only girl in the entire school to not have a pair of Nike gym shoes and baggy striped Lee jeans. My husband also clearly remembers when electricity, telephone service, and television arrived in the area. He was born in 1967.
The point I’m trying to make is that abject poverty is living memory in Italy, and economic security or even prosperity quite recent experience. So if young Italian couples decide that they want to enjoy their disposable income in consumer goods rather than try to form a family basketball team, who am I to judge?
Clearly, there are pros and cons to being a single child, which I discovered when I married one. The pros are, of course, that all the energy, time, and finances of the family are concentrated on a single person. Sometimes this produces offspring who are unspeakably self centered, but my experience is that it more often produces adults who are happy, secure, and responsible. My husband has to be the most spookily well adjusted person I have ever met, for example. The flip side is that there is no one else with whom you can shoulder the responsibility when your parents begin to age, which is a problem we, and many of our friends, have just begun to face in the past few years. We have noticed that the adults we know who were raised as single children now tend to have at least two themselves, and those who have siblings are more likely to limit themselves to one. The grass is always greener, I suppose.
Anyway, our train has left the station for destination Baby Two, so it’s too late for us to rethink things now. All I have to say is all previously discussed plans for number three are now officially null and void.
Famous last words.
]]>Last August I did one of those huge, stock-up-on-everything grocery runs at the big IperCoop about half an hour from my house, which I never get to do. I never get to do this for two reasons:
1) I almost always shop alone with my son, and shopping whilst simultaneously playing "I spy something blue", intercepting breakable items as they are about to be chucked from the cart, and convincing a two year old that all that candy and gum some childless idiot decided to display right by the checkout line is "yucky, sweetie. You don’t want that yucky stuff!" isn’t really conducive to performing the mental calculations needed to determine if the two for one 150 ounce shampoo is a better deal than the three pack economy sized 250 ounce, based on cents per ounce. You just toss in the shampoo closest to your outstretched hand and make for home.
2) Despite being the proud owners of 17 hectares of land, four rental apartments, a 250 square meter home, a barn, hayshed, machine shed, hen house, rabbit hutch, and abandoned World War II ambulance that my father-in-law keeps in the woods to nap in, we have no storage space. None. So completely bereft of storage space are we that our shopping is a zero sum equation: we run out of one tube of toothpaste, and we purchase a single replacement tube. None of that bulk buying that has made Sam Walton a rich man.
But it was August and my husband was off of work, so we headed out the three of us. And, since a husband being off of work is translated by wives the world over as "Great, Honey! Now you’ve got time to clean out the garage and/or basement and/or shed!", we had just recently concluded our annual Let’s Get This Damn S**t Out Of Here campaign (to steal a phrase aptly coined by my friend Nina), and quite successfully. I had actually liberated two shelves for sundry items like spare toilet paper and light bulbs.
It was to be a grand outing.
When we got to the store, we found that they had set up one of those big inflatable kiddie slides out front, so I sent my husband and son over there to kill time, and went on my merry way. (The fact that I was so beside myself to be grocery shopping in peace is kind of depressing, now that I think about it. I’m sure it was like this for Princess Di and Madonna when their kids were little, right?) Anyway, there I was in the checkout line with my basket so full to overflowing that it was reminiscent of a Central American cross country bus, and up behind me walks a Non Shopper Dad with his toddler.
I immediately recognized this Non Shopper Dad because he was gripping his squirming, tugging son with one hand and holding on to about half the candy and toys in the store, plus one quart of milk with the other. Even my husband, who is a Non Dresser Dad (orange shirt and red pants, anyone?) and a Borderline Feeder Dad (pimento olives are a vegetable) knows the two fundamental rules of shopping with toddlers. Always, always — even if you are just stopping in for a package a dental floss — put your kid in a cart. A cart is not a mode of transportation, but a child restraint device. Never, ever capitulate. You appease the whining with a box of Tic-tacs, and the next thing you know you are committed to a six foot high stuffed Pooh bear, triple stuffed Oreo jumbo pack, and a new home entertainment system complete with subwoofers.
The Non Shopper Dad got in line behind me, and, seeing that his son was seven seconds and counting to complete meltdown, I let him pass ahead.
Ten minutes later, I caught up with my husband and son at the slide thing, and found my husband talking to the Non Shopper Dad (our son was nowhere in sight. My husband may have shopping down to a science, but the concept of child snatching is still quite hazy.). Lo and behold, Non Shopper Dad was a cousin!
Now, in a large city the subsequent conversation would have been liberally peppered with phrases like "... incredible coincidence!", "...small world!" and "...can’t believe!".
But this is small town Umbria, and I have been here for long enough to know to keep my exuberance to myself. Non Shopper Dad sagely nodded. I nodded back. Cousins.
You see, everyone here knows each other. And everyone expects to know everyone. There are no six (or is it seven?...I can never remember) degrees of separation. Really pushing it, there may be two. So no one really raises an eyebrow to come across relatives half an hour from home, or even three countries from home.
I remember when we were in Paris about five years ago, and walking down the Champs-Elysées my husband suddenly lifted his hand and casually waved to a guy on the other side of the block. "Who was that?" I said. We didn’t know anyone in Paris. If we had, we would have been mooching a bed off of them, rather that paying way too much money in the hole of a hotel that we were staying in. "Oh, just a cousin. You’ve never met him," he replied offhandedly. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the chances of us running into a cousin in Paris was roughly the same as hitting it big in the lottery. You can hardly spit in Umbria without hitting some blood relation on the shoe.
There are, of course, positive aspects to this vast network of friends (or even just nodding acquaintances) and family.
A few years ago, my father-in-law was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. He underwent surgery and ended up being in the hospital for a month due to a series of irritating, though non-life threatening, complications. For example, he developed a case of hiccups which lasted 10 days. And not those delicate ladies-who-lunch hiccups, either, but those huge, spasmodic, body wracking hiccups that make the bed jump every few seconds. Funny, right? Hilarious.
Well, we thought so too for about the first three hours. Then we realized that spasmodic, body-wracking hiccups render quite a few essential activities almost impossible. Eating, for example. Drinking. Speaking. Sleeping, or getting any sort of rest. My father-in-law took the news of his cancer with aplomb. He awaited his impending surgery with acceptance. But after five days of hiccupping, he was sobbing in desperation.
But back to the story. As I said, he ended up being hospitalized for a month. I was at the hospital every day from 7:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., and I can tell you that there was never one solitary minute during those 30 days that my father-in-law did not have at least one visitor, if not three. Playing cards. Talking crops and weather. Bringing fruit (which he couldn’t eat) and chocolates (which I did). At least two hundred people must have filed through that room in that month, and at least that many over the next six weeks of his convalescence at home.
Not only that, but we had a constant parade of neighbors come through to help with the chores on the farm while he was laid up. And with the funniest excuses, too. Once I came out to find Quartino from next door sawing firewood. I said, "Gosh, Quartino, that’s really nice of you!" and he mumbled something about having this new blade on the chainsaw and having to break it in and not having enough wood lying around at home to do the job right, which was the biggest bunch of BS I’ve ever heard. We also had people mill feed for us because they "just happened to be passing by (with their tractor and mill hitched) and thought they’d enjoy this nice weather (rainy mid-December) to be outside and mill for a couple of hours" and show up at midnight because they saw the light on from down the road and thought they’d stop by for a visit (in their calving boots, because the light was on in the barn and that can only mean one thing at midnight). These were kindnesses offered casually and received matter-of-factly (though not without many thanks), because this sort of thing is still commonplace in our corner of rural Umbria.
However, it is not all wine and roses. Tight knit communities, I have discovered, are also breeding grounds for gossip, grudges, and cliques that last generations. The complete lack of anonymity means you can’t pick your nose in your car, be rude to the lady at the dry cleaners, or run out for a quart of milk in your bedroom slippers without it coming back to you sooner or later (usually with baroque embellishments).
There is also a very definite line separating those "from around here" and those "not" (i.e. originating from two hours south of here, or half a world away) and it is difficult if not impossible to form real friendships with the locals if you are, well, not. In fact, most of my close girlfriends here in Umbria are not Umbrian. Some are ex-pats, but most are Italians who have moved here from other parts of Italy — Sicily, Le Marche, Rome. It is reassuring to hear them complain at times about the insularity of the Umbrian social scene; I thought for a long time that it was just because I was foreign. It’s nice to know that my friend Nadia from Rome and Luana from Sicily are no less fish out of water than I am.
But more than good or bad, this knowing of everyone just produces quirky behavior. So many times I have had people say to me, "Hey, I passed you in my car this morning and waved, but you didn’t notice." It took me awhile to realize that I don’t routinely look at other drivers when I am out in my car. I just don’t have that habit, because having grown up in a metropolitan area of 10 million people, I don’t expect to recognize the folks stopped in the lane next to me at the red light. Here, not only will you often know them, you’ll roll down your window and halt traffic for the next ten minutes while catching up.
It took my husband years before he stopped automatically turning around every time he heard a car honk within a three block radius in downtown Chicago. When you grow up in a small town, a car beeping behind you means that someone is saying hello, so you better stop and wave. I finally convinced him that the probability of it being Zio Franco and not someone pissed off at the folks in the Saturn with the Wisconsin plates who don’t gun it as soon as the light changes were pretty slim. (This was before the Paris incident.)
People in small towns look at each other. They notice other drivers, they people watch with purpose, they examine every new passenger on the bus with an intensity that took me years to get used to. They spend a good amount of time greeting each other, catching up, gossiping or kvetching, depending upon their age and gender. When you’re in a rush it can drive you nuts, but I think that it has forced me to slow down a little, participate in society, be a little more human. It has definitely forced me to stop wearing my bedroom slippers to the grocery store.
And this is what it all boils down to. The sport of story telling, the speed with which news spreads, and the general interest in it. The vast, convoluted ties of blood and history and the importance of knowing who you are and how you fit in, and who everyone else is and how they fit in as well. Small town life is, well, life. A slower life, a life on a more contained scale where every single person constitutes an indispensable part of the whole. It may not be for everyone, but I have discovered ... to my shock and surprise, I may add ... that it’s for me.
]]>I can’t think of a more appropriate hobby for a vegetarian who sometimes reels at the smell of cooking meat than one which, as Step One, lists, "Render suet into tallow." This is a missish way of saying, "Boil a big vat of beef fat on your stove for so long that your home reeks like a turn of the century British tannery and the stench of it has even the dog retching and the neighbors, who live three kilometers away and raise hogs, sniffing the air and wondering if someone has been burning garbage in the woods again."
(Before I start getting indignant emails, let me clarify that I know that one can make vegetarian soap. I tried it once and it was a big pain in the butt and didn’t come out right, either. Now, there are those who live by "If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again" rule, but I personally live by the "If it doesn’t work out the first time, it obviously wasn’t meant to be so cut your losses and move on" rule. Plus, I’m just not that dogmatic about vegetarianism. I eat eggs, which many shun for obvious reasons, and cheese, which others shun for reasons I’ve never fully understood but have something to do with the lining of a sheep’s stomach. I got completely addicted to this fabulous savory cheese bread they make here in Umbria around Easter before discovering that a loaf contains roughly half a pig’s worth of lard. I figure if there’s a vegetarian purgatory, well folks, I will just have to do my time.)
Step two involves mixing the rendered tallow with lye, and as we all know, no household with a toddler should be without soluble caustic soda flakes lying around.
This isn’t the only hobby I have. I even briefly flirted with knitting when I found out I was pregnant with my son, because all pregnant ladies knit, right? (Sadly, this was just the first of a long list of tragic myths I debunked over the subsequent nine months. I also never glowed, got great nails, or big boobs. I try not to be bitter.) But there were two problems with knitting:
1) Knitting is boring as hell. Or at least it is at the beginner stage where I plateaued.
2) Knitting turns my husband on. It’s the truth. He would walk into the living room, find me on the couch cussing and tearing out stitches, and come over, sit real close, say, "So, whatcha doin’?" in that voice, and start blowing in my ears and stuff. I married a sicko.
But, since Knitting is Boring as Hell (see above), he was usually able to sidetrack me without too much of a struggle and so my two and a half year old son’s baby blanket is still roughly 12 cm by 12 cm and sitting in a Intimissimi bag on my closet floor. With the knitting needles stuck in it.
Anyway, I was making up a batch of soap the other night with my husband in the kitchen keeping me company and we started chatting about hobbies. Actually, I had started reminiscing about listening to Larry Lujak’s Animal Stories on WLS every morning from grades 1-8 and I just couldn’t stop laughing thinking about it, and as I am hanging onto the counter and wiping the tears from my eyes I look over and see my husband staring at me like I’ve just lost my mind. These are the times when I think that maybe I should have just married a guy from the Midwest.
It’s not always like this, however. I remember once I was telling him how hellish it was to be named Rebecca during the 70’s when everyone else was named something infinitely cooler like Amy or Julie, and he asked me what I would have preferred and I said, "Mindy." I started to launch into this explanation of Mork and Mindy and the utter hipness of Mindy with those two little pigtails she would wear in the front of her hair instead of barrettes, when my husband stood up, opened his fingers to a V, and intoned, "Nah-Noo, Nah-Noo." Apparently that sitcom made it over the Atlantic. (My second choice of a name was Blaire, having been a big Facts of Life fan.) I also remember once tying myself in knots trying to explain what a go-cart was, when he interrupted me to say, "Vuoi dire un go-cart?" all deadpan. Right. Un go-cart.
So we changed the subject and started talking about hobbies and I came to the conclusion that I know a disproportionate number of people in Italy who collect things. Not to say no one in the US is a collector (go to Ebay and type in Elvis ashtray, just for kicks), I just never met one. No one in my family really collects anything. My dad went through a brief phase of collecting toll booth gates, but that was more a side effect of the lack of sufficient eye-hand-foot gross motor control to pull off a Toll Booth Roll which results from simultaneously driving, listening to sports’ radio, eating corn nuts, and reading the Trib. That little hobby came to a bit of an abrupt halt right around the time we got the visit at home from the State Troopers, as I recall.
I can’t think of a single friend in the States who collects things. Now that I said this I’m going to get twenty phone calls tomorrow from childhood friends reminding me of those two hundred plus Pez dispensers they have, but right now going through my Christmas Card list, I can’t think of one.
We have lots of friends here in Italy who collect things. In fact, almost everyone I know has some sort of collection going. Pens. Crystal figurines. Dolls. Coins. My own husband hasn’t thrown out a piece of paper since 1982. (I’m not sure if that counts.) It seems strange, given that Italian homes are usually quite a bit smaller than those in the US. It would seem logical that there would be less collecting going on here, where there is no place to put all those ceramic clowns. On the other hand, Italians are much less mobile than Americans. Most Italians I know make only one move in their life: from their parents’ to their own home when they marry. There is no concept of the "starter home" here. You buy a house (or, I should say, an apartment), furnish it down to the last throw pillow, and that is where you live out the rest of your days with very little renovation. You can pinpoint the year that most Umbrians have married based on the style of their living room coffee table.
On the other hand, there is nothing that culls personal possessions like repeated moves. From home to that college apartment, then to your first real pad, then a starter home or two, then your dream home, then back to the starter home when the dot.com crash comes, then assisted living. All those moves really make you reassess if having that extensive Victorian teapot collection is really all it’s cracked up to be. I don’t have a single item of clothing that dates to before 1992. Nothing forces you take a more realistic look at the probability of ever fitting into those jeans from junior year of high school again than the prospect of shipping them overseas.
So I suspect that the popularity of collecting here in Italy is closely tied to the improbability of ever having to pack the collection into a U-haul truck. But that’s just a stab in the dark.
Back to the collections themselves. One of my favorite pastimes is stopping in at the newsstand to see what the public is collecting at any given moment. In Italy, many collections are linked to a monthly periodical. Each month you pick up your item to add to the collection along with an explanatory booklet. These subscription collections are often advertised on TV, so you see the commercial and you know to stop by the newsstand and reserve your copy of whatever it is that interests you.
Most of these collections are predictable. Porcelain birds and model airplanes and mini-perfume bottles and the like. But some of them are incredibly, um, odd. Some of my favorites:
Taxicabs from Around the World
You get a little Hot Wheels version of an Ethiopian or Dutch Cab plus a short pamphlet explaining the origins and history. If you collect them all, you can get the display case. A strong contender for top rating in the "What the ?!?" category.
Great Works of Literature in Miniature
Yes, you read right. The books are about the size of a postage stamp. My favorite part of this was the commercial, which depicted a smiling woman curled up on her sofa in front of a roaring fire, sipping a cup of tea and reading Madame Bovary from a book held between the tips of her thumb and forefinger. And she wasn’t even squinting. This also comes with a little mini glass-fronted bookcase and an electron microscope.
Fashion Purses
Can’t afford the Fendi baguette, the $5,000 Hermes Birkin tote that Martha showed up to court carrying, or those really ugly florescent Vuitton bags from that Japanese designer? Well, with this collection you get "certified authentic" copies so you can sashay down the Corso swinging them off your....pinkie. Yes, because they’re only a couple of centimeters by a couple of centimeters. At least your Barbie can be seen in Milan without hanging her head in shame.
Make your own...
There are various versions of this, but they all involve constructing a model 17th century whaling ship and/or Boeing airplane and/or WWII tank using the parts included with each monthly issue of the collection. What they don’t tell you is that it takes roughly seven years to amass all the various pieces to complete the project. My husband once asked me to stop in and see if our newsstand sold the collection he had just seen on TV which was the complete kit to construct a working, remote controlled model motorcycle. So I did. And Issue Number One of the working, remote control model motorcycle kit was: one metal spring, one screw, and one rubber tire. And the 300 page printed instructions. Few people aside from the Great Renaissance Masters have the stamina to dedicate themselves to a single project for the better part of a decade. My husband certainly doesn’t.
Reconstruct Pompeii
Another funny commercial. This is a series with which you collect elements to build a model of the ancient city of Pompeii. The ad on TV shows a sweet docile couple working together with little miniature bricks and trowel to build the Villa of the Vettii. Please. My husband and I can’t even assemble a set of bookshelves without ending up wanting to throttle each other, let alone construct an entire Roman city with miniature tools. I think this kit must have been grounds for divorce for at least a handful of Italian spouses.
Learn a skill...
This is another theme with numerous variations. Two series that we briefly flirted with were the Learn about Wine series and the Learn about Restoring Furniture series. This has the same Achilles heel as the Make Your Own category... it takes you forever to amass any amount of useful information. In much less time (and for less money) we took a wine course and bought the hefty illustrated tome entitled "The Complete Guide to Restoring Furniture".
What’s the fun of that?
This is a series of collections for things like replica antique watches, replica period tins, replica Murano masterpieces, replica Scottish pipes, etc. Now, isn’t the point of collecting things like antique watches and tins the thrill of the hunt and joy of discovery while combing through flea markets and antique shows? And the reason one collects Murano glass or Scottish pipes the excuse to repeatedly visit Venice and Scotland? I mean, if all you have to do is walk down the street to the newsstand, what’s the point?
These newsstand collections and kits are wildly popular here, so there must be something to it. Every once in awhile I almost get reeled in myself ("Hey, look at that! A complete collection of miniature hand painted lead Roman soldiers! I’ll be darned."), then my thoughts turn to the hours of dusting involved, and the whole thing loses a bit of romance.
It must be said, however, that unless you manage to throw yourself in front of a speeding bus when crossing the street on your way to pick up your latest issue, collecting model Roman soldiers is very unlikely to cause you any physical harm, whereas I managed to splash lye into my eye making my latest batch of soap. It hurt like the dickens and gave the phrase "keep your eye peeled" a whole new dimension. There are those who are attracted to the safe yet predictable pastimes, and those who revel in the sense of jeopardy and danger. (And then there are those, like me, who are just a menace to society and could probably manage to injure themselves cross stitching.)
It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.
]]>Umbrian women have made their own beds.
Imagine this: It’s our wedding day and my soon-to-be husband pulls me aside before the service and says,
"Okay, honey. This is how it’s going to be from now on. I’m going to take care of all the housework, including cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundry, ironing, mending, and basic yard work. I will also raise our children, manage all relations with your family, keep track of and organize the celebration of everyone’s birthdays (including my own), make sure everyone gets regular medical and dental checkups (including you), coordinate our social life, plan our vacations, and spearhead our religious participation.
While doing this, I will also work full time, so that you can afford to have that expensive car, watch, and week skiing that your friends all have.
And I will keep myself slim and attractive. If I happen to slip on the slim and attractive thing because I am working myself to the bone and your mother is making me age prematurely and all that time in the kitchen cooking just naturally leads to a bit of weight, or if you just get bored with me because with all the parent-teacher conferences and ironing I don’t really keep up with current events and have abandoned all outside interests and hobbies, I will turn a blind eye to your justifiable philandering.
I will do all this with a brave, cheerful face and only lament jokingly about the intrinsic unfairness of this situation at dinner parties amongst the other husbands, as we all roll our eyes in affectionate and resigned acceptance."
You folks think I wouldn’t have signed on? Heck, I’d have him in a half-nelson and be dragging him down the aisle bellowing, "Where’s that priest?!? Someone get me the priest, STAT!" and make sure the whole thing was signed and notarized before he could come to his senses. Who wouldn’t?
As it was, we had quite a different conversation about a week after moving in together, during which I carefully explained to my husband who Archie Bunker was, and why I had absolutely no interest in living with him.
Clearly I am exaggerating for comic effect, but in my experience, at least here in provincial Umbria where traditional gender roles are still very predominant, this is the tacit agreement between the vast majority of married couples. I want to be clear that not all Umbrians (and certainly not all Italians) live so traditional a lifestyle. I have quite a few friends here who share more or less equally the weight of domestic and family obligations (though the vast majority of them are couples with women who are either ex-pats or Italian but not from Umbria.).
I also want to be clear that I am by no means being disrespectful towards the women who do assume a very traditional role. On the contrary, I admire their energy. Especially because so many I know are able to do everything listed above, and still be dynamic, fascinating people with interesting hobbies and passions.
But the point I’m trying to make is that much is said about the Italian Man, but in my opinion it is just as much the behavior of the Italian Woman, in its passivity, which dictates the culture of gender relations. It is the women who seem very complacent about their assigned duties. Sure, most bitch and moan, but very few make real demands on their husbands to pitch in. On the contrary, there seems to be a bit of culture of "earning your stripes" in complaining about who has the most good for nothing cohort who couldn’t boil an egg if his life depended upon it.
I have found it surprising what an Italian man is able to do if given no choice in the matter. Especially if you commence with the yelling, banging things around, and wearing really unsexy things to bed. They start sitting up like little Pavlovian pups after just a bit of behavioral therapy.
Now, I will admit that my husband was never a big Mammone. Sure, at the age of 27 he had never done a load of laundry, but once he and the washing machine sat down and really got to know each other, they seemed to hit it off just fine. We set out the ground rules early (i.e.: You work and I work, so we both share the running of the household) and things have gone pretty smoothly over the subsequent decade. Okay, his filth threshold is higher than mine. He has been known to, when faced with the insurmountable task of ironing a dress shirt, just go buy a new one. But on the whole he has grown into his new millennium husband and father role with aplomb.
This is a source of endless amazement amongst my Umbrian girlfriends. They are forever listening with mouths agape when I tell them how I have gone out of town for the weekend and left my husband alone with our toddler son, and come home to find them both well fed and the house...well, okay. They were well fed, at least.
"Oh, my husband would never [fill in the blank]," they invariably reply. Clean. Cook. Dress our child. But when you really get to talking about it, it almost always turns out that they’ve never actually asked him to. They either assume he won’t, or, a response I especially love, like to have things done their own way and don’t want their husband to interfere. (Well, then don’t whine about how he never does anything around the house, lady.) Like I said before, you’d be surprised what a husband will do under duress.
I remember when our son was about two weeks old, and my husband had still managed to never change a diaper. So, one evening I grabbed the car keys and said over my shoulder, "We’re out of milk and I need a break. I’ll be back in a little while. And the baby needs changing." And I booked outta there like my butt was on fire.
Now, if Baby Poop Footage was used as a rating benchmark like Full Frontal Nudity and Strong Language, my house would have been XXX rated when I got home. My husband had gone through at least four trial runs and three outfits. The changing table was covered. The wall was smeared. His shirt had to be burned out back.
But, miracle of miracles, he had changed the baby. A fact he managed to bring up at least every twelve minutes over the next few days. To his colleagues at work, "You know, I was thinking over those numbers again the other night while changing my baby’s diaper..." To his mother, "Woo, hoo. Thank God we use the disposable now, Mom. I woulda really had my hands full the other night with cloth!" To the gas station attendant, "Man, smell those fumes! Of course it’s nothing like when I was changing the baby..." I finally had to break it to him that the Nobel Committee would probably not be contacting him. Millions of people successfully change millions of babies every day on this planet. But I made it clear that it was not My Job, and with a little prodding he took up the slack.
"Sure," my girlfriends say. "But your husband is different. You have no idea what a Mamma’s Boy I married!"
No man is too far gone. Let me tell you the story of two good friends of ours. I’ll call them Mary and Gianni. Gianni was a Mamma’s Boy. Big. Big Mamma’s Boy. Around the time Mary and Gianni first met (and were still just friends), Gianni’s parents went out of town for a few days so he invited over a group of people for an informal dinner party. (This is one difference between Italy and the States. In the US, when your parents go out of town you invite over your entire high school to get drunk and trash the place. In Italy, when your parents go out of town you invite over your closest companions to take advantage of the opportunity to cook a meal together. In the US, it’s great to drink without your father breathing down your neck, and in Italy it’s great to cook without your mother doing the same.) He asked Mary to grab something out of the freezer, and when she opened it she saw dozens of those little plastic margarine tubs in there. "What are those?" she asked. It turns out Gianni’s mother had made coffee (two espressos for every day she was to be gone) and had frozen them, so all he had to do was warm them up for himself. "Cripes," thought Mary. "Who is ever going to marry this guy?"
Well, life is a trickster. Mary ended up marrying him. And about five days into living together, Gianni came to her clearly upset. "Someone has stolen my underwear," he said. "Huh?" she replied. He took her to the bedroom, where his drawer was open. "Look," he said. "There are only two pairs in there. There should be seven." Well, to make a long story short, for his entire life Gianni had undressed at night, left his dirty clothes on the floor at the foot of his bed, dressed and left the next morning, and during his absence his mother would wash, dry, and iron his clothing and have it put away by the time he got home in the evening. He’d never before had a pair of underwear missing from his drawer.
Mary patiently explained the use of a laundry hamper, and that God created Saturdays so that we could all do our week’s laundry.
So we’re talking about a person pretty far gone, here.
After more than ten years of marriage, Gianni is almost unrecognizable. He does not cook, he lovingly crafts pasta by hand. He does not clean, he remops after Mary has just finished, because "she doesn’t do it right." Once Gianni was on total bed rest after having a hernia operation. Mary came upon him lying prone on the couch, and gripping the back of the it in pain with one hand. With the other he was running the vacuum cleaner over the section of the living room rug he could reach.
Of course there are those few subjects who truly are unreachable. But my thoughts on them are, "Hey, don’t marry ‘em." If no one marries them, they won’t reproduce. And in just a few brief generations of genetic selection, we can weed out those bad apples forever.
Not only do many Umbrian women tacitly accept the traditional role that provincial society projects onto them, they also create work for themselves.
Umbrians are generally very "house proud", as they say in the UK. Umbrian women keep their homes spotless. I don’t think I have ever, ever seen a home here with dirty dishes in the sink, or dog hair on the sofa. It is customary to immediately excuse your messy house when you have guests arrive.
Now, when an Umbrian women says, "Oh, please don’t mind the mess!" it is your cue to launch into (well-earned and sincere) compliments about what a pristine home she keeps. When I say to people, "Hey, sorry about the mess!" what I really mean is "Don’t worry about that sticky stuff on the floor, it’s just OJ from last week. Let me clean the last four weeks of laundry off the kitchen table and try to locate a clean mug, so I can offer you a cup of coffee. Oh, and avoid sitting on the couch, unless you like the look of red play dough ground into the butt of your slacks."
But it can also get out of hand. I know of quite a few women here who routinely iron eight hours a week. I think if I summed up all the time I have spent ironing over the past 32 years, I might clear five hours. (Though I freely admit that I am no ironer. When the war in Iraq first broke out, and the Consulate took it upon themselves to send me information regarding a possible evacuation of American citizens from Italy - because Lord knows I would be much safer in Chicago, the third largest metropolitan area in the US, than rural Umbria - they of course told me I should "have my affairs in order". "Well," said my husband, "I certainly hope they don’t mean catch up on your ironing, or you’ll never make it on the last copter out of Saigon, my friend.") However, if you iron things like a) bath towels; b) bed linens; c) socks, your time at the ironing board can grow exponentially. I also know quite a few women who mop every day, for example. My own mother-in-law scrubs her garage floor with a bleach solution once a week.
Yes, cleanliness is certainly a virtue, but it can also border on obsession. There is a telling commercial on TV, where the scene opens on a mom reading a bedtime story to her little girl. Halfway through the tale, inspired by talk of magic brooms, the woman hops out of bed to grab a mop and dust under the furniture as the girl continues to read to herself and then drops off to sleep. It makes me nuts. I want to crawl into the TV and shake that lady and tell her to drop the frigging mop and cuddle with her daughter while she still can. Dust doesn’t leave home forever at eighteen. But, of course, neither do Italian kids.
Again, I have committed the terrible sin of blaming the women who often suffer under the weight of their traditional roles, but to these women I say, "Hey, light a fire under the old man’s butt. If he can drive a car, he can run the Hoover. And skip ironing his undershirts. Grab a good book and a glass of wine, instead. I’ve done it for the past ten years, and no one’s reported me yet."
Actually, I don’t really need to say it here. I’ve been telling my girlfriends this for years. They look at me with that patient, bemused expression you use with the benignly mentally ill.
In my next life, I want to marry an Umbrian woman.
]]>I got a letter from the United States Ambassador to Italy the other day.
Now I know that what I am about to reveal may cause shock and consternation amongst my readers, but the sad truth is, despite my carefully cultivated image of jet-set refinement, cutting edge culture, and general Glamour Queenliness, I rarely get personal mail from Popes, monarchs, presidents or even diplomats. So it was not without a slight frisson of excitement and trembling hand that I opened my embossed envelope. (After a quick reality check. This can’t have anything to do with my taxes, right? No. Okay.)
Inside I discovered an invitation to a cocktail reception at Villa Taverna, the US Ambassador's residence in Rome. My initial reaction was one I assume most people would share in similar circumstances, "My God," I thought, "How did they know my address? The CIA must have a file on me." Upon closer examination of my invitation I found that the reception was being held in honor of the president of the university I attended as an undergraduate. The realization slowly dawned that I had been tracked down by force far more insidious, omniscient, nefarious even, than Central Intelligence. Alumni Fundraising.
But heck, invites including a long, detailed explanation of how to pass the security check in your chauffeur driven car don’t come along every day. Strangely, no instructions on how to get to the place by city bus, which had been my plan until my train to Rome got there so late that I had to break down and grab a cab. When I told the driver my address, he went about ten meters before slamming on the brakes and turning to face me. "That can’t be right, lady," he said. I asked him why, and he told me that I had recited the address of Villa Taverna. "Exactly," I said. "Well, that’s the US Ambassador's residence!" I told him I was an invited guest, at which point he gave me a long up and down and kind of grimaced. In that split second I was reminded of one of the great truths of Italy. Even displaced elderly Sicilian cabbies in Rome who pick you up in the pitch black outside the Termini train station know when you are underdressed for State functions. Unfortunately, I also told him that I was running extremely late, which meant that he managed to gun it across the city in a manner which had me making a mental note to check on my life insurance policy benefits when I got home (and I am no pansy driver myself) while never taking his eyes off me in his rearview mirror. I was apparently the closest thing he had had to a VIP fare in the past twenty years.
To make a long story short, I decided to attend (to much eye rolling on the part of my husband - he was just jealous because his name wasn’t on the invitation). The hook was not meeting the current university president, who wasn’t even at the university when I was there. Had he been, I quite seriously doubt I would have been invited to honor him in Rome, as the few times I ever met his predecessor it was usually while doing things like chaining myself to his office door in an attempt (vain, as it turned out) to persuade the university to divest from South Africa. You know, symbolic gestures which tend to keep you off subsequent cocktail party guest lists for quite awhile. The hook was not even the Ambassador who, as a personal friend of Bushes (father and son), prominent Republican Party activist, and shopping center real estate development magnate, effectively embodies all I abhor. The real hook was the chance to glimpse into Villa Taverna, a beautiful historic residence once owned by the Catholic Church surrounded by the largest private park (something like four hectares) in Rome, a swimming pool built for JFK’s visit in the 60’s, a movie theatre donated by the American Picture Academy, and lots and lots of security people.
It was lovely. The residence is beautiful, the gardens are enormous (though it was quite dark, so I didn’t get to see much of them), the butlers have the US seal engraved on the buttons of their jackets. It was also strange. It has been a long time since I have been to an all-American social function (the SlowTrav GTG this summer doesn’t count, because no one inspected my person for weapons) and I forgot how gosh-darn friendly most Americans are.
Not that Umbrians are not friendly folks. They are largely kind, good hearted people. They are also extremely reserved and reticent at first meeting. A roomful of Umbrians in a social setting will spend the entire evening speaking to their spouses, or, in a pinch, people they have known since grade school. I don’t think that in ten years in Umbria I have ever had an Umbrian walk up to me and introduce himself cold. The few times I have done so have been near disasters. Remember when Michelle Pfieffer crosses the room to talk to Daniel Day-Lewis in Age of Innocence and the scandal it caused? Well, it’s kind of like that. Luckily, as a foreigner I am excused myriad quirks, like actually showing up to pick up my photos after thirty minutes at the half-hour photo developing place.
I often dog my husband about this in the car driving home from yet another party where I spend the evening talking to him, his friends from the third grade, and their wives. "Why, why?" I wail. "Why does no one want to meet anyone new here? Why don’t you want to make friends?" He looks at me quizzically and invariably answers, "Well, because I already have friends. I don’t need any more." Dynamic guy.
On the other hand, get a roomful of American strangers together for an evening, and the shaky common ground of a shared alma mater becomes the instant foundations of lightning fast hand-pumping, name memorization, and business card exchanging all round. It was almost too much for me. I must have introduced myself to a hundred people in the space of an hour. It was kind of funny, really. Each guest, to a person, held out their hand and regretfully admitted that their Italian was not that good. To which I replied that neither is mine; I am American. "Oh, but you look so Italian!" they all said. Now, I can hardly show my face in an Italian shop without the proprietor immediately excusing his English or, even more often, addressing me in passable German. No Italian mistakes me for a countrywoman.
Americans can also be disarmingly informal. In Italy, you generally know who the important people are, even if you don’t know who they are. There is a certain aura of power which surrounds them, even if their origins are as humble as, well, Berlusconi’s. And the Umbrians, especially in the area where I live around Assisi and Perugia, are extremely formally mannered people. I have know people for years here socially, and we still give each other the Lei, which is a formal, third person address. I have girlfriends who give their mother-in-laws the Lei. That is equivalent to the Victorian practice of spouses calling each other Mr. and Mrs. Smith in bed.
Imagine my surprise to find that the man who had grabbed my hand, shook it hard, introduced himself as "Mel Sembler" and quickly segued into a long discourse on the merits of Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign work, turned out to be the Ambassador. To be honest, I was kind of disappointed in our diplomatic representative to Italy. I had envisioned a Kofi Annan sort of figure, and instead found a man who, as a response to my question regarding his diplomatic career before Italy, proudly boomed, "Hey, I’m no diplomat! I’m a businessman!" Oh, dear.
I also discovered that I was making small talk with the current university president only after my answer to his question, "Did you enjoy your years as an undergraduate at the university?" (I replied that my memories of those years had grown especially fond once I had paid off my student loans) was greeted with an uncomfortable pause. Until the president’s wife came to my rescue with her raucous barking laugh, grabbed my elbow, and gave me a little squeeze, which signaled to the rest of the group that a little bit of edgy sarcasm was acceptable. Bless her.
I was then saved again by the ambassador's wife, who broke the long embarrassed silence which followed her husband inquiring as to what I do (apparently running a service sector business rather than paving over acres of perfectly good farm and wood land, over lighting it so much that it can be seen from space, and plonking down a Discount Warehouse which runs the local small business owners into the ground by illegally employing desperate immigrant workers who mop for five bucks a day under the table is not something one admits to while sipping sparkling water at the Ambassador's residence) by asking me a series of sincere questions regarding my business, feigning real interest in the answers, and finishing the conversation by asking for a business card. Right. Like the Ambassador and his wife are going to bed down on the farm the next time they come through town with their security entourage. But I appreciated the effort. Now she, my friends, was a real diplomat.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, I didn’t have any cards with me because, in anticipation of a security inspection on my purse, I had done a last minute switch to the only bag I own which did not smell of peanut butter crackers and contain a small fleet of Hot Wheels, two sippy cups, emergency wipes, and the latest in Teletubby literature. It also did not contain any business cards.
As soon as the speeches started, I slowly backed my way out of the room and started opening random doors on the first floor. I didn’t have the balls to go upstairs. I figured someone was bound to be watching on a security camera somewhere and would get around to arresting me sooner or later. I discovered a series of lovely rooms downstairs, full of donated art (some of it atrocious, to be honest) and valuable antiques. The only time the building has been vacated by the Americans since the early thirties when it was bought by the US government was during the second world war. The withdrawing Americans entrusted the estate to the Knights of Malta, who converted it to a hospital for the duration of the war, and painted a large red cross on the roof to deter bombing by Allied and Axis forces. The US reclaimed it after the war in perfect condition.
There was also a large collection of Republican knick-knacks about (framed letters signed by Reagan, for example) which got me thinking. There must be two storage rooms somewhere on the compound, one which contains the Republican relics and one the Democratic. That way when the administration switches over, the Reagan correspondence gets boxed up and the snapshots of Carter trotted out. It’s just kind of amusing, when you consider it.
I stumbled upon the dining room at a certain point, set for about twenty who were apparently staying to dinner. My husband had expressed surprise at an invitation to a cocktail party at the strange hour of 6:30 to 8:00. I told him that it wasn’t that the party ended at eight, it was that I wasn’t important enough to be asked to stick around to eat.
The thought crossed my mind that if I were Nikita, I would have a vial of poison hidden in the heel of my boot and would summarily dispose of quite a few members of the higher diplomatic corps in one fell swoop. As it were, I took a quick gander at the menu and china (with US seal, what else?) before being politely directed to the ladies room by a mirrored sunglasses clad gentleman who appeared out of nowhere.
All in all, an experience that I will certainly bore my great grandchildren with its recounting 60 years from now. As I got back on the train home (at 8:10, at the exact moment that the real VIPs were sitting down to smoked duck breast antipasto), I did the unimaginable. I called my husband on my cell phone, and quickly brought all movement in the rows of seats surrounding me to a standstill by loudly beginning to recount my evening at the US Ambassador's residence.
Tragically, my glory was short-lived, as my husband cut me off laughing, "Quit bragging to the rest of the people on the train, you loser. You can tell me when you get home." And then he hung up on me.
The man apparently doesn’t know that I am now a personal friend of Mel Sembler’s.
]]>I broke my candy thermometer, which I need to make soap (it’s a long story), so I’ve been looking around for a new one. This is one of those strange kitchen implements that I can’t seem to find in the house wares section of the Coop (apparently Italians don’t make a lot of Divinity), so I decided to take a look in Genevieve Lethu. To those of you who don’t know, Genevieve Lethu is an upscale kitchen store kind of like Williams Sonoma, where I usually don’t buy anything, but rather wander around and dream of the day that I live a life glamorous enough to necessitate such accoutrements as silver grape scissors. However, they do have lots of gourmet cooking supplies, so I stopped in.
I found a saleslady, impossibly thin and with perfect skin like so many of the women in retail in Italy (which made me think to myself, "Why is this woman working in a gourmet store, since she apparently doesn’t eat?") and asked her if they carried candy thermometers. She went to go get me one, and when she came back and handed it to me I took a look and noticed that it had a tag which read 40.80 on it. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but if my memory is accurate I picked up my last candy thermometer at Target in the States for a buck ninety-nine. We’re not talking about nanotechnology here. We are talking about a tool commonly used to make popcorn balls.
"That isn’t the price, right?" I asked the woman incredulously. She looked at me and smirked, having already pegged me as the kind of person who does not spend roughly the GNP of a small African nation on pastry blenders and crepe pans, and indicated that Genevieve Lethu, God bless her whoever she is, did indeed intend to charge me over 40 Euro for a candy thermometer.
I still couldn’t believe it, so I said, "Are you sure there’s not some mistake? I mean, this is something I can get in the US for under two dollars." At which point she snatched it out of my hand and snapped, "Well, why don’t you go buy it in the US, then?"
So I used some of my kickboxing moves on her and folded her up like a piece of lawn furniture.
No, I didn’t. But I was sorely, sorely tempted. Only the presence of my son stopped me, since I have been trying very hard as of late to curtail those behaviors which could possibly serve as material for the "Things My Mother Did Which Psychologically Scarred Me So Profoundly That I Am Now A Mass Murderer/Founder Of A Satanic Cult" tell-all book that I suspect he will be writing 30 years from now.
As I was driving home, I got to thinking about how so many Italians I meet have such a strong reaction to any mention of the US or anything American. (That is, after I snapped out of a twenty minute trance during which I replayed my fantasy version of How This Scene Would Have Gone in Rebecca’s Perfect World, which culminated in me unveiling my true identity as the CEO of Genevieve Lethu and firing that cow on the spot, despite her tearfully pathetic groveling, and how she subsequently became obsessed with candy thermometers and candy, thus becoming fat and zitty, and was eventually institutionalized. No, I don’t have an anger management problem.)
I’ve noticed this phenomenon often when I go out with one of my closest friends here in Umbria, who is a transplanted Australian. We chat between ourselves in English (or in what Barbara claims is English as spoken Down Under - it has taken me ten years to realize that when she’s pissed, she means she’s had one too many, not that she has her draws in an uproar) and are sometimes interrupted by Italians who ask where we are from. My friend responds, "Australia," for which she gets a friendly nod and sometimes an inane comment about kangaroos. I say, "The US," and spend the next half an hour in conversation about the current president, Wall Street, and if jeans really are cheaper there.
These exchanges almost inevitably end with the phrase, "Well, this isn’t the US, you know," which can have two completely different meanings depending upon the tone with which it is said. It can either be the belligerent, "you people think you’re better than the rest of us" tone, or the wistful "we are just backwards folk here in Italy and you have to accept it and shrug" tone. It is never, ever a neutral tone.
I’ve found I have to be careful making comparisons between the two countries, or even just random comments about life either here or there, because unfortunately they are most often interpreted as a critique of the Italian Way. Usually I am simply making an innocuous passing observation based on the only experience I have had, which is growing up in another country which happened to be the US but could have just as easily been Bolivia, but even what I intend as neutral comments seem to bring out the national Italian inferiority complex. The sometimes defensive responses inevitably push me to take the side of the US, which I find an uncomfortable position to be in. Though I love many things about America and would never deny my nationality, I am not what you’d call a girl with a star spangled heart. Don’t even get me started on George "there is no French word for entrepreneur" Bush.
And when I’m not defending the US to Italians, I’m defending Italy to Italians. So many seem to just assume that things are better in the States and that I have made a huge sacrifice by relocating. Now, there are certainly some things I miss about the US and wouldn’t mind if they were adopted here (24 hour dry cleaners, for example - or even just one that could manage a turn around in less than four days), but quite frankly if I thought everything was better in the US I would be living there, not here. I can’t begin to count the number of conversations which have ended with me listing off all the great things about Italy to an Italian. "C’mon, stiff upper lip, you’ve got tiramisù and great fashion, right?" I say as I search around in my bag for a tissue to hand over.
What it comes down to is that whether I like it or not, the US is a larger than life presence in this world, laden with image and myth (and misconception). And as an American living abroad, I am alternatively saddled with, and blessed with, all the presumptions and assumptions that entails.
This doesn’t necessarily explain that saleslady. She could have just been a bitch. But I’d bet my last greenback that if I had said that candy thermometers were cheaper in Canada, I would have gotten a serene smile and a "Canada, huh? I hear the foliage is lovely this time of year."
]]>Take, for example, the ancient rite of story telling. Now, in a big city, the raison d’etre of a story is the Punch Line, so Plot and Narrative Speed are key elements. In small town Umbria, a tale is instead judged by its Spin Off Potential, so Setting and Character are pushed to the forefront, and Plot is often left back at the bus station.
Imagine you walk into your corner caffè one morning in, say, New York (or London, or Berlin, or Singapore), and, as the Javameister pours your cup, he casually asks, "So, how ya doin’?" You respond by saying, "Well, yesterday I got a flat tire, but this guy stopped and helped me change it. All’s well that ends well." A good urban story. Quick, to the point, and with a canned Hollywood ending. The waiter may respond with a "That’s good" or a "Happens to the best of us" or perhaps someone down at the end of the counter will chime in about his recent flat (but you will think to yourself that he’s a nosy little bugger) and that will be the end of it.
Here’s what happened to me. I walk into Sensi’s Bar over on the Corso, and Silvia asks, "So, how ya doin’?" All movement ceases. Espresso cups pause halfway to lips. A dozen eyes peer over the sports pages. Even the old Faema pauses in its hissing and wheezing. "Well," I clear my throat nervously, "yesterday I, uh, got this flat tire and ..." I get no further because the bar erupts with sound. Cups are slammed back into saucers, papers tossed onto caffe tables, the Faema starts to wail like a turn of the century steam locomotive.
The crowd is evenly divided between those who demand to know exactly where the tragic event took place ... I bet you were down by that new brick sidewalk they put up in Santa Maria. Those bricks are too darn sharp right there along the road there with no curb or nothing. I wrote the Mayor ... Were you over by the new indoor swimming pool? Because some kids threw some rocks through the glass the other night and there are still shards all over and I don’t know what we pay taxes for if they can’t even clean up the roads ... At the traffic circle, right? Gino told me that there was a big back up yesterday [read: four cars] so I guess that was you ..., those who, oddly enough, also had a flat yesterday (or on the exact same date in 1962), and those who wouldn’t trust a tire salesman as far as they could throw him.
I raise my voice above the cacophony, "Actually, I was near the Camping in Bastia!" Not precise enough. Before or after the Camping coming from Assisi? Was there tobacco or corn in the field where you stopped? I hazard a guess. I grew up in Illinois, so can identify a corn plant. It was not corn, so I opt for tobacco. Ah, right along old Francesco’s field. A quick aside to dissect Francesco’s skill in agronomy ... Can you believe he’s planting tobacco with the new EC regulations? Heads shake, papers are slapped against thighs. Francesco is clearly a raving idiot. A voice rises above the rest - belonging to an incongruously tanned man dressed in an Armani suit and wraparound sunglasses - they may be farmers in Umbria, but their kids are lawyers and investment fund managers. Of course, he is one of the last to switch over, the man announces, and has made a bundle renting out his equipment. Heads nod, voices assent. Francesco is clearly an agricultural genius. ... before everyone gets a quick turn recounting their own, personal Flat Tire Near Francesco’s Tobacco Field story. I discover that it is a veritable Bermuda triangle for pneumatics, as everyone in the bar has either had a flat at that exact spot, or is blood relation to someone who has.
I decide to move things along. "But it was no problem, because this guy stopped to help me change it." It is manna from heaven. Who could my mysterious savior be?
We start by identifying his steed. Every make and model of every car ever produced in Europe is thrown out as a suggestion, and I reveal that he was driving a turquoise Opel Corsa. (I had also memorized the license plate number, just in case the guy turned nutty on me. I did grow up in the hood, after all.) Every Umbrian who drives that model car is named as a contender, but I specify that this particular knight had introduced himself as Paolo. The crowd, as one, scratches its chin and stares off in space, thinking. Thinking. Suddenly I hear, "Did he have a tic?" accompanied by an explanatory head jerk off to the left. Yes, come to think of it, he did. It was Paolo di Tito! The crowd roars. It doesn’t get any better than Paolo di Tito as Corner Bar Yarn Fodder.
Before I go further, let me explain Paolo’s name. Here in rural Umbria, you are rarely known by your own first and last name as stated on your birth certificate. You are known by your nickname or "soprannome" which can refer to either your place of origin, a physical characteristic, or a personality trait, or as the offspring of someone else, who may be known by his place of origin, physical characteristic, or personality trait. So, you are almost never John Smith. You are Old Oaks, or The Red-haired, or The Liar. Or, you may be known as John of Jack, John of Old Oaks, John of the Red-haired, or John of the Liar. Until Jack, Old Oaks, the Red-haired or the Liar dies, then you are no longer John of, but just the descriptive, and your offspring become Fred and Mary of John, or of Old Oaks, or of the Red-haired, or of the Liar.
Okay, stay with me here. Concrete examples. My husband is not known as Stefano. He is known as Stefano di Brigolante (the name of our house/land) and will be until his dad (known as Brigolante) dies, then he will become Brigolante and our son will become Nicolò di Brigolante. We have on one side of our property a family whose nickname is Il Moro (The Moor ... strangely they are all blond - I guess lots of reproducing with lighter folk happened over the ensuing generations), so they are Franco Il Moro and his sons Simone del Moro and Alessio del Moro. Another neighbor’s family nickname is I Guitti (The Ill mannered ... you gotta wonder what gaffe their forefather must have committed centuries ago), and so the head of the household is known as Il Guitto, and his daughters Ida del Guitto and Carla del Guitto. When you marry into a family, you keep your own nickname. So Franco Il Moro is married to La Roscia (dialect for the Red-haired), and Guitto is married to La Guardiana (The Guardian ... don’t ask me why), but the male head of household passes his soprannome on to the kids.
This all illustrates how important lineage is in an area where most are born, live, and die within a range of just a few kilometers. I often see older people corner adolescents at the local festivals or after Mass, cup young chins in their gnarled hands, and ask, "Whose child are you?" They respectfully reply, in that polite way Italian kids have with the elderly, "I’m Lorenzo, son of Giovanni of the Red Bridge and Franca of Bellancino."
It’s like being trapped in Dances With Wolves.
Back to Paolo. Paolo di Tito means Paolo, son of Tito. Okay, I just blew my whole schematic nickname overview all to hell, because their family nickname is Livietto, but Paolo goes by Paolo di Tito, not Paolo di Livietto. I asked my husband why, and he looked at me kind of strangely and said, "What is it exactly you’re writing?" so let’s just say there are exceptions to every rule.
Anyway, having established that it was, indeed, Paolo di Tito who came so heroically to my rescue, my companions settle in to a long session of Stories Which Involve Paolo, Tito, and any or all of their Close Relatives. ... Remember the time they stole Paolo’s car from right underneath his bedroom window? And the window was open? And they backed into a big pile of gravel in the driveway, and from the skid marks it looked like they must have revved that engine for a good fifteen minutes before they managed to pull out, and Paolo still didn’t wake up? And how they found the car just a couple of kilometers down the road, because Paolo’s too cheap to have more than an eighth of a tank at a time and so the thieves ran it out of gas? Remember the snow back in ‘47? And how Tito wore those boots that left what looked like footprints in the snow? And how someone asked him why they left such strange tracks, and he lifted up his foot to show that the darn things didn’t have soles, so he was basically walking barefoot? ... I quietly make my way out of the bar, but no one takes much notice of me. They are all engrossed in a convoluted story involving Paolo’s great grandfather and some Alpine Browns he bought which were actually another type of cow that had been daubed with shoe polish.
That afternoon the phone rings. It’s Michele, down at Carloni Tires. He heard about that flat I got yesterday. Thus illustrating the first of two other basic differences between small town and big city life: News travels at roughly the speed of light.
He continues. "Sure hope it wasn’t one of those retreads you got over at Truffarelli, because I know they’re relatives and all but they would cheat the Virgin Mother. No, ran over a nail? Well, how about you just tell that good for nothing husband of yours to start buying his own gas rather than taking your car to work," he chuckles. "Listen, come on down tomorrow morning, and I’ll fix you up and take a look at your other tires. Can’t have anything happening with that little guy of yours on board."
This man knows: 1) where you bought your retreads; 2) that your husband is a tightwad; 3) that your tightwad husband is always taking your car to his construction sites where he subsequently runs over nails; 4) that you have a son. Thus illustrating the second difference: Everyone is all up in your business.
Another good example of these two differences happened to me this summer. I was out walking with my two year old, and a neighbor (neither the Moor or the Ill mannered, if you’re curious) pulls up in his car to have a quick chat and ask how our little boy is getting on. Now, I try very hard to avoid making sweeping generalizations about Italians or buy into stereotypes. The longer I live here, the more I am aware of what a nuanced culture this is. In a nation of zero population growth, my babysitter is the eldest of nine. In a nation of soccer worship, I married a man who couldn’t name a single goaltender if you held a loaded pistol to his temple. In a nation of lead feet, I can overtake my father-in-law six kilometers from home, and already have the pasta cooked and eaten by the time he pulls in the driveway. So, I’m really sticking out my neck here, but I feel confident that I can publicly declare this one truth: Italians are obsessed with their digestive systems. Perfect strangers will discuss their bowels with each other. People are always complaining of kidney ache (before I moved here it had never really consciously occurred to me that I had a kidney, much less that I could isolate a pain in it). Intelligent, scientific folk believe that if you eat hot bread, drink an icy drink, or come within spitting distance of a body of water before four hours have passed since your last meal, you will immediately keel over stone dead.
So it was only natural that when Marino asked after my son, I told him that he was a little constipated. Just one more sign of my going native, I guess. We parted, and I didn’t think any more of it until I stopped by the grocery store a few hours later to pick up a couple of things. We are friendly with our local grocers, a husband and wife team, and they have spoiled my toddler to high heaven, so as we approached the deli counter in the back the proprietor Egidio automatically started slicing up a piece of bread to give to my guy. Luciana, his wife, started shrieking and waving a knife at her husband from the meat case on the other side of the store, "Egidio, if you give that poor little lamb a slice of white bread, ti caccio gli occhi (I’ll pluck your eyeballs out). He hasn’t pooped in two days and you know what white bread will do to you!!" Egidio immediately grabbed a whole wheat roll, doused it with a little olive oil, and handed it to my son, with the comment, "Questo scioglie." (This loosens.)
Now, part of this whole bowel obsession is that every Italian (on the face of the Earth, not just Italy) has a mental catalogue of all existing foodstuffs, each of which is assigned to one of two categories: those which stringono (tighten) and those which sciogliono (loosen). Really. I think it is part of the required elementary school curriculum. I challenge any of you to stop a random Italian on the street ... and I’m even talking immigrants here, so go ahead and try it in Sydney or Birmingham or where ever ... and stick an item of food under their nose. Anything. Kumquats. Sausage. Licorice. They will immediately declare authoritatively either "Stringe" or "Scioglie". I swear on my husband’s grandfather’s grave (who, I am told, suffered a massive stroke because he ate beans too close to bedtime and didn’t digest them properly - I’m not kidding).
Anyway, back to the everyone being all up in your business. It’s a small store, Luciana is a loud woman, and the word poop draws Italians like proverbial flies, so I found myself surrounded by a throng of fellow customers, all simultaneously offering up their personal catalogue of foods to "loosen" up my toddler. I smiled and thanked everyone profusely, and made a move to carry on my shopping in peace. It was not to be so. The gaggle shadowed me around the store, noting and commenting each addition to my shopping cart with a murmured "scioglie" or "stringe". I reached for cheese. "Stringe" intoned the crowd. I tossed in milk. "Scioglie." I started to sweat, just a little. My hand hovered over the apples. Half the group said "Stringe" while the second half simultaneously declared "Scioglie". Chaos ensued, as they all attempted to talk over each other, arguing the case for their designated category.
From the meat case where she has been presiding, Luciana called the room to order. She invited the main proponents of each camp to approach the bench, where they conferred in hushed tones for a quite a few minutes while the rest of us waited breathlessly. Finally, she pronounced her verdict. "Apples stringono when eaten raw, but can sciogliere when cooked." I hurriedly announced that I fully intended to cook these apples for my son, and the crowd was appeased.
Months later, I still run into some of these people at Egidio’s, and damned if they don’t ask if my son has moved his bowels lately. It’s an obsession, I tell you.
Don’t touch that dial. Part two coming soon.
Part two is called Life in Bedford Falls, part two
]]>My husband’s word, or phrase I should say, is sixty thousand. I know, it’s weird in English, but in Italian it really does glide off the tongue quite gratifyingly ... sessssSANTAMEEEEllllla!!!. When he starts going on about how the phone must have rung sessantamila times in the past half hour, or how that new dent in the car is going to cost at least sessantamila big ones to fix, or how he must have told so-and-so sessantamila times such-and-such, it means it is only a matter of minutes before we have a total meltdown on our hands and he starts bringing out the power tools. My words are "incredible" and "insane". Traffic can be incredible, the phone bill can be insane, the line at the post office is often incredibly insane.
So, when my husband came home from work a few months ago and did his Mr. Brady impression of "Hi Honey, how was your day?" and I answered with a very un-Mrs. Brady-like "Incredibly [effing] insane", he knew. Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building. Defcon 5. The only sane recourse is to head for cover. So my husband, who, despite what some would consider a considerable lapse on our wedding day, is nothing if not sane, quickly grabbed our son and made for the door, mumbling something about a bike ride (it being the hottest June on record and approximately three hundred and six degrees outside), leaving me to stalk around the house hissing and spitting like a caged wild cat and muttering under my breath (when not screaming like a banshee) about ... taxes.
Yes, my friends, taxes.
Now, let me preface this by saying that I am a fourth generation Chicago democrat. I do not have a problem with paying taxes. I believe in taxes. I believe in national health care, Head Start, and smart presidents with interesting sex lives. There is a funny story about how I became the fourth generation Democrat, but it doesn’t really fit here. I wish I could footnote. Ah, what the hell. If random tangents in a storyline bother you, you’ve come to the wrong place.
Here’s the story: My paternal great grandmother and great grandfather were both immigrants from Greece - she from Mykonos, he from Zakynthos. They met in Chicago. My great grandmother fell in love with him on sight and concocted a way to meet him ... she ran him down with her bike. True story. She was quite a gal. Anyway, my paternal grandmother, their only daughter and raised Greek Orthodox, met and fell in love with my paternal grandfather, the son of two German Catholic immigrants. They wanted to marry, and preferred to practice the same religion, so my grandmother decided to convert to Catholicism.
She tells how one night at the dinner table (she was still living at home, of course), she cleared her throat and tremulously announced to her parents that she had decided to marry, and, by the way, she would also be converting to Roman Catholicism. My great grandfather gravely finished chewing his bite of lamb, swallowed, and sat silently staring at his plate for what seemed like forever. Then he slowly looked up. Now, in my great grandparents’ dining room there were two prints on the walls, one hanging above the head of the table depicting FDR and one above the foot of the table depicting The Last Supper. I know this is true, because it was that way until the death of my great grandmother six years ago at the age of 105 (ish - another story).
My great grandfather took a deep breath, looked his daughter in the eyes, and pointed to the print of The Last Supper. "You can always change religion," he intoned. Then he lifted his other arm in the direction of FDR and growled, "Just never change political party." And that’s why we are all Democrats. It’s a religion to us. I have relatives who have come to blows over the primaries.
So, like I said, I don’t have any fundamental quibble with paying taxes. But the taxes in Italy truly drive you to the brink, both financially and psychologically. Part of the problem is that I believe I am one of perhaps seven people in Italy who don’t cheat on their taxes (the other six have all been institutionalized).
This is not because I inhabit a higher moral plane; I’m just chicken. I’ve never had the balls for stealing. Even in middle school, while all the other cool girls were nonchalantly nicking Teen Magazines and blusher from the Walgreen’s left, right and center, I was the only fool actually fishing out my hard earned 99 cents for a Bonnie Bell Cherry Coke Lip Smacker which was the size of a small flashlight and worn on a cord around your neck. Just the thought of sneaking that out of the store sent me into a cold sweat. Plus, my mother was a formidable woman in her prime. Civil disobedience was one thing, getting a call from the corner store manager with your daughter in his office was quite another, and I can guarantee you that I would still be serving out my lifetime grounding sentence in my room if that were ever to have happened.
Unfortunately, this pervasive tax fraud amongst Italians has led to an vicious upward spiraling cycle in which the state assumes the citizens are going to cheat, so taxes them to kingdom come in the hopes of bringing in at least enough to keep the show running, and the citizens, under the incredible weight of ridiculously high taxes are pushed ... okay, tempted ... to cheat even more. So more taxes. And more cheating. And more taxes again. Just look at what Italians declare as the value of their home. I don’t think I have ever heard of someone actually declaring their home’s true value, or buying a house without paying a portion of the price under the table here in Italy. It’s almost comic.
Not only are the taxes disproportionately high here, they are also almost ridiculously numerous. There really is little in Italy that one can do that is not taxed. Most documents needed for any sort of official transaction, from renting a property to applying for a driver’s license, must be presented "in bollo", meaning with a tax stamp affixed. Even if you want to put up an index card at the local grocer’s to try and sell your used skis, the thing has to have a "bollo" on it. There is a tax on keeping your passport current. There is a tax on car ownership. There is a tax on your driveway (passo carrabile). There is a tax on the sign above your store. You have a business and would like to put some sort of marker along the road to help people find you? Taxed. This is over and above your property tax, income tax, and social security (health and pension). You really begin to understand why tax fraud is so pervasive in Italy ... it’s fudging for survival.
I would have no problem with these sorts of taxes if the services that they paid for were exceptional. Unfortunately, that’s generally not the case. You pay all this money for health care, but often have to go to private specialists which are paid for out of pocket because the waiting lists for the state provided specialists are so long, all this money for public schools, but textbooks must be bought by students, who are also required to bring toilet paper and photocopy money to school, all this money for garbage pick up when our closest bin is a kilometer away so we have to load our garbage in our trunk to take it to the dumper (which means that half the time it ends up getting tossed in some random dumper 30 kilometers from home, because I always forget I’m hauling a couple of bags until the car starts to reek of melon rind, coffee grinds and dirty diapers and I suddenly remember that I have a week’s worth of trash in the back of the car), all this money for infrastructure when every time it rains we are out filling in the potholes on our road ourselves with our own wheelbarrow, shovel, and gravel. Where does all this money go?
My breaking point came last summer. It was mid June, so both income and social security taxes were due, which just about cleaned me out. Just as I was coming to, this guy showed up at my front door. He was a representative of the SIAE, which is a sort of labor union for artists (writers, actors, journalists, etc.). Anyway, he came to inform me that as the owner of a business which provides television sets to the public, I was required to pay an annual tax.
Never mind that we already pay a tax to the state TV RAI for the privilege of watching incredibly partisan news and shows like "Marry Me!" where these poor sad individuals get on national TV and tell the story of how they’ve been dating this guy/girl for 14 years but they just never seem to be able to take the plunge and get hitched, and so they get all dressed up like a bride/groom and then surprise the other party by proposing live right there and, if accepted, getting married. If not, getting humiliated. Hello, folks. If you’ve been dating someone for more than a decade and he or she still hasn’t married you, there is probably a reason, and most likely one which you do not particularly want announced and subsequently dissected in front of 57 million viewers.
This is neither here nor there, because before we got satellite the only state station we were able to pick up here in the mountains was a very snowy RAI1 between the hours of two and six, but we were required to pay the tax anyway for the simple reason that we owned a TV.
Anyway, I responded with a big gaping mouth and an "Incredible!" to which this guy, who was just doing his job, after all, replied that this was a tax that had existed for years but no one ever paid it (no wonder - who knew?), and to demonstrate the SIAE’s goodwill there would be no fines for back taxes. To which I responded, "Insane!" and told him that he needn’t bother with me, I would rather burn the TVs than pay one more red cent to the Italian State. This should have been a warning sign of my state of mind. But our valiant state employee pressed on. "But, Signora," he said, "the tax applies even if you only have clock radios in the bedrooms. An answering machine that plays music in the office. Newspapers and magazines in the reception area."
Okay, this was not one of my better moments. Here I am, hot, sweaty, (not to mention broke) dressed in a halter top and cut offs with my unwashed hair in a pineapple and barefoot, holding my squalling infant son on one hip (stark naked except for a snorkeling mask ... don’t ask) and my arm akimbo on the other, with two hounds snapping and snarling at my feet and my father-in-law nearby on the porch swing dressed in a wife beater and feed cap, screaming at the top of my lungs about where this man could put his taxes and how he and the horse he rode in on could go to hell on the next train and if I ever caught him on my property again I’d be after him with a shotgun and lots of other really, really bad words. All that was missing was a couple of abandoned carburetors on blocks on the front lawn and a Marlboro light stuck to my bottom lip.
Of course I went into the office two days later, showered and humbled, and paid the tax with gritted teeth.
But I’ve made a new resolution. It’s time to start doing as the Romans do and cut some corners before this whole tax thing just gets too incredibly insane. I’ll let you all know if we need to change the title of these essays to Rebecca’s View from Cellblock Uno.
]]>Italy made me beautiful
I went through quite a long ugly duckling “but she’s got a great personality” stage. Essentially from birth to sixteen, come to think of it. Right around that age I tentatively started clawing my way out, but the problem with change is that no one seems to notice but the person doing all the evolving. (Just for the record, my parents claim that I was always an attractive child. However, as the Italians say, “Every cockroach is beautiful to his own mother.” I have photos of myself as an adolescent.)
Then, magically, I spent the summer in Italy. I was with a new family, new friends, in a new town. In a country which makes no bones about being beautiful and appreciating the beautiful. I remember walking down the street in Assisi and asking my “host-sister” why so many boys were looking at me. She stopped, turned to me with a quizzical look, and said, “Beh, perchè sei una bella ragazza.” (Well, because you’re a pretty girl.)
In the intervening years, I have come to realize that Italians bandy about the word “bella” with something akin to abandon. I have heard Alessandra Mussolini described as “una bella signora”, the poor thing. Imagine Benito with a tacky blond wig, loud lipstick, and in drag, and you’ve got his granddaughter. But the important thing is that at that moment in my life, I needed to hear that I was bella. I needed to feel bella. I needed to be treated bella. And I was. And I took that beauty back home with me, and people noticed. I felt good about myself, and confident, and it gave me the self-assurance to be able to do lots of fun, challenging things over the subsequent years that I may have never otherwise attempted.
Sure, I should be above all that. I shouldn’t care about the superficial male-dominated cultural dictates for beauty. I mean, I’ve read bell hooks and I’ve Taken Back the Night and all. It shouldn’t matter. But it did to me then, and, in a much smaller but still fundamental way, it does to me now. I have come to terms with the truth that I am a person who needs to feel bella, and in Italy I do. Still today people here call me, with more than a tad of generous spirit, “una bella signora”, and it takes me back to being sixteen and feeling like I held the world in the palm of my hand. What a great feeling.
Italy made me brave
It was my last year of college, and everyone else seemed to have a handle on what they wanted to do with their lives. Some were headed to grad school for more of the same. Some had landed great jobs. Some were Teaching for America. And then there was me, staring embarrassedly into my drink at parties mumbling something about not having quite decided yet when classmates asked me what my plans for the following year-slash-rest of my life were. Then my on-again-off-again long-distance Italian beau suggested that I move over to Italy for a little while, so we could see where things were headed with us. And that seemed like a good idea. Less work than grad school. Less scary than job interviews. I had a plan.
A plan that quickly made the circuit of my friends and acquaintances, because anything that wasn’t “I thought I’d do a dissertation on the Uzbekistan Kurds and the Fourth World at Yale” or “ I just got a call back from Arthur Anderson and their paying over 40 G the first year plus relocation” was refreshing to hear, I think. And everyone was telling me how brave I was. What a big step I was taking. How they’d never have had the courage to pick up and move overseas. How much they admired my spunk. And suddenly I went from clueless chickensh*t to being brave, taking a big step. Being spunky, for God’s sake.
I started to see the whole move differently, and when I got to Italy it was more of the same. The Italians I met were amazed that I would move so far from home so young. They kept calling me brave, too. (Though not spunky. Maybe it doesn’t translate.) And over time, I came to feel that I had made a bold move, perhaps not initially inspired by bravery, but certainly carried out with it.
Bravery (even projected) begets bravery, I’ve found. Every time I am confronted with a challenging decision here in Italy, I gird my loins with recollections of my Brave Overseas Move. “Hey, if I had the courage to move here, I must have the courage to enroll in law school.” Then, “If I can do law school in Italy, I can certainly run a business here.” “If I can run a business, I think I can darn well write some essays for SlowTrav.” You get the gist. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and my (ad)ventures here have gained me more than I ever imagined.
Italy made me patriotic
I’m not talking that love it or leave it type of flag waving. I mean a real appreciation for those aspects of American culture which do, indeed, make it a great country, and a critical awareness of some substantial problems that real patriots should care enough to fix. Italy has shaped me, it’s true. But the reality is that my formative years were spent in the States, and the very fiber of my being reflects some of the things I love about the U.S. Optimism. A belief in meritocracy. A sense of civic duty. A respect for and curiosity about other cultures. A visceral love of sweet corn.
I once asked my husband if he had to describe me, what word he would choose. Without missing a beat he said, “Intraprendente.” (Loosely translated as enterprising, someone who takes initiative, a go-getter). This gave me a bit of pause, because the Cosmo “What Your Man Really Thinks of You” quiz I was doing gave me the choices of A) sex kitten; B) drop dead gorgeous; C) mile long legs; D) all of the above. I ticked D, cause I figured as a go-getter, with some effort on my part (and quite a bit of invasive surgery), I could undertake to become all of those things.
Back to the point, I realize it was growing up in a culture of being rewarded for hard work and believing that you really can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps that made me someone who is willing to stick my neck out and give it my best shot, and, within limits, that’s a good thing. Hey, this is the country where you can leave college halfway through, set up a software firm, and become the richest human on the planet. And then get into trouble with the anti-trust folks, but you know what they say about the rich and camels. And heaven. And needles. How does that saying go?
Anyway, once I no longer lived in the States it was easier for me to appreciate the unique culture there and be grateful for what it taught me. It took sleeping with my mistress to make me appreciate my wife, or, perhaps better, getting to know my mother-in-law to make me appreciate my mother.
Italy made me appreciate family
Before we start all that romanticizing about Italians and families, let me just say that there are some fundamental problems with all this togetherness. Forty year old men who still take their cappuccino in bed from their seventy year old mothers, new brides who have never done a load of laundry, siblings who don’t speak for decades because of rancor in dividing their parents’ property...when their parents aren’t even dead yet.
However, despite what can sometimes be an overwhelming and unhealthy micro culture, family is one of the fundamental pillars of Italian culture, especially in traditional rural areas like Umbria. There is a symbiotic relationship between the generations, and generally the young help the aging, the aging look after the grandchildren, everyone talks on the phone at least once a day if they live more than three blocks away, and there is less isolation and stress and sadness on the part of everyone.
In the States so often the generations live in different cities, if not states, and a once a week phone call is considered keeping in close touch. One of the things we value is an independence from our families, and, while that can certainly be a positive thing, I see a lot of children who see their grandparents twice a year, hardly know their aunts and uncles, and could walk right past a cousin on the street without recognizing them. I see a lot of parents who try to juggle jobs, kids, and home and don’t have a soul in the same town to lend them a hand. I see a lot of old folks parked in a home and forgotten. I see a lot of graves never visited.
For as much as they push me to the edge of reason at times, I feel lucky that we live next door to my in-laws and that my son sees them everyday. I am happy that he is growing up surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins, relatives of various degrees and removals. I like that when we go to the cemetery he kisses the pictures of my husband’s grandfathers and says, “Nonno.” I know that whatever happens to us in the future, we would never fall through the cracks and find ourselves homeless and destitute and alone in the world. We have hundreds of wedding guests to fall back on, for one thing.
On the flip side, the distance has made me appreciate my own family and be less flippant about my relationship with them. Seeing all these close-knit families around me in Umbria makes it seem more important that I nurture the ties to my own relatives, though so far away, and that I learn as much as I can about my family’s history now while I have Grandma alive and kickin’. Mine will never be an Italian style family (my brother and I can only go about twenty minutes before reverting to arm wrestling and calling each other butthead as if we were both in middle school again...seeing each other a couple of times a year is probably our limit) but it’s still mine, and when it comes down to it, they’re all I’ve got.
Italy made me patient
It was either that or drop dead of an aneurism from the stress.
Italy made me joyous
I’ve had a relatively happy life, given a scale that includes child slave laborers in India and all that. I’ve had my good times, and my bad. Who hasn’t? Anyone who says they want to relive their childhood has apparently blacked out the middle school years. All told, I always considered myself a generally happy person.
But it was in Italy that I found real joy. It was in Italy that I met my husband, the flame to my moth, the Yin to my Yang (or is that Yang to Yin?), the pasta to my ragù. It was in Italy that I had my son, the air that I breathe, the light that I see, the reason that I live. It is in Italy that I sometimes stand very still, hold my breath, close my eyes, and command myself, “Remember this moment forever. Remember this moment forever.”
And that, my friends, is the greatest gift.
So, let us raise our glasses and toast: To beauty and courage, country and family, patience and joy. To these ten years, and the next. To life. To Italy. Cin-cin.
]]>My husband and I cuss like sailors. I won’t deny it. We have been trying to put a lid on it since our son was born, but it’s just another one of those bad habits you get into after years of living together just the two of you, like picking tomato slices directly out of the salad bowl with your fingers at the table or sleeping buck naked.
I swear because I was brought up in a proudly swearing American home. I was probably in my early teens before I realized that our grand city’s football team was named The Bears, not Those Godded Sons-a-B**s. (That all ended with Iron Mike, a hero at our house.) All of us cussed, and as long as we didn’t offend Grandma or the neighbors it was never an issue. Recently my son asked where his dad was, and I casually replied that he was out getting the piece of s**t car stereo fixed. My baby, who had until this moment never strung more than two words together, decided that this was an appropriate moment to make a huge developmental leap, and spent the afternoon wandering the house repeating to himself "piece of sit caw steweo, Mamma? Piece of sit caw steweo, Mamma?" which had me lunging for the telephone for a tearful conference with my mom as to why I am not fit to parent (there is a long list of reasons why I am not fit to parent, including items such as: When I learned I was pregnant, I immediately went out and bought a white couch; and I ate all of my son’s Easter candy ... two years in a row.)
My mom tried to calm me down with the story about how once she was out driving with me as a preschooler standing in the middle of the backseat (it was the seventies ... who bothered with child safety restraints?), got cut off by another car and responded with that low hiss that responsible parents make when they really want to let it rip but have young children within hearing range, only to hear me pipe up from the back, "Did you see that a**hole, Mom?" She finished the story by saying, "So, you see? You grew up to be perfectly normal." Which got me sobbing even more since I did not grow up to be perfectly normal, I grew up to be the kind of mother who teaches her two year old four letter words before he has even mastered "Please" and "Thank you".
My husband swears because he uses power tools.
In my years of living here in Italy and speaking Italian, I have become fascinated by how the definition of profanity is so rigidly dictated by different cultures. What makes hair curl in English is quite amusing in Italian, and what would shock an Italian used to puzzle me immensely when I first moved here ... how could phrases that seem so innocuous be so taboo?
Consider one of my favorites: bullst. It really takes the wind out of your sails to be raving about BS this and BS that, and have your husband rolling on the floor in hysterics. It’s just funny translated. You know, basically male cow poop. How did that ever get coded as an expletive in English? Not to mention another frequent guest star in my conversation: rat’s a, as in "I don’t care a rat’s a** if all the hardware stores are closed for the month of August, you promised new shelves up by September and I expect new shelves or you can just make up the couch for yourself, my friend." (Does this sound like a real life exchange? It should.)
On the flip side, the most weighty expletives in Italian are blasphemies. But they are a riot. Dog God. Pig God. Snake God. My favorite: Shoeless God. I mean, really. But the fact is that these are extremely offensive things to say, which took me quite a while to get a handle on. I moved here about ten years ago, and roughly ten years minus half an hour ago we started restoration work on our farmhouse. My formative months of Italian language education were spent in the company of lots of construction workers. One can just imagine what that did to my vocabulary. It was quite some time before I was able to rid myself of the habit, when told at the grocery store that there was no fresh ricotta and it wouldn’t be in until Thursday, of responding with a cheery Beast God, to mortified expressions all round.
Even shared expletives carry different weight in different cultures. The old standby F-word exists and is used in Italian as well (as anyone who has ever seen Grease knows), but whereas in this country it is often a throw-away sort of cuss ... something along the lines of "to he** with it" or even addressed to friends in jest ... we all know that in English it is quite a heavy handed phrase. Just as I had a problem with taking Italian blasphemes seriously, so did my husband in giving the f-word it’s proper respect in English. Many a dinner party conversation in the States has been brought to a grinding halt by my smiling husband lightheartedly suggesting someone at the table go f*** themselves.
I find it interesting that the most offensive curses in English have to do with sex, and the most offensive in Italian, religion (followed closely by "cornuto", or the word for cuckolded, but I have to say that I hear that one less and less. I guess that whole Latin thing about being able to keep your wife happy is dying out.) I see the Puritan roots reflected on one side of the Atlantic, and the traditional Catholic ones on the other.
However, as I said, our swearing days are numbered now that we are grownups and have a mortgage and everything. Though we are pleased that our son is growing up bilingual, the ability to cuss out crazy drivers in a plethora of languages is probably not what we need to be cultivating in him. Or at least we should have him master please and grazie, first.
]]>I had to go to the doctor’s to have him take a look at my hand which, truth be told, has been hurting me for months now, but as the mother of a toddler I am no longer allowed to indulge in luxuries such as timely medical attention or peeing in complete privacy. Anyway, I headed off to the doctor’s...no, wait. I’m skipping a step. To make a long story short, our family doctor has his olive grove bordering on our olive grove above Capodacqua, so he spends lots of time talking This Year’s Harvest with my father-in-law Ugo when they run into each other out there (often, it seems, since my doctor appears to visit patients a total of two hours a day). Unfortunately, whenever I stop by Dr. Bensi’s office with some minor complaint or prescription to renew, he invariably settles himself down for a nice satisfying chat about fertilizer and pruning techniques. This used to be a bit of a problem, since I have something to confess. We all have our dirty little secrets and this is mine: I don’t really know all that much about the daily workings of our farm, Brigolante, my home for the past ten years. I often have guests at our agriturismo ask me things like how many pigs we have in the barn, and I look them straight in the eye and respond: four females, two males, and 14 piglets. I’m lying. I don’t have the faintest idea of how many animals are in the barn, what is planted in the north field and the running market price of barley. In fact, the last time I was in the barn was Christmas eve 1997, which began with an emergency 1 a.m. porcine birth, and faded out to a touching scene of me, attired in a cocktail dress and black pumps holding a slop bucket in each hand filled with squirmy, slippery newborn piglets while my husband, in suit and tie, whacked at the glowing new mother with a broomstick to get her to lie down and nurse, both of us cursing our neighbors Peppe and Gentile with all our linguistic creativity for having invited my in-laws over for a late game of cards.
Back to the doctor story. For about the first eight years I lived here, I would no sooner step into Dr. Bensi’s office before he would whip off his glasses, lean back in his chair, and bark, "Is Ugo spraying his trees this year?" and I would stare at my shoes in shame and mumble something under my breath about how I really wasn't sure and the rest of our interview would be terse and stilted and I was starting to worry that I was receiving substandard medical care because of this whole olive thing. However, being the kind of gal that takes a bull by the horns (after almost a decade of mortification) I now arm myself with knowledge before my doctor visits. Or, I always mean to, but seem to forget until 3 minutes before I’m supposed to leave for the appointment, which results in much frantic driving in my 4x4 from field to field searching for my father-in-law in blind panic, until I come upon wherever he is tilling, and pick my way across clumps of freshly plowed dirt in heels and a clean skirt until I’m within shouting distance and screaming over the noise of the tractor, "How’s the olive harvest this year?" which, what with the engine roar and Ugo’s encroaching deafness, inevitably leads to a vaudeville-esque routine of him yelling back, "No, thanks, I don’t want a beer!" and me replying, "No, the OLIVE HARVEST THIS YEAR!" and him looking at me quizzically, "Yeah, the sky sure is clear" until I finally mime for him to shut off the damn tractor and repeat myself, at which point he really looks disconcerted, because, as I have already established, I’m not exactly in the habit of talking crops with Ugo. Then his face clears and with a look of comprehension he yells (my father-in-law yells even when there is no farm equipment to compete with), "Tell the Doc there isn’t a damn thing to pick this year!" and I take off at a lumbering sprint back towards the idling car.
So, the other day I marched confidently into my doctor’s office and deployed a preemptive strike before the good Doc even got out "Buon Giorno". "Doc," I said, "Ugo says there isn’t a damn thing to pick this year" at which point Dr. Bensi yanked off his glasses, tossed them on the desk, and leaned back in his seat with the air of a man vindicated. This segued into a 15 minute conversation with me doing lots of nodding sagely and um-hmming and desperately trying to convey the image of someone who has the least opinion of whether or not this year will be worse than the harvest of ’83, if plowing or leaving meadow is wiser with this kind of heat, and if old Mario’s team of pickers skim off the top. Having successfully navigated these rocky waters, we were able to move on to talk of my hand. (Any of you still with me here will remember that this is how the whole thing started.) While the doctor was printing out the forms for an x-ray and specialist visit (which you then have to take to the hospital and wait in line to book an appointment, then come back for the appointment, then come back for the results of the appointment, then go back to your family doctor for follow-up, because Italy is many things, my friends, but user friendly ain’t one of them) I made some crack about starting with the minor ailments of advanced age and Dr. Bensi immediately replied, "No, you’re only 32." I automatically opened my mouth to correct him because, Lord knows, I’m only 31, before I realized with a bit of a shock that, in fact, I am 32.
Now, I’m not one of those people who really cares all that much about aging...no existential crisis or leaving my husband or anything for my 30th birthday (though there has been a noticeable proliferation of face creams in the bathroom over the past couple of years, because if it’s a battle against time I’ll go down fighting). As the great James Taylor said: The secret to life is enjoying the passing of time. Of course, his brain was completely fried on acid and we all know how he screwed things up with Carly, so as a mentor he’s a dubious choice at best. Anyway, I am usually one of those people who takes successive birthdays with aplomb. But I suddenly had that recurring vision of myself sitting across the desk from a balding man in a white coat staring gravely at his hands intoning, "Ma’am, I’m sorry but you only have 55 years left to live" except all of the sudden he was intoning 54 and I felt a year had been shaved off my life. It was clearly time to regroup, reflect, reevaluate my priorities.
As soon as I left the doctor’s I immediately ate a big Magnum Double Caramel ice cream bar, because with only 54 years left why bother dieting? Then, I resolved to catch up with my son’s baby book. I am one of those masochistic freaks of nature allegedly keeping a baby book. I say allegedly because I haven’t actually touched the thing for six months, which doesn’t seem like much time until you consider that he’s only two, so that’s roughly a quarter of his life left undocumented. Anyway, I feel it’s important to have something to page through sixteen years from now during the drive over to the police station with my husband, who has been dragged out of bed along with me by a 2 a.m. call from headquarters requesting that we come collect our son who has been picked up for drag racing/underage drinking/smoking reefer behind the school. It will remind me what a beautiful miracle he is and keep me from throttling him on sight when we get there.
But what this feeling of evanescent mortality really got me reflecting upon was the difference in how age/aging are perceived in Italy as compared to the States, and how the US is fundamentally much more of a youth oriented culture. This is actually a theme I have occasion to contemplate every three months when my college alumnus magazine arrives in the mail. There are good and bad things about having attended a top university (besides, of course, just another prestigious bumper sticker for your parents to add to their collection. My father claims that he keeps so many in clear view as an explanation to the world in general as to why at his advanced age he still can’t afford anything better than a beat up ’91 Mazda minivan with cracked windshield and left rear fender held on by duct tape): the good thing is that you meet all these highly intelligent, motivated overachievers. The bad thing is that you meet all these intelligent, motivated overachievers, so as I peruse the alumna news section of the magazine I get to say to myself, "Why look, there’s Mary Jo! What’s she up to these days? Oh, Supreme Court justice, mother of six, Olympic archer. And here’s Billy Bob...hmmm Nobel prize winner last year, adopted 12 Brazilian street children, recently sold an investment property for six million" by which time I am turning the bathroom upside down searching for a razor blades and lamenting loudly to my husband about how I am a worthless piece of dog doo wasting my life away. Just for kicks, I’m tempted to write in, "Rebecca, who busted her a** to graduate with honors in Political Science/International Relations, now lives on a farm in the middle of nowhere, where she spends her days crashing her computer and fishing legos out of the toilet and lists among her hobbies stain removal and butchering of the Italian Language." That’d make ‘em green.
What I’m getting at is that many of my contemporaries are quite far down the path of career and family and financial stability in the States, and this is accepted as just and good. Consider, however, that in Italy the average age of a college graduate is 27.8 years, after having studied for an average of 7, according to the August 7 issue of Panorama magazine. This means that in the US a graduate enters the labor market at least five years before her Italian counterpart (though, to clarify, many Italian degrees are the equivalent of US graduate degrees, such as law and medicine). Once out, Italian graduates face an incredibly stiff labor market...roughly half of all unemployed Italians are under 25; 1 in 3 people under 25 are unemployed according to Paul Ginsborg. There are numerous complicated reasons behind the lengthy stays at universities and youth unemployment, but the point I’m trying to make here is that most of our thirty something friends and acquaintances here in Umbria are only just finishing school and beginning their first jobs, not working on second homes and retirement packages. It’s a little bit of a chicken and egg question, but this later start into career seems to have affected expectations for young people in general. In the US, by thirty you are expected to have your act together, or at least go into massive credit card debt to cultivate this image. There is no such pressure here in Umbria. Thirty is considered just about right here for kids to start moving out of the family home, getting married, starting a career. There is no sense of failure, or even showing up late to the game, to be pulling in your first paycheck at 31, and the youngest small business owners I know are...me and my superhusband, who founded his own company last year at the age of 34 after waiting for four years. The wisdom was for him to start up something in his name at 35, since clients don’t really trust anyone too young. He stuck it out until 34, and then decided to roll his dice. (I’m not counting here the numerous friends we have who have entered into their historic family-run business, which is by far the most common model in Umbria.) This later blooming is accepted on a political level as well. A law passed in 2000 offered cheap government financing for "young entrepreneurs." The first version of the law defined a young entrepreneur as up to 25 years of age, the next version up to 30...to make a long story short, the definition for "young entrepreneur" is now until 40. 40?!? I know American kids who have retired at 40 (okay, I don’t actually know any, but stories circulate).
On the flip side, Italians seem much more comfortable with growing old. There is so much pussyfooting around the word "old" in the US. No one is old anymore. They’re older, or elderly. In Italy, old people are just old and make no bones about it. At a certain point, middle age women who routinely dye their hair a strange shade of copper, dress in tight jeans and stilettos overnight morph into bowed little old ladies wearing Queen Mother shoes, who garden in wool tweed skirts and take bus trips to places like San Giovanni Rotondo or Lourdes. It happened to my mother-in-law (okay, she’s never worn jeans, but you get my meaning). My grandmother in Chicago at almost 80 still dresses in velour track pants, blindingly white tennies, power walks the mall each morning, and would probably be offended to hear herself referred to as elderly. Her big source of pride is that they still ask for ID for the Tuesday retiree discount at Dominick’s Supermarket.
So I’ve come to the conclusion that your life as an adult is brief here in Umbria, Italy. You don’t grow up until after 40, and suddenly by sixty you’re primary concern is playing bocce and ballroom dancing. I’m happy to find that I am still in the flower of my youth here, quite precocious on a professional level, really. And, in moments of alumnus rag self-doubt, I comfort myself with the thought that thirty years from now Mary Jo, Billy Bob, and their kin will be dead of stress related cardiac disorders while I will be here in the Bel Paese, dressed in a support stockings and kerchief boarding a coach for La Verna.
]]>Anyway, he came to the States for the first time in 1988 to stay with my family, and about a week into the trip my Mom sent us to the local 7-11 for something she had run out of for dinner. I remember there was the requisite “No shirts, no shoes, no service” notice on the door, which Stefano considered thoughtfully for a minute before going inside. I didn’t think anything more of it until a few days later, when we were talking about his first impressions of the US, and he announced that he didn’t think Americans treated their poor very well. Now, I happen to agree, but this was an intriguing comment to make after ten days of middle America suburban living. To make a long story short, he assumed that those too destitute to afford proper footwear and accompanying attire were being denied their God given right to a Super Big Gulp. I tried to explain to him that it had more to do with fashion crimes (not to mention hygiene) than economics, but given that the average Italian would sooner go to the supermarket wearing their underwear as a hat than leave the house shoeless, he remained unconvinced.
Fast forward a week or so to find us attending the Taste of Chicago, arguably the largest celebration of the pursuit of obesity on the planet (the last time we went, chocolate covered frozen bananas were sold at not one, not two... SIX stands. Now that’s the kind of cookin’ that makes the Windy City famous.), attended by hundreds of thousands of badly dressed fat people (many my relatives, so I can say it) who, if they are wearing shoes, are wearing rubber beach flip-flops and, if they are wearing shirts, are wearing those black t-shirts printed with the flag of our nation and emblazoned with those immortal words: “Just try burning this one, a**hole”, which make me so proud to be American.
He has never been the same since.
]]>Anyway, the events which followed are easy to guess. A cab ride to the train station left me with no cash. The cabbie dropped me and my big battered red suitcase outside, and I walked into the main hall of the station, which looks like a shopping mall, not a train station. Seeing no ticket counters, I thought I had been dropped off at the wrong place. Did I mention I was disoriented, broke, and didn’t speak a word of Italian? I did what any self respecting sixteen year old in the same situation would have done (or at least I nurture my bruised ego by maintaining so). I sat down on my big battered red suitcase and started to sob.
This little old guy came up, and we managed to communicate through a bit of Pidgin Italian-English and lots of gesturing the gist of the situation. He hobbled over on his cane to the adjoining hall, which I’d been too panicked-slash-idiotic to find myself, and bought me a ticket to Assisi. He bought me a sandwich and bottle of water. He walked me to my platform. He waited with me for almost an hour until it was time to depart. He took the conductor aside and told him to keep an eye on me (I assume, for that’s what the conductor did, including waking me up when we got to Assisi).
Now, I’m not one of those new-agey-miracle-believing-Celestine-Prophesy-chatroom-folk, but this is my story and I’m sticking to it. It was time for the train to pull out, and I swung the aforementioned big battered red suitcase on the train, turning my back on my octogenarian savior for less than 30 seconds. When I turned back around, he was gone. Disappeared. The platform was long, and this man walked with a cane. He wasn’t a fast mover. He had dissipated into thin air. I never got to thank him, pay him back for the train ticket, or say goodbye. Thus began my love affair with La Bella Italia.
(This tale will be included in the first chapter of my book, which I have decided will begin with the sentence: The thing is, where I’d really always wanted to visit was France.)
]]>But I think the Achilles heel of the vast majority of guidebooks is to be found in that small chapter somewhere near the front entitled, “Insights into Italian Culture”. This section, usually stuck in between “How to Purchase Train Tickets” and “Where to Change Money”, dedicated to the admirable task of helping the English speaking traveler navigate the rocky stream of acceptable behavior in Italy, is usually peppered with grave pronouncements I imagine made in that booming, self-important male voice which narrated every social studies and biology film I viewed between the third and ninth grade. Sometimes these are quite accurate and helpful, but I have certainly read some over the years which have made me sputter my cappuccino all over myself and exclaim “WHAT?!?” to no one in particular.
The problem is that most of these authors (with a few notable exceptions, of course, including anything Mary Jane has had her finger in) have never lived in Italy and barely have a working grasp of the language. They dedicate most of their time here to inaccurately recording museum opening hours and overlooking decent hotels, and their cultural knowledge is incidental at best. I would like to share a couple of my favorite doozies, and, I hope, set the record straight for those Slow Travelers out there who may be about to make their first trip to the Bel Paese.
1. Small Town Italians are Very Friendly. They commonly greet Everyone They Pass, and it is considered Rude not to do so.
This is my favorite example of what happens when an outside observer interprets a situation completely out of context, with comic results. (Another example: Many comment on how endearing our two dogs are - how they so obviously care deeply for one another, always out walking together and napping side by side on the lawn and whatnot. Our two dogs hate each other with a jealous passion and live for the day the other is sucked into the combine harvester and gone forever. They are mortally fearful that the other will somehow manage to get more than his share of chow, and for that reason only stick to each other like white on rice.) This is how I imagine the scene: Our fearless guidebook author sips his espresso at an outdoor café in a small town in Italy, all the while observing an Italian gentleman meandering down the Corso, greeting with regularity those he passes. “Aha!” says our author to himself (in a booming, self-important voice), taking feverish notes, “Why, Small Town Italians are Very Friendly. They greet Everyone They Pass. It must be Rude not to do so.” What is really happening is this: The Italian in question is not greeting Everyone he Passes, he is greeting Everyone he Knows, which, in most small towns in Italy, is about 99% of folks in town.
Now, I am not saying that Small Town Italians are not Very Friendly - they generally are. But you are certainly not expected to greet every single one of them as you pass them on the street, though you can if you feel up to the task. Their reaction will probably be:
1) in faux small town Italy (i.e. places like Assisi with a small population but huge tourist influx) a friendly, polite greeting in return. These folks have met thousands like you who have read that same guidebook chapter and taken it to heart;
2) in real small town Italy, a infinitesimal pause, during which the Italian quickly tries to place you, followed by a friendly, polite greeting in return. Small Town Italians are, after all, Very Friendly;
3) a shocked silence, followed by a loud, indignant “Who are you and why are you greeting me?!?” I can’t actually imagine this happening but feel I must make allowances for those few Small Town Italians who are, in fact, not Very Friendly.
In fact, as measured by greeting perfect strangers and superficial small talk, most English speakers I know are far more “friendly” than Italians who, as a whole, combine gregariousness and reserve with great skill. I have known Italians for years before finding out what they do for a living, what their university degree was in, how much they are paying in child support, and when they had their last surgery, which are all subjects generally covered within the first five minutes of sitting next to any average American on an overseas flight.
2. You are expected to order an antipasto, a primo, and a secondo at an Italian restaurant, and will be in ill favor with your server if you do not do so.
I suspect that some Italian restaurant consortium actually paid the author to put that in the guide, because I have never read such complete bunk in my entire life. I can honestly say that in 15 years of traveling to, and living in Italy I have never ordered three courses in a restaurant (mostly because I’m vegetarian) and have never been treated any differently because of it. If you are, you should immediately get up and leave. Your server is either being inexcusably rude or is part of the consortium which paid the guidebook, and either way doesn’t deserve your business.
The truth is this: very few Italians eat a traditional three to four course meal anymore. Modern sedentary life just can’t justify the calories. My husband and I eat out quite often, usually with groups of two or three other couples, and it is a rare occasion when one of us orders more than a main dish and salad. The only time I have seen our waiter get hot under the collar is while trying to coordinate the order of the dishes to be served, as in a group of eight there are inevitably two who want an antipasto and primo, two who want an antipasto and secondo served with the others’ primi, one who wants a pizza served with the antipasti, one who wants a primo and contorno but the contorno as an antipasto, one who wants a secondo and contorno, but the contorno as a primo, and the poor guy at the end of the table who caught a bit of a chill on the back of his neck two evenings ago and hasn’t digested since and can he just have a bit of riso in bianco with perhaps a little lemon? It would drive a saint to drink.
I have given a lot of thought as to how this misconception of what you must order in an Italian restaurant came about, and I think I may have an explanation. Whereas in the States, your server comes to your table, introduces himself by name, pulls up a chair and launches into a 20 minute discourse on his family history, latest car purchase, and the fact that this is just a day job, what he really would like to do is direct, followed by a deep, heartfelt look into your eyes and a beseeching, “Now, is there any chance that I could possibly interest you in one of our appetizers today?”, the Italian server marches up to your table and with great economy of words barks, “Per Antipasto? Per Primo? Per Secondo? Vino?” Now, neither server really cares all that much about what you end up ordering (in fact, the stakes are probably higher for the American server, as it is not common in Italy to tip as a percentage of the total bill), but to those not used to the Italian way of taking an order, it may seem that you are expected to choose one thing in every offered category. Regardless, feel free to order exactly what you feel like eating without pressure. Doggie bags are, however, taboo.
3. Italians will bargain for anything.
This is, in fact, true. I have seen my own husband offer up a conspiratorial grin and wink to the teenage girl at the Osco Drug check out counter in Northwest Suburban Chicago, plunk down a toothbrush, and say (in his English which sounds like a mix between Ricky Riccardo and Tarzan), “You give me good prize for dis, no?” to which the girl flatly responded, without pausing either in paging through Vogue or snapping her gum, “Prices are as marked, sir”, which might explain why her photo was conspicuously missing from the Employees of the Month plaque on the wall behind her.
My word of warning here is that this sort of unqualified statement skims over the subtleties of Italian bargaining. Italy is not a Moroccan bazaar; Italians generally do not haggle. Bargaining in Italy calls for finesse and good humor and, above all, time. It is, in short, an art.
I offer here an example of how not to go about it: A few years ago I was conversing with a friend of mine inside her upscale ceramic shop in Assisi. Suddenly, an English speaking man barged in, (I won’t reveal his country of origin, but will go so far as to say he was wearing Rockports and a Tilley hat. Just kidding.) and interrupted us by abruptly demanding of my friend, “How much for the clock in the window?”. My friend, taken aback, smiled politely and replied in her perfect English that the price was 150,000 Lire, as marked. The man, apparently mistaking my friend for a patient of Oliver Sacks, repeated his question veerrryyy slllowwwlllyy, “N---o, h----o----w m----u-------c----h i-----s t---h---e c---l---o---c----k i----n t----h---e w----i---n—d—o---w???” My friend matched his speed, “I----t’s 1---5---0,--0---0---0 l------i----r--e, a-----s m-----a—r—k—e---d.” The man had had enough of his precious time wasted, and, raising his voice, barked, “No! I mean, how much do you really want for the clock in the window!?!” My friend looked at him, slowly and sweetly smiled, and answered, “200,000 Lire.” The man huffed out to join a very harried and dogged looking wife, and they stomped away together (surely prepared to regale their bus-mates with stories of the rude shopkeepers in Assisi all the way back to Rome).
Now, I can’t image a Slow Traveler ever behaving thus, but I thought this would be a good example to juxtapose with my fantasy version of how it could have gone: Man enters shop, compliments woman on beautiful wares. Woman thanks, asks if there is something he likes in particular. Man indicates clock. Both wax poetic about clock’s beauty for several minutes. Man asks price, woman answers. Man sadly shakes head, comments that he is now poverty stricken after wife’s shoe shopping spree yesterday (indicates relaxed, happy looking woman waiting outside). Woman makes slightly flirtatious comment regarding what trouble women can be. Man laughs and settles himself against counter. Half hour conversation ensues (He just spent two weeks in Tuscany and Venice. Yes, Venice is beautiful. He and wife hail from Philadelphia. What a coincidence, her grandfather’s second cousin emigrated to Philadelphia in 1903, have they met?). Talk returns to the clock. Some good natured figures are bounced back and forth, interspersed with observations about the weather and recommendations for where to dine. A deal is struck, she packs up the clock and throws in a small ashtray for good measure. His wife comes back the next day for the lamp she spied the afternoon before. All is done with a light touch and friendly tone. Finesse.
Yes, you say, but what if there is a language barrier? Never fear, some of the best bargaining I have ever witnessed has been done almost exclusively with hand gestures, pen, and pad of paper. Some good stock gestures in any bargaining repertoire may include on one side:
1) clutch object to heart = I cannot live another moment on this earth without possessing this pair of boots/antique vase/plastic gladiator cruet set;
2) pull out empty trouser pocket lining = I have been burned in the bear market, so have pity;
3) down on hand and knee = international sign of supplication.
On the other side one might see:
1) palm hitting forehead = disbelief at the mere thought of parting with such a valuable and rare object as this pair of boots/antique vase/plastic gladiator cruet set for such a paltry figure;
2) sympathetic head shaking = yes, I too put my money in Olivetti in the 80’s;
3) resigned shrug = international sign of giving in.
Remember, finesse.
A final note: Many guide books point out that a number of stores post signs informing you that their prices are fixed. I have found that it never hurts to ask if there is a possibility of a small discount. The worst that can happen is that you are politely told no, and the best is that you find yourself with extra gelato money at the end of the day.
4. Italian men are predatory.
Consider this scene: you (you’re female in this scene, and not unattractive) are sitting in the main square of your hometown...Des Moines, let’s say....at about 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, enjoying the sunlight and the view of the world-famous Baroque fountain (go with it). A man saunters up and starts making conversation. It soon becomes apparent that you are being hit on. Now, I don’t know about you, but I am pretty pragmatic about these sorts of things, so my first reaction would be to ask myself, “Why doesn’t this loser have a job, or isn’t at very least busy working on his Ph.D. thesis or serving hot meals to the hungry or otherwise productively occupying his time at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday rather than trying to pick up women at the famed Des Moines Baroque fountain?” (The same could be said for you, of course, but we are talking about predatory men, not ne’er-do-well women here.)
The point I’m trying to make is that the vast majority of Italian men, like those all over the planet, are too busy working, studying, volunteering, parenting, and otherwise living full, happy, responsible lives to spend many weekday afternoons hanging around in piazzas, wolf-whistling. The small percentage who instead have nothing better to do than lurk at the Trevi Fountain trying to pick up foreign women are more noticeable, but certainly not indicative of the average Italian male. This is not to say, of course, that Italian men, like many of Mediterranean cultures, are not notably more appreciative of the well-turned-out female than the average stiff-upper-lipped, Puritan Anglo-Saxon (aside, of course, from those certain subgroups which seem to include predatory behavior as part of their professional qualification the world over, i.e. construction workers, truck drivers), and given the amount of time and effort many Italian women dedicate to their appearance, it seems only fair that it should be so. However, I have found that a token, subtle glance at a leg is one thing (quite buoying, in fact, on those days that I can’t quite get the zipper up on my skirt and my hair dried all funny and sticky-outy and I am surrounded by a nation of women just naturally more attractive than myself), asking you if you are traveling alone and shadowing you back to your hotel is quite another.
So, my word of caution is to steer clear of those same people you would be prone to steer clear of in Des Moines, and you should have no problem. You may, however, go back home convinced you have the best legs on earth, and, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that in my book.
To acknowledge that there is, indeed, an exception to every rule, I offer the example of my Italian husband, who, despite centuries of proud history and genetic selection, must be the single most oblivious man to female charm and beauty on the planet. The only time I have ever seen him look twice at a woman in 15 years was when we once passed Naomi Campbell on the street in Portofino, at which point he managed to trip over a flowerpot, fall of the curb, and walk directly into a No Parking sign all in one fluid movement. I must have looked particularly nonplussed, as he immediately threw his arm around my waist and whispered in my ear, “Too thin!”. Good save.
So, as my husband likes to say, “’Un pò fa,’ disse l’uomo mentre che faceva la pipi’ nel mare.” (Every little bit helps, said the man as he peed into the sea). I hope I have added my bit to the sea of knowledge and not to that of myth and misconception. I’m sure I’m not the only one out there who has spotted these hilarious off-mark cultural observations. Let’s hear others!
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