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nearly30yearsitalian

~ Daily observations of life in Rome and further afield from a single, working mother either entirely competent or confused in two languages, two cultures, at least two mindsets.

nearly30yearsitalian

Category Archives: Nuances

Peeling back the layers of cultural nuances that distinguish and identify background and explain reaction.

The Oyster Chairs

29 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by nearly30yearsitalian in Nuances, Verse

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images, nostalgia, Poetry

My grandmother’s living room was not large but warm and inviting. One entered either from the dining room, through the main entrance to the house, past the secretaire in the corner with the oil portrait of my mother wearing a red handkerchief hung above it or –much more commonly– through the kitchen with its warn and warm sand-toned linoleum floor and corner bar and sink placed just opposite the door to the basement where my brother would one day live and hide for a spell. This would become just one of a series of long and short spells.

No matter which way you came into the living room, you faced a rather intricately carved wooden hearth whose bookshelves framed the fireplace. In front of these book shelves where books like The Italians and Italian Idioms lived, flanking the fireplace, were two oyster chairs. I don’t remember if they were called oyster chairs or if only my grandmother called them oyster chairs or if I just dreamt about their being called oyster chairs one day and there they remained in my mind as oyster chairs.

She’d had them recovered in the 80s with a soft velour in varying tones of pale yellows. Their shell-like shape swiveled on an invisible mechanism, hidden by the fabric. The arms were covered with protective sleeves of the same fabric. The chair to the right was nestled between the black, baby grand piano to the back of the room and the right side of the fireplace. It tended to stay put, never teetering, carefully placed on the carpet and just in front of the small window leading out to the screened-in porch on the side of the house. The chair on the right got little use, for the view of the TV was blocked by its twin. It would be used most often on holidays and visiting Sundays for unwrapping presents and conversation.

The swiveling, soft yellow oyster chair on the left was also positioned carefully on the plush red carpet which covered all of the living room, entranceway, staircase and dining room. However, it often shifted ever-so-slightly so just a tiny bit of its intricate, invisible base went onto the slate floor in front of the fireplace, causing it to be off kilter and not only swivel but tip. Here my brother perched and hung and jumped and swiveled. Yet he was not a little boy. He was a big, strong, high school athlete who, bowl of ice cream in hand would take a running lead from the kitchen and land on the delicate oyster swivel chair with a thump. His legs splayed over the protective sleeve, he’d swivel it around, still holding his ice cream in one hand and reach for the remote control with the other. My grandmother would make a plea to “go easy on the furniture” but to no avail. Not because he didn’t adore his grandmother but because he didn’t equate the running down of things with the running down of people.

For years I watched the once identical, soft yellow swivel chairs become different from one another. One carefully preserved, well-positioned and poised, the other tattered, unbalanced, bruised, its slip covers worn and threadbare, its bones creaking.

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Nothing Happened

17 Saturday May 2014

Posted by nearly30yearsitalian in Nuances, Toiling in Rome, Verse

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Tags

girl power, italy, Poetry, rome, storytelling, women power, women's rights, women's safety

Late afternoon sun warms the urban ladder.
Mediterranean promise lies behind its rays.
A light, sultry, dust-carrying desert wind lifts the grime of the inebriating city.
Time is running low to this experience of rebirth –
a Renaissance of her own – from midwest to mid-Med.
Learning hides behind every corner, life lessons coming fast and furious.
Lessons of world struggle, history’s shifting poles of power give pause.
Independence comes through the panes of a speeding train, the pains of growth spurts.
Significance creeps through everywhere, through every crack in the asphalt, in every sprayed tag.
Courage, faith, steadfastness arise, filling her core.
Everyday a new discovery, everyday a new blessing.
All this, she thinks, as she scampers down the metal framed staircase.

Observations skills keen, she sees his furtive backward glance.
She advances aware, her newly fortified armor up.
Rounding the bottom rung, he pounces.
Arms flail, breath caught, fragments of rumpled suit and razor stubble betray social ineptitude.
Escaping as quickly as he attacks, she runs back up the rickety metal staircase towards the masses.
Thank goodness, she repeats to herself and later to her caregivers, nothing happened.

Nothing happened.
Except that instead of falling into warm, fitless sleep each night, she replays the sound of those metal stairs in her head, her heart beating fast against the silent walls.
That happened.

Nothing happened.
Except she no longer walks anywhere unaccompanied, her newfound independence taken hostage in a fragment of a second. Her self-assuredness under siege.
That happened.

Nothing happened.
Except that her smile ever-so-slightly lost its brilliance.
Her glance ever-so-slightly suspects.
Her voice holds a veiled apology.
That happened.

Happy exploration of new pathways is now tantamount to a six-year-old walking down a shadowy hallway to a dark bedroom during a thunderstorm.
Venice’s romantic canals reflect threat.
Rome’s gelato has lost its creamy lustre.
Sleep lacks rest.
Study brings unwanted mental meanderings.
That happened.

From girl to woman in an instant
she discovers solidarity among women and women-loving men.
She will overcome and find power within.
Women are not playthings.
Women band together, find strength and come back stronger and more fierce.
This happens.

 

Taxi!

15 Thursday May 2014

Posted by nearly30yearsitalian in Nuances, Toiling in Rome

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rome, taxi driver

The question of Roman taxi drivers has been plaguing the city for some time now. Self-owned taxis are driven by drivers who generally belong to one cooperative of the other, all part of a large lobby which plagues and often holds hostage the Mayor’s office. It is a generally well-known fact that many, many licenses are often sourced, purchased and not necessarily “earned” outside of Rome. Legend has it that if you were to search 10 drivers, you’d find as many as 8 of them have licenses from Pescara, Terni, Ancona or some other underwhelmed city not far from Rome. 

Taking a taxi in Rome has become a gamble. Will he be kind and service-oriented? Will he act as though having to give me a ride somewhere is an imposition to his busy schedule? Will I hear endless sugary hits Baglioni and Venditti tunes from the 80s at the highest volume or will it be interminable arguments about La Roma or La Lazio (depending on whether the decals on the dash are Giallorossi or Celesti)? Will there be the sweet aroma of dope mixed into the grungy Marlboro stench or will the Evergreen hanging from the rearview mirror make my stomach turn? And when it does begin to turn because of the smell, the heat or the rapid weaving between lanes of traffic, will he allow me to open my rear window without a lecture about how the wind affects his cervicale? Or will he be a she? Oh, that is a rare and generally appreciated occasion!

Here is one episode of Roman taxi idiocy which makes me crazy with rage: taxi comes to take me to the airport. I tell him it’s a credit card fare to make sure he’s not one of those POSfobes whose portable machines are always mysteriously broken. “Si’, si’, signora. Ce l’ho.” We pull into the terminal and he realizes he’s left his ‘man purse’ (literally ‘borsello‘) at home with all of his documents, including his license and his little portable credit card machine. 

Insert here cultural sidebar: It is late afternoon, just past traditional lunch time. Here’s a guy constantly on his phone Whatsapping even as he drives. He gets a call or two. The mumbling and smirking are so transparent, he’s lucky his wife isn’t in the car with me. He’s clearly been somewhere other than home for lunch and gotten something a little extra on the side. During his little afternoon love distraction, he left his borsello where he stores his credit card machine much like he’d have taken his entire car stereo with him every time he parked his car in the 80s. Something about gadgetry that men have to always take them with them.

So, here we have a two-timing taxi driver speeding to airports with no license on him. And I’ve got no cash and he knows it. This is a business expense I  had hoped to put on a credit card but his gadget is in a boudoir somewhere. I bet he’s regretting his little fuga already! The wife would be rejoicing in Karma coming back to bite him.

Yet, I’m the one to suffer. In a fair, Western, working world, I’d say “well, I’m sorry, I have a plane to catch”. Instead the lavativo suggests I leave my bags with him while I frantically look around for a Bancomat (and everyone knows those abound in Rome’s Fiumicino Airport). Off I go in a rush and overheating. Then I stop: “Hold on. What’s wrong with this picture?”
I go back and suggest he follow me so I can then pay him and be on my way. I take my bags– yes, I take them — ever heard the word cafone? This is its embodiment. I, client, carrying my bags like a mad woman running through Fiumicino looking for a cash point as the slow, unprepared, imbranato taxi driver follows behind, talking on his phone.

When I do finally find the ATM, I turn around and ask him if he has his receipt book with him. “Oh, mamma mia, I’ll run to the car and be right back.” Yes, I actually wait for him. The alternative to all this would have been my responding to his initial claim “‘sti cazzi” and been on my way. But police and carabinieri and public bystanders, all with an opinion would have ensued. I make it to my gate with no time for my airport manicure but in time to find the 60 Sicilian Middle School students lining up for my budget flight to Catania: the kind where you have no assigned seat and the quickest and craftiest gets the good seat. As if with 60 12-year-olds there is such a thing as a good seat.

Insert happy ending sidebar here: Landing to a view of active Etna at sunset, I rejoice in my new assignment which will bring me to Sicily again and again. As for those rambunctious, pushy, little tweenies, here’s the trick to no assigned seat flying: recognise that the first to board the shuttle to the plane will be the last to board the plane. I, therefore, can write to my heart’s content on my little device, sat on my little bum (ok, poetic license), drinking my little espresso and be – what a concept – the last on the bus and the first on the plane! So, first seat, first row, slept the whole way. Now to my room with the waves gently lapping just off my balcony, grilled sword fish and some ridiculously wonderful pasta peppered lightly with toasted local pistachios. And this is why we put up with awful taxi drivers and the like.

 

Preface to the exhibition: A Roman Experience, Reflections on Immigration, Isolation, Otherness

11 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by nearly30yearsitalian in Nuances, Toiling in Rome, Verse

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cross-cultural communication, immigration, italy, migration, rome, the other

“When I Left Home -home! what remnant of home there was to be called home- the smell of saffron and freshly ground flour still filled my pores.

With a rucksack of roots, an extra tunic, a pair of sandals and a head scarf, I set out.

Small figurines of animals known to me and carved in ebony line my left pocket. Prayer beads line my right one. I fidget with them as I walk. My shoes prepare to bear the unbearable in the coming days. 

The dust on my skin is familiar, the wind’s song, the noises from a distance all find a home in my brain’s facets of memory.

We walk – I meet others – we all walk in silence. We are the strong, the capable, the eager, the hopeful, the dreamers. We will make a difference and prevail. We will provide for our own.

I have never known what it is to be a minority, to be the one to speak a foreign tongue, the one with the outlandish dress, the one whose skin differs from most.

I have never pondered what air different from that I knew tasted like; what the wind on another continent felt like; never felt pangs of hunger for what’s known, what’s familiar, what’s friendly.”

 

“I have lived here my whole life and before me my parents and before them their parents, and so on and so forth. We have roots here. 

See that shop? That was once my uncle’s fruit and vegetable shop. Look at it now – a bunch of Sri Lankan immigrants there now. Just listen to that racket! They never stop laughing! 

Smell that? That’s my neighbor. I used to have a nice Sicilian family living next door. They weren’t the easiest to understand either but at least they ate at normal hours and cooked with normal ingredients! The grandfather passed away and his son up and took the family north – said it was getting to be unlivable here with all these foreigners moving in! He decided it was time to go somewhere where he could live and work unperturbed! I don’t know what he thinks they’ll find! It’s not like in the North they’re any better to the Sicilians than we are to the Africans. 

I much preferred Sicilians to this man from Pakistan or Kurdistan or Afghanistan one of those places over there! When he’s not praying, he’s cooking, it seems. And smell that! Have you ever?? It’s all those herbs and spices and vegetables they sell now at the market. All their stuff from all their countries. I have to walk twice as far to find a local vendor of local goods! This country is going to Hell in a hand basket, I’m telling you!!

What? Oh, yeah, that old line? Italians emigrated all over the world? We were the ones who they shut out of clubs, apartment buildings and restaurants? The ones the Want Ads excluded? ‘Italians Need Not Apply’. ‘No Italians Allowed’. Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it over and over. It’s what those bleeding heart leftists go on and on about. Or the parishioners who come every year at Christmas and Easter to ask if we’d like to volunteer our time to serve hot meals at the train station to the likes of these guys over here. But I didn’t emigrate, did I? No. I’m right here, tried and true Italian. That wasn’t me on those long boats so why should I feel any empathy at all for these others invading my Rome? My people have been here for over five generations! Get them up and out, I say. Rome is for the Romans.”

 

“I’m trying to recite my prayers quietly to myself because I feel as though my neighbor gets angry every time he hears me praying.

Usually prayers calm people – whenever there is the call to prayer in my country people pause, even if only for a second, and acknowledge a higher power to our own. Here, church bells clang incessantly and yet, no one pauses. No one looks up or bows their head. And on and on they clang.

It is right to recognize our humility, our humanity. We must live in respect of others and of God. We must treat our brothers as we ourselves would like to be treated. But the man next door, as much as he has two arms and two legs, as I do, and two eyes and two ears, as I do, he does not appear to me as brother. As hard as I try to communicate with him, he ignores me or throws up his hands at me. Sometimes, when I hear he is coming out of his door, I open mine to smile at him and he turns the key and runs away down the stairs. It is hard to treat others humbly and with humanity when they refuse you. I try, I fail, I feel defeated. 

I miss the big sky and the earth tones from home. The bird’s song is different here – more aggressive and threatening, or am I imagining it? I spend my days from dawn until dusk on busses and metros and in line from one public office to another. They do not ask my name or where I am from as if they want to know me. They don’t. They want to shuffle me. They want to move me along and push me out. I don’t know where is next but I know it won’t be as frightening and solitary as here. My nights are spent in line at the train station. There Italian brothers and sisters with some foreigners who speak in English serve me hot meals. They do not know me and I do not know them. I try to smile, they’re looking down the line to the next to serve. We are shuffled again. The food is so different from what I know. I eat out of hunger, I hunger for what I know. My biggest fear is that that hunger will, eventually, turn my hope and my will to dust.”

 

“My neighbor is learning a little Italian. Seems the parishioners who bang on and on about the hot meal service also started teaching the poor souls Italian. At least now I can ask what it is he’s cooking all the time. He even brought me a taste. Rice with some saucy stuff on it. It wasn’t exactly a Sunday dinner but it didn’t taste half as bad as it smelled! 

Turns out he’s a doctor, too. Studied medicine but never got to practice it. It seems war broke out, he lost some family and the rest, I guess they say, is history. We’re not friends, mind you, but he’s a nice enough guy. Says his name is Sam. That’s easy enough. Says it’s short for something but I didn’t catch what. Seems he speaks English and German and he’s hoping to head north from here but, in the meantime, he’ll learn Italian and wants to know if I want to help him practice. Ah, what the hell? Who else do I have to talk to? If he wants to come over and watch the game every so often, why not?”

 

“Turns out my neighbor is my brother, after all. He speaks loudly and uses his whole body. Sometimes he hits me in the shoulder to get his point across. It’s a very odd thing but I notice other people do it, too. Sometimes I see two men walking and talking and then they stop. They stop in the middle of the sidewalk to finish their conversation or to make a point. If anyone is walking behind them, he simply has to go around them. It is funny to see how other people get on in the world.

I gave my neighbor-brother some rice the other day. I didn’t tell him but I do worry about all the pasta he eats. I don’t understand how an entire country can survive on wheat alone. If it’s not pasta, it’s pizza and if it’s neither, it’s bread. 
I have begun Italian conversation with him. I think tomorrow I will bring him pictures of home so we don’t have to talk about – and over – the TV!”

 

Separation Anxiety

04 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by nearly30yearsitalian in Nuances, Verse

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

italy, loss, love, rome, short fiction

Nora had not taken the call herself; surely there was some inane law against contacting an almost wife as opposed to an actual wife. Had she had the head to sit down and think about it, she’d go on and on about how the policy-driven institutions of this country were squelching its very vitality; ignoring the human side of any issue, erring on the side of caution, taking very important decisions based solely on the institution’s own risk as opposed to determining the best decision for the finest, most humane outcome. Nora and Peter could discuss things like this with the same wild animation one associates with mad Italians in a crowded neighborhood cafe’ the day after yet another government scandal or leading up to a big soccer match. Sometimes friends of friends would think they were arguing but they’d quickly be reassured that despite their very Nordic features, they were happily hot-blooded. Getting worked up was something they both relished, whether it was about getting more people to recycle in town or the importance of eating well, they discussed everything with passion.

Their passion in conversation was matched in the bedroom, beginning quietly and delicately, as one would envision the handling of raw silk upon its arrival to Venice, following months of heavy and dangerous travel on horseback. They would skillfully unwrap it, slowly, taking care not damage the precious contents inside. Then, ever-so-cautiously, they’d hold one fold and then another, examine it as if they’d never seen anything so exquisite, hold it up to the light, brush it against their skin and finally, when their eyes and touch had adjusted, unfurl it in all of its plush and luxurious glory. Always a different hue, each time a slightly different hand, each time the same slow and meticulous process of discovery. Just thinking of it turned her knees to water and she sank to the bottom of her cluttered closet, gripping the quilted bag they’d purchased just behind San Lorenzo on their last foray to Florence. She sat upon the mound of clothes he’d always insisted she sift through, giving away what was of no use to her and hanging the rest but she had never dreamed of giving away anything. There would always be another, exciting use for her clothes, each stitch of them. They would speak of her like photographs in a family album.

She struggled to regain control of her thoughts but instead just kept seeing his face propped up on one elbow above her, after having unfurled yet another bolt of raw silk. It must have been the third or fourth time that day (Why couldn’t she remember? She chastised herself, “third or fourth, which was it? How could you forget?”). He looked at her, eyes dancing from her mouth to her hair, to her bare skin and back to her glance, “they’re sending me to Syria. I leave tomorrow for New York and next week for Beirut. We’ll go in by ground.”

By his tone he might as well have said, “I’m going to get a glass of water. Can I get you anything?”. It took her a second to register the weight of his words. “They” was the UN agency for which he worked as a consultant; there’d been talk that they’d have to go in and file an assessment of the casualties for the new year statistics. She never would have thought it’d take place so soon. “they’re still fighting over there! What’s to assess? As soon as you turn in your report, it’ll be obsolete and there will be new numbers to tally. That’s if you get to file your report and don’t actually become part of it!”

With that, Nora got up, the feel and color of the silk they’d just ruffled already a distant memory. There was no use in pursuing this, she’d been there before and knew that all of the Peace and Conflict Resolution studies they’d both undertaken would lead to some missions she’d prefer not to think about. If she thought too hard about the UN, she’d soon be overwhelmed with that same negativity she had spent years shedding. All of her dreams about actually making a difference put together with all those who shared them, still could not stand up to the bureaucracy and cynicism of reality within those non-territorial walls.

No. Nora happily kept her expertise to her Mac in the comfort of their own home, with a cup of hot tea and one of her carefully selected playlists in the background. She’d write and lecture on Conflict Resolution but had no desire to go back to any seriously conflicted area of the world; frankly, she saw ample ground for her peaceful intervention in the gun-riddled, vitriolic landscape of their own country. And, besides, they were beginning a family; all of this sex used to be just for sheer gluttony but it now served a higher purpose which was affecting her in unexpected ways. It was still too early to tell if any of their attempts had been successful and yet she felt something in her had shifted: when had she ever cared if the placemats and napkins matched at the dinner table? When had she ever been afraid of anything or anyone? Now she did and she was.

She was afraid of car accidents and slipping on the ice and cried during holiday commercials. Once, not too long ago, they’d gone down to the Farmer’s Market on a Saturday. Weaving in and out of the stalls, going on and on with that characteristic verve about the season’s vegetables and what could be done with them, she’d temporarily lost sight of her Peter. Gone was her excitement over mixing that butternut squash with grated pecorino cheese, fresh pepper and nutmeg to stuff ravioli and serve with melted butter and sage. Panic set in; real panic, the kind that came complete with silent, streaming tears, feet stuck in concrete and low, short breaths. Rationally, Nora knew this was a most unhealthy and possibly pathological display of some sort of fear of abandonment or another such textbook condition but she could not think rationally and she could not find her Peter. In fewer than five minutes, he came up behind her, wrapping his arms around her so that his fists full of sage brushed her tear-streaked cheeks. She yelped a most unbecoming, needy and irrational yelp and hated herself for it Nora did not recognize this whiner, knew not where she’d come from nor who had let her take up residence in her otherwise sturdy self but yelp, nonetheless, she did. Eventually, her public yelping turned to a tiny whimper and, finally, she was capable of carting parcels to the wine and cheese stand, clumsily clinging to her Peter along the way. A couple of sniffles gave way to loud laughter, as he did his best to defuse the dramatic episode with some of his signature dry, comic relief.

She jolted atop her mound of clothes and looked up past the hangers and the long chain hanging from the power-saving lightbulb. Her thoughts ran wild: “that had been a premonition. Someone knew this was going to happen and had sent her a warning. Why hadn’t she realized it then? Why hadn’t she protested more before they sent him? Why the fuck did they call his parents, whom he hadn’t seen in nearly 18 months instead of her, his partner of 5 years, his friend and colleague for 10 years before that and the probable mother of his child? Oh, God. His child.” This pushed her forward in her resolve; she lifted herself up and began stuffing her quilted bag with favorite sweaters, socks, underwear, a few pairs of jeans and, before turning away from the closet, Peter’s wood-chopping sweater. The quilted bag puffed out unevenly and looked a bit like a poorly overstuffed sleeping bag. It would not suffice, sadly, and she went to look for another one.

She found a second bag purchased at that same stall, not the cylindrical, drawstring design of the first but rather an Italian knock-off of those flowered quilted bags she’d seen so much in Boston’s Logan airport and beyond, a favorite among the once preppy set of New England. Like most things Italian, however, this knock-off was better and more beautiful than the original it imitated. Peter had been afraid they might be stopped upon entering the US for carrying counterfeited merchandise. “But it’s not a counterfeit”, Nora held the bag up in front of him and reassured him, “look, this one is by “Vera Brotley”. They laughed heartily as they breezed through the customs area, deftly avoiding the cheese-sniffing beagle, and proceeded to the bus stop from which they headed north, towards darkness and home.

She began filling the second bag with her toiletries, her few medications and vitamins, her round brush, a blow dryer, some books. She fit her computer in its scuba diver’s case and slipped it in on top of her favorite boots and a pair of sneakers. She then grabbed all the chargers she might need: phone, i-pad, computer and looked around. That would suffice. For now.

On the phone, Peter’s father had suggested they meet at Dulles Airport as soon as she could get a flight. She had checked flights and found nothing until too late the following day. She decided she’d drive: what else could she do, sleep? Not likely. Not tonight. She’d called her friend and neighbor so that the house would be looked after. She simply said, “I have to go to D.C., it seems something has happened to Peter.” She had not yet told a soul that he was actually coming back in a body bag. Just the thought of uttering it aloud was enough to break her – for good, this time, not like the interminable five minutes at the Farmer’s Market.

Still, she smouldered that the powers that be had called Peter’s parents and not her. She dreaded the thought of celebrating his life with a bunch of people with whom he no longer associated, in a place foreign to her and forgotten by him. She was his life. This was their house. She was – she felt sure now – having their child.

She started the car, purse on the front seat, i-pad playing their “puttering-around-the-house-on-Saturdays” playlist. Her phone was set to silent, plugged into what once would have been a cigarette lighter and resting in what once would have been an ashtray. She drove-thru a Dunkin’ Donuts for a black coffee which she had the guy pour into her own mug. Peter and she, having both lived in Italy separately and then together for a long while, laughed at how American establishments had so successfully misconstrued the coffee culture of the Mediterranean and made it so inappropriately theirs. Whoever coined the terms “single” and “double” for espresso? Why does a latte have coffee in it? And don’t even get them started on mochaccinos, frappuccinos and the like. Of course, they told each other, they had to be careful around their friends, as their snickering could be taken for snobbery when it was anything but. They both firmly believed in the “when in Rome” concept when it came to coffee. When in Rome, or at home, they’d have Italian coffee. Anywhere else, they’d order it as the local Gods intended it to be. Reaching out to reclaim her mug, she impulsively ordered a dozen Munchkins: maple glazed, glazed chocolate and cinnamon. It had been more than 20 years since she’d had a Munchkin but just then she could think of nothing she wanted more.

Cup in its cup-holder, purse now on the floor- having been displaced by the Munchkins- Nora set out for Dulles Airport. 91 S. to 95 S. followed by a little variation of the 295-495-95 dance, easy enough. Coming up to Springfield, Vermont, Nora saw signs for 11 W. Her car exited. She drove-thru another Dunkin Donuts. This time she handed over her cup for a dark, hot chocolate and asked for 12 more Munchkins. Instead of climbing the on-ramp to 91S, Nora’s car –well, Peter and Nora’s, really– headed west. On her last, cold drop of dark, hot chocolate and licking her fingertip before pressing it to the Munchkin crumbs at the bottom of the box, Nora noticed signs for Buffalo and stayed the course on Interstate 90.

It was about then she realized she was headed to Alaska. They’d talked about it forever, watching Northern Exposure re-runs and marveling at the oxymoronic profound simplicity. In her google-mapping mania, she’d mapped it a thousand times. By her calculations, Peter’s plane would be getting into Dulles the following afternoon, EST. If she continued at this rate, she’d stay ahead of him at least until tomorrow night, PDT. If she never turned back, it would be as if he was still on mission and she’d hold the illusion of looking forward to their reunion. Only this would keep her blood pulsing through her veins, granting her warmth.  Only this – and, oddly, a regular supply of Munchkins – would keep her sane.

She would call her neighbor in the morning and tell her she’d be away longer than expected and ask her to have the village real estate agent come down and look at the place. If they could find someone to pack her private things up and store them, she’d rent it out to one of the professors over at the college. Nora would stay on long enough to thank her neighbor for understanding but hang up before she asked too many questions. Her phone continued to flash on and off silently as she drove steadily from dark towards dusk, listening to “puttering around the house on Saturdays”.

Progress(o)

04 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by nearly30yearsitalian in Nuances

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

anthropology of food, food, food culture, italian food, italian regional identity, italy, roma

On this first day of July we are warned that records are being set as temperatures soar. Having just stepped into my 1920s fourth-floor walk-up apartment from what seems like a deserted film set of the Eternal City, I would say I have to agree. A friend of mine reports having seen prairie grass along the via Parioli and heard the ominous notes of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly while walking her dog this afternoon. I, too, could have sworn I saw some tumbleweed rolling about an empty Metro station just now as I mosied on back from my exploratory mission to check out Rome’s newest urban cathedral, Eataly. It is confirmed, then: today’s heat, known as Caronte for the Greek mythological figure who would ferry souls along the Acheron, reaches beyond sultry to hallucinatory.

Visiting Eataly has stirred in me a series of reflections on one of the most prominent and present aspects of my life since I can remember: food and what we currently call with more pretense than recommended, food culture. If all the days and hours of my life were a pie, all but one slice will have been devoted in some way to food (even my metaphors). My food culture is indelibly linked to Italy in more ways than one. My food culture crosses oceans and centuries and generations and then comes back again to its roots.

When I was a young girl, nearly everything in my grandmother’s Rhode Island pantry was labeled Progresso. While very little in her kitchen came from a can, some of her amazing cooking got a helping hand from Progresso. So, we had chicken cutlets made with “romano” (read: pecorino romano) cheese, parsley, salt and pepper mixed with Progresso bread crumbs; Pasta e Fagioli with Progresso Cannellini Beans and sometimes, just on occasion, I do remember we’d fix ourselves a bowl or two of Progesso’s “Chickarina” or “Authentic Italian Wedding Soup“. My grandmother would not appreciate my mentioning the soups. When it came to tomatoes, there were three kinds: paste, ground peeled and whole. Each of the three had a specific purpose and each either came from Progresso or, more often, from Pastene. Both companies were started in the US by Italian immigrants: Pastene in the 1870s by Luigi Pastene in Boston’s North End and Progresso in the beginning of the 20th Century in New York City by Sicily-born Vincent Taormina. The Pastene Company is still run

There was never a lack of tomatoes and tomato paste in my grandmother’s pantry.

by descendants of the founding family while Progresso was sold to industry in the 70s and is now run by General Mills. I find it interesting that Progresso began with bread crumbs. Having been married to a Sicilian, I quickly learned that breadcrumbs were so much more than that in the poorest reaches of the island: muddicata replaced grated cheese on pasta, provided stuffing for eggplant, sardines and other ‘poor fish’ and actually replaced the meat in the Italian American meatball and, most importantly, found something to do with leftover bread which was – and still is – a sin to throw out. I cannot be sure but I’m willing to bet that Mr. Taormina likely thought canning his childhood memories and selling them was, indeed, progresso.

Stocking these two brands in each Italian home in pre-globalized America was as authentically Italian as one could get. They were considered as Italian as the fresh ingredients found at the markets around town. The fresh bread came from Borelli’s bakery; meat and sausage came from Vito’s, the neighborhood butcher who would provide the Italian cut of any meat for any occasion; pasta was either homemade or American made. Barilla had not yet made an appearance although De Cecco could be found. But mostly it was Prince gracing the tables of Italians in America.

Then I went to Italy and became, in my Maine-born Italian grandmother’s words, ‘more Italian than the Italians’. One might have likened me to the protagonist of that epic classic, “Breaking Away” had it not been for the fact that I was not a man, my father did not sell used cars nor did he expect me to, I did not come from Indiana and I was not athletic. I did watch Italian television- serial dramas, soccer games and inane variety shows I would come to despise much later. I even watched the stations of the cross around the Coliseum every Good Friday while my grandmother and I rolled out the dough for the Easter pies.

My grandmother’s recipes, soon-to-be-compiled in a family book, stand testimony to human geography as defined by food.

And I pretended to understand everything they were saying to the delight of my elders and the sheer frustration of my brother whose TV rights were given up for my higher objective of learning language and culture in a most unorthodox way; I listened to Italian music and I pretended to cook Italian food all the way through high school and college.

Once happily ingrained in Italian life to the point where I may not have been more Italian than the Italians but certainly more Italian than I was American, my then husband and I did everything our neighbors and our neighbors’ neighbors did: we bought seasonal, local vegetables and fruits at our local markets. We made a practice of going near to closing time (lunchtime) and often carted off a full crate of whatever the seasonal abundance was that week at half the price. This lead to sun-drying tomatoes, canning artichokes or eggplant, freezing asparagus, etc., etc.

When October came around, we’d fill the car with five and ten-liter jugs known as damigiane and we would head off to Chianti Puto, above Vinci (of Leonardo Da – fame). There we’d find our farmer-of-the-year (we’d switch, every few years, depending on chance, whim and differing tastes but it was always a question of excellent or slightly more so, never a question of hints of rose and cinnamon or terroir and shifts in wind or precipitation that season). He might be working on the olive trees, getting ready to harvest, or sitting in a wicker-bottomed chair seemingly made for a leprechaun with a hand-sewn cushion dozing or cleaning his thick nails with a whittling knife while listening to the Sunday soccer on the transistor radio. Either way, his wife would call to him, the dogs would rouse and bark and he’d have us back up to the cantina where he’d begin to fill the damigiane.

Damigiane are just larger versions of those liter bottles of Chianti in your favorite restaurants. Most Italians keep them in their garages or cantinas. These are wine damigiane, while oil damigiane also exist. Wine and oil are then bottled over time at home.

The same process would lead us to our year’s supply of olive oil in a month’s time at yet a different Tuscan farm. We’d also order wine and olive oil from friends and colleagues, many of whom had family members who made their own, adding to the variety in cold storage on our veranda. It was a variety born out of affection and ties to one part of the countryside as opposed to another; the quality still varied from excellent to slightly more

Grapes hang in the early morning summer sun on the Tuscan island of Giglio

so and the memories of a day spent with someone we loved or the laughs we’d had would be the motivator behind the choice.

The distinguishing fact between now and then is that this is what one did to spend a day, to save loads of money and, well, it is just what one did. The alternatives were cropping up in the shape of supermarkets but these were for toilet paper and cleaning supplies, rarely for anything else. No one in our circle of friends in Italy would ever contemplate forfeiting a morning at the local market or a Saturday out in the countryside to look for oil or fresh eggs, cheeses and vegetables for a stroll down an air-conditioned aisle.

Where we lived, we all came from various backgrounds: a Southern Italian faction of a North-Central Italian city. I often thought I’d chosen the “Brooklyn” of Italy, so varied were the dialects and accents in my neighborhood. One local friend had some Emiliano worked into her background and therefore in came the lasagne, the tortellino, la zucca. Others were Pugliesi from Foggia enter, therefore, thick, rich meat sauces and cima di rape. We were Sicilian and Italo-American: he brought capers; anchovies; baked, stuffed, fresh sardines; snails; aged cheeses with whole black peppercorns; wild fennel and wild anything, really. I brought Thanksgiving complete with stuffed turkey and pumpkin pies, Christmas cookies and thick, heavy tomato sauces made with canned tomatoes and meatballs which, like most Italian emigrants, had abandoned their peasant roots in favor of rich embellishment (in this case, in the form of three kinds of meat, cheese AND eggs and only a bit of bread) only to come back to the Old Country and boast. Much of what we ate, we picked (including the snails, ugh!). Again, making the foraging a precious part of the process.

We were responsible consumers without today’s hoopla around consuming responsibly. We enjoyed the table and its fruits, both edible and intangible. We proudly bought local (before we knew about chilometro zero). We shopped at the Tuscan-born chain, COOP and were (still are) card-holding members. We supported Arcigola, Circoli Arci, Feste dell’Unita’and I, for one, would have followed Dario Fo anywhere he suggested I go.

The Slow Food movement met with consensus and enthusiasm from a wide base of Italians initially. Then came the ambivalence: was this a heralding of solid, healthy, local customs or the beginning of a food elite?

When Slow Food became a movement born out of Arcigola, we were enthused. We began appreciating our wine and all of its hues and undertones beyond just “excellent”; we paid closer attention, maybe, to the origin of our traditions. We continued to go to festivals and sagre and bought Terra Madre magazine and our customs, though already thoroughly formed, were explained and validated. A movement was born.

The pie chart I refer to above, reflects not only a personal connection. Much of what I have done in my professional life in Italy has been to highlight, describe, explain and bring to experience the connections between land and table, city-dwellers and countryside, wine and olive oil production and the economic and social fabric of Italy. To experience Italy without any of this is not to experience it at all.

Take last night as one of so many fortunate examples: after a long, hot day at the beach, some friends and I gathered at one of our homes for dinner. Fresh goat’s cheese, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, wild mint and Sardinian bread were mixed in a bowl with olive oil and lemon; spelt was cooked in boiling, salted water, drained and served with zucchini and spices; peppers were steamed with onions; ice cold, paper thin carpaccio of sea bream was served on a bed of local greens. All was accompanied by local wines and finished off with homemade myrtle liquer. It was a fabulous dinner server by candlelight on a terrace in a working class neighborhood in Italy like so many others going on at that same moment in similar neighborhoods, each with its own local favorites. None of this was done with pretention or imitation. None of the people present, I suspect, will have ever heard of Chef Ramsay, The Barefoot Contessa or Nigella. Most will believe Slow Food and Gambero Rosso have made food pretentious and something it’s not. They, like many, will maintain correctly that it is not trendy in Italy to eat this way: it is just how people eat.

In 1989 Slow Food announced its objectives to the world and introduced its unmistakeable symbol: the snail, a local, recognizable symbol of slow and steady. It was a movement to herald customs such as these I’ve described and, in singing their praises, warn against their potential extinction in the face of a trend more marketable at the time: fast food. Slow Food was against the industrialization and dehumanization of the table. In the process, it highlighted the economic realities tied to food and even to food security and food scarcity. Food Culture has become a veritable academic field which delves into questions of development, hunger, human geography, anthropology and economics all through the availability, scarcity, trade, tradition and evolution of food around the world.

The movement since its inception can count numerous worldwide effects. Most pertinent to this article is that individuals around the [Western, wealthy, ‘developed’, outside of Italy] World have either changed their attitudes towards food or made a conscious effort not to. Either way, they most certainly have witnessed the debate between fresh, local, seasonal, healthy (and, in some places, expensive and elitist) and fast, easy, industrial and readily available. And cheap and populist.

This is when the conversation on local, seasonal food inevitably turns to money and economics. Good, local, healthy, seasonal food is costly and time-consuming, some maintain. Having witnessed the origin of the movement and what it stood for, I can attest that much of the reason one would buy from the farmer or coop in Italy is not so much the responsible investment in local economies, although this is certainly a knock-off effect, but mostly because what is seasonal, local and fresh has always been what costs less (and please note I am purposely staying away from the “organic” conversation). Basically, the seeking out and picking or purchasing of local foods provides both entertainment and nutrition: two budget lines in one. There is nothing so satisfying as foraging for your dinner and then making and enjoying it, all the while supporting your family budget and the local economy. This was the premise, I believe, of Slow Food. The meal with friends I describe above would be a costly meal in many trendy new eateries around the world while, in fact, it is the economical alternative in ours.

Just two weeks ago, three major openings took place in one very restricted area of Rome in a crescendo of economic development, forward-looking investment and partnership of public and private interest so dissonant with the status quo:

– a major engineering project which has been underway for over a year and locally dubbed “the bridge to nowhere” finally opened, taking traffic from the end of Circonvallazione Ostiense across the train tracks to via Ostiense. The jury is still out on the utility of such a massive structure but most agree it’s a welcome addition to the ever-gentrifying, post-industrial skyline.

– Italo, Italy’s first privately-owned train founded by Ferrari, fashion and football magnates, Luca Cordero de Montezemolo and Diego della Valle, began running fast train service from none other than Stazione Ostiense to Milan, Florence and Naples.

– And, thirdly, Eataly, the massive Ikea-like supermarket of all things deemed worthy of the consumer’s attention by its creators opened on- surprise, surprise- Italo’s reserved platform at Stazione Ostiense.

Is EATALY going to change more than the landscape of the neighborhood?

If only Italy could always pull off with such precision and aplomb endeavors of this sort! It was, in my mind, such a beautifully choreographed grand slam that the local consumers in the neighborhood hardly noticed the coincidence or, if they did, they really believed it was, in fact, coincidental. The neighborhood in question, Garbatella, has seen gentrifying efforts over the past 10-20 years beginning with the removal of the central wholesale markets and the founding of Rome’s third university which initiated the systematic re-generation of various industrial buildings which had long been in disuse. This past month’s events will hopefully contribute to the growth and charm of Rome’s new trendy neighborhood.

The world’s largest Eataly has opened in what was an empty shell of a building known as the Air Terminal. I say “known as” because it never was inhabited at all and turned out to be just one of many projects heavily funded in honor of the Jubilee year of the the Catholic Church which never materialized. Much more than Air Terminal, therefore, it became home to several hundred Afghan migrants over the years. And an eyesore. And an unfriendly reminder to everyone who walked or drove by that Rome is not as welcoming and progressive as one would hope.

While we are left with the question of where all of its former inhabitants went and why some of them weren’t employed by the massive enterprise, most are pleased to see the almost entirely glass building lit up and put to good use every night. Many are hopeful that such an investment in this area of Rome will lead to rising property values, more attention to roads and sidewalks from the local authorities, more visitors to the area on the part of other Romans, Italians and tourists, the demise of the horrific toy store next to it which looks more like a giant crack-house.

But let’s go back to the original theme to this reflection: food, its accessibility and our contribution to local economy by way of foraging for it. All of this attention to food and where it comes from stems from the premise of that handful of enlightened men and women who banded together initially with their snail to protest against the building of a McDonald’s in Piazza di Spagna, the Spanish Steps. I was here that year; I remember that battle. Alas, with that first McDonald’s, locally dubbed McSteps, flood gates opened and there were McDonald’s everywhere.

Their concerns were well placed. Waistlines have expanded, as have derrieres, and nutrition-related health has deteriorated since the global influences on food consumption hit this country: fast food from the US has been met with its domestic counterpart: one can now purchase ready-made frozen meals in the supermarkets. Much like our US children have been known to think french fries come from the freezer, so, too, do our Italian children lack a knowledge of the origins of their foods. Thanks to

A graph illustrating the onslaught of overweight and obese children by region by the National Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

these globalised cultural shifts, Italy’s first ever generation of child obesity is nearing child-rearing age. Eating and meal-taking is still much more a part of every Italian’s social and familial day than it is in that of your average American but things are changing quickly. More meals are skipped or taken on the run, more businesses stay open during the once widespread “pausa pranzo” or siesta. On the other hand, dinner is still generally at home and most still shop in local outdoor markets or at their neighborhood butcher, grocer, baker and fruit stand but supermarkets swell on weekends and during the holidays.

When I speak to students and visitors about adjusting to life in Italy, much of that has to do with timing and schedule. There still is a definite breakfast, lunch and dinner time here. Dictated by the season, they start earlier in winter but get pretty late in summer; this time of year, people have a light breakfast, lunch at 1 or 2 pm (depending on how far south you are) and dinner at about 9 or 10 (again, depending on how far south you are).

Now, with the arrival of Eataly to our neighborhood, much of this could be eradicated: it is open from 10 am – 12 am, seven days a week. This, in and of itself is a revolution. My heart did a little thump when I realized that I could finally, if I had to, shop after hours! If I need a liter of milk and the shops are closed, will I still go beg at the cafe’ in the square or will I be prompted to head over to the shiny, impersonal, Crate & Barrel of Italian food? Will Italians, bound to their eating schedule for centuries, now begin to ‘graze’ like Americans do? And, if so, how will their family and social lives be affected? What about their waistlines and overall health?

I struggle with Eataly, for with its glass elevators, designer chandeliers, open escalators and exquisitely designed selling space, it is a veritable temple to Italian design, ingenuity, taste and flavor. Yet, something has been lost: what Slow Food heralded so many years ago was the natural, unwitting backbone of this society. It put a name and a face to the habits of most Italians and their innate skill in the kitchen both as creators and consumers. The discerning palates of Italians cannot be certified by a course at the top of a glass temple to good taste; they are the product of generations of home-cooked goodness. And if the connoisseur of Italian goodness needs no certificate, even less so do its creators. Taking any Italian homemaker I know into Eataly smacks of presumption and commercialism. Presuming to tell those people who, by virtue of who they are and where they have spent their whole lives, what their local traditions are, how to prepare them and, while you’re at it, what very expensive bottle of wine to serve with them just rings phony. My own grandmother, while never even stepping foot in Italy held the torch to her long food tradition with her magical, innate ability to replicate flavors and aromas she had only seen re-created by her own mother who, in turn, had seen them imported and sacredly protected by hers. I once stopped for directions in a small cafe’ on a tiny country road near my great-grandfather’s hometown in Abruzzo. The family’s kitchen was to the rear of the cafe’, the door slightly ajar. The unmistakeable aroma of escarole soup when I walked in literally brought tears to my eyes. What a miracle that those smells and flavors had been protected along a narrow corridor from there to New England, across language and culture barriers and centuries when one cannot even find them in nearby Rome!

I struggle with Eataly because what was once affordable and a direct connection to the social and economic fabric of each town and city in Italy has gone around the world, been introduced to marketing strategies, packaging and design, outsmarted and intellectualized, analyzed, put in magazines and on tv, poshed up only to come back shiny, expensive and certainly not local. Of course, many of the products are certified Slow Food presidii; the others are chosen from local or regional suppliers. The presumption that quality is guaranteed is a fairly safe one. But the purse is a that of a large, international chain, not the local supplier. And the art and pastime of foraging such as that described above amounts to a paid parking lot and one massive, loud and frenetic indoor, air-conditioned space as opposed to a day out in the country with loved ones and friends. Some of my fondest, most love-filled memories are tied to those days and not, so much, those spent, in the words of Lucio Battisti, “in un grande magazzino una volta al mese“, “arm and arm in a supermarket once a month.”

In my struggle, I wandered and explored Eataly with this article in mind. I went from restaurant to restaurant, smells of fried fish (undoubtedly exquisitely so) mingled with the finest chianina steaks being grilled; noise reverberated throughout the open space and I was suddenly wheeling my double-tiered, plastic cart through the most delicious and expensive food court in the world. It was, nonetheless, a food court.

I spoke to a young woman who worked at the original Eataly in Turin and is now excited to be working at the Italian brewery within Rome’s Eataly where Balladin meets Birreria del Borgo and somehow intertwines with Dogfish Head (I cannot complain about this global matrimony but can only admit that most days it makes me very happy). Francesca recounted how she, too, struggles with the pretention of it all and the not-so-affordable prices. She thinks, though, that the good outweighs the bad; that young people are being educated about good food choices and, of no minor account, employed by Eataly. Regularly. With contracts. Not under the table. This, in Italy’s 2012, cannot meet enough praise. She, too, had heard of the building’s former inhabitants and wondered where they went and why they weren’t offered jobs even in the warehouses or parking lots but continues, “then, again, there are so many Italians out of work.”

I looked at the myriad of spices (exotic and not Italian) and thought longingly of my

Spices, rice, grain, fish, kosher and halal meats, fish and vegetables are available at the center of Rome’s only multi-cultural square’s marketplace: Piazza Vittorio

Saturday mornings at the market in Rome’s only, truly international neighborhood, Piazza Vittorio where I could buy cumin from a Bangladeshi stand and West African spices and plantains from a family from Cote d’Ivoire. Does having Eataly down the road mean I will no longer bask in those sounds, flavors, colors and voices around me in Piazza Vittorio?

I look at all the goodies I generally

Photos of market displays. Fish in Sicily, left. Figs in Rome, above.

pick up at the farmer’s market near Circo Massimo, Circus Maximus, where farmers from all over Lazio come to set up their stands every Saturday and Sunday. The Farmer’s Market, a veritable highpoint of my week, is less than 5 minutes away by car or Metro from Eataly. Europe’s only Solidarity Economy “City” complete with organic supermarkets and

other equo-solidali purchasing opportunities interwoven with viable, responsible enterprise is even closer. I wonder what will come of each come Fall.

My eye is drawn to the beautiful displays of fish and Sicilian delicacies and yet another favorite market comes to mind: the open market on the tiny island of Ortigia in the city of Siracusa, Sicily. Here is where I have relished in recent years when in Ortigia for work in purchasing tiny, salted capers or sun-dried, Pachino cherry tomatoes and other favorites for myself and my Sicilian family and friends who emigrated over 40 years ago to Tuscany. Now, that giddy pleasure of foraging so far away for such sun-packed flavors at such tiny prices is somehow supplanted by the realization that they soon will be able to go to their local Eataly (soon to hit Florence) and find everything they need. Minus the musical hawking in dialect.

I note with some pleasure and some regret that the same juices, yogurts, milk and cheeses I purchase at our local health food store do, in fact, cost less here. Well, there is a conundrum.

I end up leaving Eataly a product of the same consumeristic world I question having spent 98.00 euro! Twelve went to the very smart, lined and heavyweight shopper in navy blue with white piping and lettering, “Italy is Eataly”. Yes, I have paid for the privilege to advertise for them. I did end up buying milk (but only half a liter, the other half I’ll buy from my local place in honor of the conundrum) and yogurt. I also waived my “local only” rule for some raspberries and blueberries arrived fresh from the Italian Alps (by train, I hope). A Vermonter without her berries in summer is not a very happy Vermonter.

I bought gadgets for a friend’s birthday: a nifty milk frother, a silicone cylinder to peel garlic without getting stinky fingers and something I just couldn’t resist: a plastic egg which when boiled with eggs, sings three different tunes, indicating three different stages for the egg. The soft-boiled, my favorite and a personal challenge of mine, rings off a fitting “Killing Me Softly”. Ach! I’ve fallen for the shiny, colorful, “you-cannot-possibly-do-without-this” section!

Onto cosmetics, I find the exact same rassoul clay which was used on me in Istanbul when visiting the hammam. Surely, the exercise of whipping it up and applying it myself  in my porcelain tub will pale in comparison to the ancient ceramic halls of the women’s hammam and the full-breasted woman who sang beautiful whispers of Turkish prayers to me while she not-so-delicately saw to the proper treatment of my hair and skin. Surely, I’d never washed properly until then nor have I since. Maybe with my store-bought clay from my neighborhood Eataly, I can aspire to replicate that one beautiful, unforgettable morning.

There is much to be studied with the onslaught of this new addition to an ever-changing environment. As Italy strives with its ‘technical’ government to stay above the curve and leaders of local, municipal and regional organizations, universities and businesses attempt to innovate and re-generate with little or no funding, one can only hope that events such as the one culminating in the simultaneous opening of three major, innovative and modern enterprises actually do indicate stimulus and are as much or more of a symbol of progresso than those cans that lined my grandmother’s pantry.

Italian Gender Relations in the Cramped Space of an Airplane Cabin

29 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by nearly30yearsitalian in Nuances

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On a plane to London, an extended Roman family travels for the long weekend. I happen to be seated next to the younger members of the group; at first glance, they seem like young high school sweethearts but soon it is evident they are a married couple. It seems they are traveling with his parents and other family members. As we prepare for the take off, the voice over the loudspeaker (in Italian) repeats over and over the necessity to turn off all electronic devices before take-off. They are specific, knowing how attached to their modern devices Italian people are and how stubborn, too, when it comes to following direction, and they list all imaginable devices by name. At that point, a tiny voice near the window suggests her bolder partner heed the advice and turn off his i-phone. Every time the loudspeaker repeats the order, she timidly reminds her husband. At one very uncomfortable point (for me and for her, that is), he turns sharply towards her, “insisti?”, he grits. He says it over and over again, a typical Roman goading mechanism, drawing his face closer and closer to hers each time. She’s near the window, there’s no further back she can go. Each time she tries to reply with her feeble tones, “they say it interferes…” or “but they said…”, he won’t let her finish and, in his extreme braggadocio just raises his hand and sticks his face in hers, repeating, “o! allora? insisti!?”I wanted to turn to him and say, “look, you little bully, she’s right. Turn your fucking phone off and get out of her face.” But I know as well as any woman who has ever been in that belittled and intimidating position that it would be of no use. And so the little schmuck’s phone stayed on. (As an aside, we took off and landed without incident which proves to me that this turning off of phones on planes really is a debatable topic, but that’s another story.)

As I listened to them during the flight between my intermittent, deep sleeps, my heart-strings pulled. This beautiful, young woman continually put herself in positions of powerlessness. She’d feign fear at every bump along the way. She’d look at her husband as if to say, “what was that?” She knew what she was doing, she was giving him opportunities to show her up, to feel strong and all-knowing, to protect her. It’s not uncommon, it’s not new, it is a tradition handed down through the generations. Mothers to daughters to granddaughters: make them feel important, never show your ability, your intelligence, your independence. In fact, never reveal any of that even to yourself. Bury it, hide it, let it fester or wilt away. What do they want to eat? How would they like that cooked? Sunday plans must include the game (whatever the game may be), and so on and so forth. It’s a web of deceit and design; difficult, demeaning and disheartening. And, contrary to a conversation I recently had with colleagues of mine, this is not a step backwards for young women for whom we (and those who came just before me) paved the way; for many of the women I see subscribing to the long tradition of standing in the wings, are direct descendants of the same patterns. There may be a certain tendency to revert to the old objectification of women in the media and in our Anglo-American cultures but the women who fought for a fairer Italy in the 60s and 70s raised women who still fight. They are not reverting. It is those who were oblivious to the change due to their working class and often starving status, who continue to take a back seat. They hold down the hearth and manipulate the husbands, fathers and sons in their life in a co-dependent frenzy which will assure them a constant flow of neediness to feed their own until the day they die.

There exists, as a result of this commonplace game, among a certain social set of the masses particularly in Central and Southern Italy, a suspicion of strong-willed and independent women. The opposite of needy becomes humiliating to men who are used to supplying the answers and quelling all angst: A woman who rises above them humiliates them. I listen to women like this one next to me or mothers who complain their sons “just don’t want to sit in their car seats” when they’re babies and “just didn’t like to study” when they drop out of school and sleep until lunchtime, their every need catered to, as long as they continue to need their mother, and I cannot help but think they are actively assisting in the repression of fellow women; that the insults and liberties suffered by women, as men lash out against them, are, in large part aided by the mothers and wives who allow and, indeed, abed the repression. There are girls who grow up coached and encouraged by their fathers and mothers to stand alone, excel, speed and speak up. I cringe at the thought of the fears we witnessed and felt as children in honor of the frail, male ego.

Before landing, the young woman’s feigned fear reaches a point where she actually asks how a plane lands. How is it that it doesn’t just crash face first? She gives him the perfect opportunity to chuckle at her lack of knowledge. Perfectly crafted, almost scripted, they imitate the scenes of inequality between husband and wife to which they’ve always been exposed. Patronizingly, he responds, “No, amore (as if to say, you silly nitwit), it doesn’t go straight down like this” (he used one of the airline magazines rolled up to simulate an airplane in landing phase and her tray table which was down, despite the order to put it back in place, to simulate the runway). His own lack of knowledge and vocabulary was so painfully evident as he purported aeronautical prowess, it was almost comical if not for the power dynamic which had long been established between the two. He held her hand as we landed, her eyes and expressions continuing to convey little, lost girl syndrome; she gave a yelp and a smile at touch-down and immediately reached into her purse where the i-phone lay. The plane still braking, she dialed her in-laws, back in Rome.
“Si’, si’, we just landed. We’re still on the runway. It was so funny….how’s the baby? it’s cold and cloudy here, what’s it like there?” and, then to her husband, “your father says it’s 30 degrees and sunny there but it’s so cold here, how can that be?”

And she was not being facetious. I was quietly thankful that I didn’t have to witness yet another lesson, this time in meteorology. All of this was taking place as the other members of their family and a handful of other Italians applauded the landing, a tradition which is becoming a rarity. Occasionally, especially on the Italian national carrier, one can still bear witness to the raucous applause upon landing which baffles and amuses the other, non-Italian passengers. Others were standing, many others still, mostly businessmen en route to important meetings, on their phones: “mamma” rang out through the cabin, “si‘, sono arrivato“. All of this as the purser was telling everyone to remain seated and keep all electronic devices off until the “fasten seat belts” sign was switched off. Repeated attempts were necessary to gain control again of the unruly passengers at which time the “fasten seat belt” sign was switched off and all those called to order, in unison, raised their hands in a gesture loosely translated as, “so, what was the big deal anyway?”

The young woman next to me calls back a few rows to a family member, “ma ti funziona Facebook?” “is your Facebook working?”. Her husband shoots her a glare “sei in roaming, non e’ attivato”. He’s pleased as punch not only that he knows what roaming is but that he can use it correctly in a sentence and tell her that hers is not activated. The excitement, however, has gotten the upper hand and egged on by her cousin/sister/sister-in-law in the back, they fool with their phones until, Eureka!, it works! “You’ll end up paying un leasing”, he states, using yet another English term to indicate the massive amounts of money international roaming will cost her in order to use her Facebook. This time, I have to agree with him but I secretly rejoice in the idea of his having to pay onerous amounts of Euro upon his return to Italy just for the sheer pleasure of his wife.

Rome is Burning

29 Wednesday Jun 2011

Posted by nearly30yearsitalian in Nuances

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

italy, Nuances, rome, Summer

In Rome, one doesn’t just “take the heat”, she absorbs it, assimilates it, becomes it. I describe Rome as a sexy, gritty city all year round but in summer, like much of the Mediterranean, it becomes even more so. Skin glistens dark bronze to deep ebonies; the showing of skin allows a glimpse of soul.

Summer in Rome reveals the soul.

Yesses flow more freely than during the less-scantily-clad year. We find ourselves in one hot and steamy locker room after a really good, endorphin-building workout. Stares linger. The very fact that this decidedly non-athlete can conjure such an image is testimony to the fact that our very atoms are shaken-up and turned around in summer heat.

In my primer years, before becoming fully Italian, I would roll around naked on the ceramic tile floors of my newlywed apartment in a small bowl of a city in Tuscany, framed so closely by the Apennines so as to prohibit the passage of air. My soft, white, New England flesh would absorb the cool from the ceramic tiles. I’d weep for the heat, rolling from one row of tiles to the next. I’d pine for a New England chill.

It has not gotten any less hot in Italy, in fact, conventional wisdom tells us it is getting hotter. And yet, like most Romans I know, I come to life in summer. The stream of warm air flowing through the city of Rome, not dissimilar to an eager lover’s warm breath on your neck, is a welcome change to the lack of air in the bowled Tuscan cities of the Apennines.
It is so hot as to defy the ordinary; high heels of slim sandals sink into the sidewalk; technology flits and wanes, the electrical system in my car only works at night. My eyelids weigh, my breathing slows, I become a slightly southern drawl-version of my former self.

The post-sunset life of summer in Rome brings promise and promiscuity. Promise of promiscuity. As my fiery Sicilian friend says, it is a time to throw out the seed without giving it too much thought and then, come fall, harvest whatever grows! And it takes no prisoners. We all, for a time, become as sultry as the air that invades our very being and every corner of every room. There is something to be said for the adjustment to climate and seasons on the part of the human race. Adapting to nature, in and of itself, affects our inner being in a humbling way, adding an element of perspective, deeper meaning and, well, proportion to our livelihoods and daily routine. How important can that deadline be in the face of 105 degrees in the shade?

The earth tells us to slow down and rearrange and when legislation, private and public enterprise follow the earth’s suggestions, even those of us with an innate puritan work ethic feel validated. We adapt without guilt. We are molasses by day and crisp, white wine by night. We revel in the evening breeze until the wee hours.

We wake early, too, with few hours’ sleep but with that vigour from the night similar to that which a new flirt provides. Our endorphins rise to the occasion and we adjust. It’s mating season.

With bedroom windows open and heavy, dark, louvered shutters ajar, the city’s couples turn to each other in the deep of the night. One becomes accustomed to the love-making schedule and rhythms of one’s neighbours. At first I pummelled the mattress and held the pillow tightly on my head. Now I simply let the sounds lull me back to sleep with a tiny smile on my lips. Slightly embarrassed for them and with a blush, I allow myself to hear their peaks and valleys which seem, from a comfortable distance, to utterly satisfy. I imagine they fall into a deep sleep, the cooling night air streaming in through their shutters and over their spent bodies.

As I fall back asleep, I think of the thousands of juxtapositions facing me daily in this, the sexy, gritty, holy city; the city of the sacro e profano. Just as the Pope will address thousands of worshipers this morning, the day of Rome’s Patron Saints Peter and Paul, at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, those same pilgrims will be back at the Feast of Saint Paul’s tonight drinking, eating, dancing and making merry until the wee hours of the morning when the festivities culminate in fireworks for all to see and feel and emulate. Every night this summer there will be a saint’s feast somewhere in the city of Rome and at every feast the explosion of color and spark and sound. And in every corner of every room an explosion of color and spark and sound.

Stellina

29 Friday Apr 2011

Posted by nearly30yearsitalian in Nuances

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Living abroad, Nuances, rome, the way things were


The other day I went to my doctor. When I moved to our new neighbourhood, I changed doctors for my daughter and me. It’s not mandatory to do so but my daughter had outgrown her paediatrician and I was not particularly attached to my last neighbourhood doctor. A dear friend of mine (also a doctor) referred to him as my “Al Qaeda” doctor. I know that wouldn’t be considered necessarily appropriate at home in the US. Political correctness to the extreme would probably find something wrong with that. But here we can (and do) say anything we want.

So, I changed doctors. Now, all I have to do is go down the three stories to street level from my apartment and turn left onto the sidewalk. Between the door to my apartment building and my doctor is but one storefront: there sits a woman behind a shatter-proof glass partition offering to buy gold from those in my neighbourhood jonesing for new hair extensions or the latest 10″ heels, those who need to pay for their cable sports subscriptions and tanning salon appointments.

My doctor sees her patients on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. She prefers them to call first and make an appointment but this, more than any other, is a place where old habits die hard and doctor’s appointments are a foreign concept. Going to the doctor’s office is a right and a rite. It is neither where I grew up.

Every day the elderly gather in my doctor’s waiting area (tiny, not geared for comfort and, with its eight rudimentary chairs, five along one wall and three facing them, does not even try to be). One of my first visits was on a cool, sunny morning in February. In the sun it was probably 65 degrees; in the shade still in the 50s. In came Stellina, accompanied by her husband. All 38 kilos of her was wrapped in a heavy wool coat whose buttons had been moved to the point where they buttoned nearly along her side. She wore a kerchief on her head and tied under her chin. She looked to be about 130 years-old as much as she looked ageless. She was elegant and frail, spry and slow.

“Stelli'”, the lady behind the desk cried out. “Buon giorno, Stelli’! What brings you out so early?That husband of yours should know better than to make you go out in this cold!” It was not cold out, like I said. Maybe chilly. Not cold. Then she turned to the husband “what on earth were you thinking? Or were you?” There’s a hierarchy at the doctor’s office in Italy: if you are working-class, elderly, young (as in someone’s child), uneducated or otherwise lacking in the pecking order, the person manning the phones at your doctor’s office will talk down to you. The doctor will talk down to her and to you.

If you’ve studied or travelled or can otherwise hold your own in a conversation using the proper verb conjugations and more or less complex sentences while being succinct and to the point, the doctor will tolerate you and even, over time, coddle you. Seeing as illiteracy still laces those aged 60 and above and low-level schooling laces the younger generations, the cycle will not likely break anytime soon.

And yet the receptionist was lashing out in a most affectionate way. Stellina walked over and stroked her cheek before patting it before, finally, gently pinching it as she would have her own great-grandchild’s. The husband threw his hands up and started to justify himself to all of us: “We have to come here, go to the pharmacy, collect our pension, pay the bills, all before 1:00, how could I come out any later?” Yes, in my neighbourhood, as in all of Italy not sold out to tourists, siesta still begins at 1:00pm, so, one must get one’s errands in before lunch and rest time. We all looked at him forgivingly, he sat down again and opened the paper, Metro, handed out for free in coffee bars and metro stations every morning. Stellina pressed her hands along her tiny hips, smoothing her skirt down where the elastic waistband (a necessary afterthought) caused it to bulge slightly. Her husband folded the paper and stood to help her out of her heavy coat and loosened her kerchief for her. “Vieni, siediti, Stelli’. ” She turned right in front of me and made to take the three steps between her and the chair. Then she turned back. Gave the receptionist another smile, patted her cheek again, turned away and went to sit down with her husband. The receptionist, beaming and calling her “amore ” , encouraged her along to her chair.
Stellina and her husband sat hand in hand as he read the paper and held her coat on his lap. He told her the news in a voice loud enough – no, actually intended – for us all to hear.
When it was my turn, I told the doctor how happy I was to be in this new neighbourhood and how pleased I was to meet her. She confirmed it was a pleasure but had less favourable things to say about the neighbourhood. She began to complain about her patients, the rudeness, the crassness of them. I said, “but Stellina and her husband out there ” … “They, my dear Signora, are one of the few exceptions. ” My romantic heart was temporarily crushed. My neighbourhood, famous in all of Italy for its 1920 architecture, built for the families evicted from the Roman Forum by Mussolini who wanted it all for himself, unlike any other, full of artists and old Roman families, a cacophony of sound and colour, was snootily under attack.
In contrast to the other case popolari in Rome, Garbatella preserves a fighting spirit of the evicted, the displaced. While other spots of Rome were granted Council Housing in the great master plan of the urban redistribution under Mussolini, here gratitude for Il Dux has always been lacking. The homes are quaint and artfully crafted by three architects from just as many different parts of Italy and the neighbourhood winds and climbs like a maze over hills with pedestrian paths from one project to the next, overflowing with flowers, trees and shrubs, interspersed with parks and cobblestone. Ok, and laden with graffiti, social activists’ clubs and hanging laundry. Yet, as quaint and desirable as a 21st century ex-pat finds it, just as detestable the original families settled here by force once found it. For them, it was repatriation. The 5 kilometres from their original dwellings to this would have been like 15 kilometres today. While we are now considered central, they would have been relegated to the countryside back then, a fate of untold hardship. While other council settlements of the times let their gratitude then form their political views today, this and a couple of nearby settlements let their anger at being displaced form their very fighting spirit today. One breathes the air of strength in masses and feels the camaraderie in every street, piazza and coffee bar. Never in gratitude to Il Dux, Garbatella remains a place of open minds, hearts and, well, every so often, purses and desk drawers.
The other day I went back to the doctor to pick up a couple of prescriptions. The receptionist was being brutally scolded in very formal Italian. She couldn’t find the doctor’s “stamp” with which she validates all of her prescriptions. I thought it odd that in such a bare, tiny office they could lose something with such ease. “I tell you always to lock it in the drawer when you have to turn your back! Now look, it’s gone again! And I’m full of appointments, how will I get to the Carabinieri before 1:00?” (Actually, while the 1:00 lunch and rest holds true for most, one can still go to the police at any time, really, but one wouldn’t unless it was a dire emergency.)
When she called me into her room, I said hello and, in my naiveté commented on the event which was clearly impossible for anyone not to overhear. “Incredibile”, I said. “what an odd thing to go missing”. The thought of someone forging prescriptions for drug addiction was still furthest from my mind. “Odd? You know how many times it disappears from here, Signora mia?” She gave me a knowing smile. “What did I tell you? It may be a fashionable neighbourhood but don’t believe it quaint for one minute! I can’t wait to retire from here!”

——————————————————————————–

I ran into Stellina at the seamstress’ shop the other day where my daughter was having the dress we’d bought for her cousin’s wedding remade to fit her torso and imagination. The dress had cost us thirty euro; to have it custom fit would cost us fifteen. The shop, with no room for two slender people to stand next to each other, forms a line from the street to the counter. It is flanked with embroidery kits, yarn, pins, needles, bras and underwear all displayed vertically, making the best use of tiny space and high ceilings. Stellina came in and was standing behind another couple of ladies who deftly made room for her to move to the front. There is a stool in the corner, wedged between the measuring counter and the curtain leading to the tiny storeroom where my daughter was slipping into her strapless bra. Stellina was lowered onto it and presided over the viewing.
As the seamstress pinned her dress, others voiced their opinions and one, apparently once famous costume seamstress in the Dolce Vita era of Italian cinema, came up with an idea and tried to convince my strong-minded, teenage daughter to go with it. She did not and our young seamstress-shop owner stood up for her. The veteran dressmaker eventually huffed and made her scorn obvious as she slinked her way past others all the way to the door. I felt awful. Had we offended her? The young seamstress said it was she who had overstepped her bounds; this was not her model and she should not have interfered. The spectators agreed. She went on to compliment my daughter on her firm resolve; I realized again how much I’ve been a pushover to please others and how proud I am of my daughter for sticking up for her own will. Once she was all pinned, Giulia beamed. She loved how this was going to come out and felt perfectly at home with her close circle of nonne voicing their opinions, giving her advice and talking about the event. Stellina stretched her arm out and smoothed Giulia’s dress from the waistline over her hip and ended with a kind little pat on her bottom. With that, my daughter was excused; she could step out of her dress and back into her clothes. The neighbourhood nonne who by morning meet at the doctor’s and by dusk at the seamstress’ merceria, approved and accepted her. She’d brought light to their evening and they’d brought nurturing to hers.

Ok, ok, I’ll do it

06 Wednesday Apr 2011

Posted by nearly30yearsitalian in Nuances, Verse

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Tags

italy, lifegate radio, Nuances, rome, Toiling in Rome

After, well, nearly thirty years in Italy, I have finally decided to take the advice of many and begin my own blog. I feel slightly like that other Julia in last summer’s big hit, “Julia and Julia”, sitting here in my Roman – not Brooklynese – sottotetto, listening to my favorite radio station (Lifegate – 90.9 in Rome and on line at http://www.lifegateradio.it/).
On this space, I will share some of those quintessentially Italian, Roman or some other regional moments which I witness in my very busy day-to-day. In doing so, I  hope to reveal some of what makes Italy so fascinating, so mysterious, so frustrating, so maddening, so chic, so apparently unruffled yet so animated and, at times, suffering.

The words “watch this space”have all of a sudden taken on all new meaning!

A prestissimo, allora….

Nuances Toiling in Rome Verse

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