thisweekinitaly.com

Easter

I went to Church in Florence and met there two American friends from
Bologna. I got to church early and was able to see the start of the “Easter
Parade” Florence Style. It was led by three or four groups dressed in
Renaissance outfits (Italy’s answer to the Civil War reenactors I saw so
often in Gettysburg). The men wore vests of leather, cloth or metal. They
carried swords, pikes, antique firearms, daggers, and cross bows. Behind
these groups was a large wooden war chest drawn by 4 oxen decorated with
flowers. The war cart had fireworks all over it which are lit when the cart
gets to the cathedral where it is blessed. (Don’t ask me what, if anything,
this has to do with Easter.). There is also a dove released and depending
upon where it lands (or flys I can’t recall), the harvest for the year is
predicted to be good or bad (sort of like Groundhog’s Day).

In Italy, when Easter is discussed, the elements that are discussed are in
order of priority: food, the long vacation weekend, and religion. I had
dinner with friends that started with crostini with fish and the traditional
hardboiled easter egg. Next there was a green lasagna made with artichokes
and other green vegetables. Then there was rabbit stuffed with spinach and
with other items. The salad was with rucola and radicchio. For dessert we
had a Sicilian cake made with ricotta cheese. There were then sliced
strawberries. Red wine with meal and spumanti with dessert. Coffee to
finish it all off.

Phone Booth

I usually call the USA at night (because of the time difference) from a
public phone booth. There are both open booths and closed ones. The closed
ones are better to insulate the noise from the street. The light in the
closed one near my house now does not work; who know when it will be
repaired. Recently I saw a brightly lit closed booth. I stepped in to make
a call, but this booth had no phone in it.

Shoes

I’ve always been surprised that at the twice weekly market in Pistoia there
are only two stands selling shoes. Well last Saturday on my way to Library
I passed through a piazza I hadn’t visited before on market day. It was
filled with market shoe stands. My surprise is over.

Being Discovered

There is the old joke of the two guys stranded on a deserted island in
middle of the ocean. One is distraught at ever being rescued. The other is
totally calm. When the upset one asks the calm one, how he can remain so
blasé, he replies: “I pledged $100,000 to my (church, synagogue, university
–you fill in the blank), I’m sure they will find me.” I know how he felt
as I got this week a fund raising call in Italy from Harvard Law School to
which I had never given my new address or phone number.

My Language Skills

On the train recently I could understand the announcements made when the
speaker spoke Italian better than when he repeated them in English. Is this
a sign of my better Italian skills or just more evidence of how poorly
Italians pronounce English?

A reminder that I really haven’t conquered Italian yet. Recently on the
train I meant to say to an Italian to whom I was talking “I understand that
before the Second World War Italians did not eat a lot of meat” (Meat is
carne in Italian). But he understood me to say “Italians did not eat a lot
of dog” (Dog is cane in Italian). The conversation drifted downhill from
there…

Barcelona

I spent 2 and 1/2 days in Barcelona.

I haven’t been to Spain since 1967. It is most popular vacation destination
in Europe. Barcelona is a beautifyul city — as nice as any city I have
visited. The prices are much more reasonable than in Italy. On the basis
of this short trip to one city (certainly not an in-depth study) I would say
that Spain is a better place to retire than Italy. I chose Italy because of
my ancestry, but if someone had no ties to either country, I’d suggest
learning Spanish and moving to Spain.

There are some problems, however. In Barcelona the people understand
Spanish but speak Catalonian. In the Basque country they speak Basque. I
was surprised to find out that in the schools in Catalonia,the language of
instruction is Catalonian. I was there for festival of San Jordi (St.
George) which is lover’s day in this area. Men give women a rose, and women
give men a book. Catalonian flags are everywhere. There is a movement to
have a separate Catalonian state; I don’t know how serious it is.

We ate in some wonderful restaurants, but I would say that the food in Italy
is a bit more subtle than in Spain. I ate two gelati in Spain that were not
up to Italian standards. I also saw something in Spain that I see in Italy
too. At a pastry shop there were chocolate covered donuts like those you
would find in the USA (Barcelona has a Dunkin’Donuts shop). Out of curiosity
I bought a chocolate covered donut. It tasted like one in USA — nowhere
near as good as the Spanish pastries. Why would a Spaniard buy such an
item?? An American might buy it out of homesickness, but a Spaniard??

I stayed at a cut rate hotel (very nice clean room) named the Hotel Call in
what was the Jewish section of city before the Jews were expelled from Spain
in 1492. Actually the Jews were given the choice of converting to
Christianity or leaving. Among those who chose to convert there remained a
strong underground Jewish tradition. In fact hundreds of years later there
would be families in Spain that had family rituals that reflected their
Jewishness even though family members no longer new the origin of the
rituals. This was all brought home to me when outside the hotel I heard a
group of about 20 singing a Jewish song. They also spoke Spanish, so I
assume they were survivors of this long tradition who can now practice their
religion openly.

In Barcelona I saw many buildings of the city’s eccentric, brilliant
arcect Antoni Gaudi who worked at end of the 19th and beginning of the
20th centuries. He was roughly a contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright. Both
he and Wright espoused what they called natural arcecture as a revolt
against the predominant arcecture of the time. Both used simple geometric
forms as the basis of their buildings. But here the similarity ends. For
Gaudi nature was a fantastic font of colors and shapes that he used fully in
his works. Wright hewed much more closely to the simple forms he saw in
nature.

View of the Government

In the USA there is a distrust that government can solve large problems.
Some see government as “the enemy”, but I think most Americans do not see
government workers as evil folk but just as people caught up in a large
bureaucracy that is incapable of keeping certain promises. The idea of the
government as “the enemy” seems to be much stronger here. Of course only
150 years ago the government was “the enemy” as Italy was ruled by foreign
powers. And when government fails to do a job well, people here just shrug
their shoulders and say what else could be expected.

In Gettysburg a few years ago a group of local citizens began on a volunteer
basis to clean up the trash on the downtown streets once or twice a week.
Eventually the county loaned prisoners from the county prison to help in
this effort. This kind of volunteer effort would not happen in Italy –
people would look at the dirty streets and complain that the government, as
usual, was not doing its job.

Newsletter Number 30

Church Fair

My church in Florence had a Spring Fair to raise money. I worked at the
bake sale table where we had lots of options including many plates of
brownies (which had to be explained to the Italians). I felt I was back in
USA when I saw the plate full of overdone hot dogs from the Bar-B-Que grill.

Riding My Bike to Florence

I rode my bike to the Church Fair. The road surfaces in Tuscany are not
particularly smooth, especially for a area where there is no freezing and
thawing to chew up the roads. Route numbers are seen rarely and directional
signs (route 264 north or south or east or west) never. The signs mainly
point you to a city or cities. But the signage is rarely complete. If you
follow the signs to. let’s say, Prato, you will inevitably come to a fork in
the road that is unmarked as to which way to Prato. Doing the job 100%
correctly is not a primary Italian virtue.

The Train Strike

A few months ago I missed going to church because I did not know that there
was a one day Sunday train strike. But this time I did see the
announcements of a strike on Sunday. So I bought bus tickets to go to
church. The bus leaves from front of train station. I looked into the
station, and to my surprise, the trains were running. So I hopped on the
train and saved the bus tickets for another day. When I got to Florence I
discovered that the strike was only on long distance interregional trains.
Some things in Italy are hard to comprehend fully.

A Day in the Country

The train service and some local businesses are sponsoring a free train
trip into the nearby mountains with local tours, lunch, etc when you get
there. A very nice event on May 4. You have to make a reservation. The
flyer tells you to make reservations at the local office of the DFL. No
indication on the flyer of what DFL stands for and no address given for the
office. By asking around, I found the office. It is not uncommon here for a
flyer to list a building or location without an address. It is assumed that
everyone knows where “it” is. This is a small example of how Italy is a
country
not really user-friendly to immigrants.

Free e mail

The good news. I can use computers at library for my e mail. Bad news, for
some reason the library blocks the site “Hotmail.com” on which I have my e
mail. So I had to open a new address to use at library
“bobnordvall@virgilio.it.” (This may be only a temporary address because at
present I cannot send e mail to Gettysburg College from this address.)I have
a suspicion that Hotmail may be blocked by an anti-pornography filter that
is meant to block sites such as “hot chicks”, “hot babes” etc. There is an
address of the local library site e mail administrator to whom I could send
a message asking why Hotmail is blocked, but my Italian friend tells me that
it would be a total waste of time to send such an inquiry.

Public Baths

Just outside of town there is a large older building that says over it
“Public Baths.” It is now used for another purpose, but I discovered on a
back street recently that there is still a small public bath facility where
one can pay to take a shower. It would be interesting to find out how much
this facility is used.

No Smoking

Smoking is more common in Italy than in the USA, but the restrictions on
smoking in public places are quite similar. Recently the trains severely
limited the locations where one can smoke on a train. Previously there were
smoking and non smoking sections on many train cars. You see a lot of
graffiti on walls that says something like “smoking kills 80,000 people each
year.” In general graffiti here are much more political in nature
than in the USA.

Italians and the USA

I wrote last week about how America seems to represent a sense of personal
freedom to Italians that is less salient in this more structured society. A
way that this is apparent is in commercials that often try to portray the
sense of freedom you will get by buying X car or using Y cell phone service.
These often show someone in “wide open spaces” of a type typical in the
American west. The vastness of the USA becomes a metaphor for the freedom
one feels there.

Dogs

For some reason Boxer dogs are very popular in and around Pistoia (perhaps
in all of Italy). I mentioned before that people do not pick up the crap
that their dogs deposit on the pavement (Grass is not common here.). I
thought that this may be part of a general disrespect for cleanliness in
public spaces. Here is a possible alternative explanation.

An American recently told me that at the Italian dog obedience school she
attended, one had to pick up after the dog. She did so immediately with a
plastic bag she bought for that purpose. The Italians, on the other hand,
retreated to their cars to get a shovel with which to pick up the offending
item, put the item in a bag, and returned the bag to their cars.

In USA when you take out the dog, you grab a small plastic bag that you
have from the newspaper or some items at the Supermarket. You put the bag
over your hand to pick up the crap, turn the bag inside out to tie it off,
and put it in your pocket to throw into the trash.

In Italy there are a few machines where you can buy a plastic bag along
the street for this purpose. Using a bag from Supermarket is probably
incorrect because it is not a bag made for this specific purpose. Picking up
the crap with your hand covered by a bag and putting bag in pocket is
probably in incredibly bad form. In short, there is no way that one can pick
up dog crap on the sidewalk with style and verve. Result: it stays there.

The Italian Economy

A friend who visited me commented that he now understood how the Italian
economy works. It is premised upon the suppositions that everybody has (1)
30 pairs of sunglasses, (2) 40 sets of extremely intimate underwear, and (3)
30 pairs of shoes. Additional presuppositions are that everyone eats out
twice a day, drinks at least 10 cups of coffee a day, and has three haircuts
or permanents in a beauty parlor every week.

Dogs in Businesses

Although most businesses permit dogs to enter, some do not. When this is
not done, there is a sign showing a few happy dogs with a legend such as “we
wait outside.” A simple “No Dogs Allowed” sign would be impossibly brusque
in Italy. At a store that sells primarily neckties, I recently saw a sign
(the first one) that said dogs are welcome inside. I guess dogs are not a
danger to the cravats.

Italy and the USA

Italian, like other Romance languages, has both a formal and informal word
for “you.” There are rules for when you use the formal “you” and when you use
the informal one. These forms of courtesy represent not only the
politeness of Italian society but also the sense of structure in this
society. What is attractive to many Italians is the lack of structure in
the USA — a country where it appears that one is less constrained by one’s
city of birth, one’s social class, one’s family, etc. The USA is probably
not as open of a society as it appears to be from abroad, but it is clearly
more open than is Italy. For this reason I think it will continue to appear
attractive to many Italians. On the TV recently I noted that on three
commercials in a row, the background music was in English.

An example of Italian politeness is the note that the police put on cars
which states that the owner’s residential parking permit is about to expire
and reminds the owner to renew the permit before the last possible moment.
It then gives the address and the hours of where the permit can be renewed.
Obviously it is to the advantage of the police too that people don’t all
wait until the last day to renew the permit, but still this was a very
polite and nice reminder.

Clocks

There are fewer clocks on the outside of businesses here than in USA. In
the stores themselves one is less likely to see a visible clock. Time (and
punctuality) are simply less important in Italy than in the USA. Almost
everyone has a watch, but watches are more important as items of jewelry
here than in the USA.

Antidepressant Pills

A newspaper headline announced that a record number of such pills are now
sold in Pistoia. (Such pills may be available without prescription here
–prescriptions seem less necessary to buy drugs here than in USA) Actually
Pistoia is in second place to Lucca. As might be expected such pills are
more common in the prosperous north than in the less prosperous south of the
country. (Rich people talk to their psychiatrists about their troubles; poor
people talk to their sister.) A friend tells me that Pistoia has a high rate
of teenage suicide. Recently a girl from Pistoia jumped from a hotel
balcony on a school trip. So all the Italians are not carefree, happy souls.
But even if Pistoia is in second place in Italy in gulping happy pills,
Italy in general uses less of these pills than do other European nations.

The Florence Gospel Choir

It sings once a month at the church I attend (American Church in Florence).
The leader is a Black from America and his wife is in the group. All the
others are wes either from Italy or elsewhere. I figure it is the most
we Gospel Choir in the world, but they sing well, and it always a joy
when it is there turn to sing.

The church has an iron fence in front of it. On Sunday there is a gatekeeper
who is at the gate to let people in. Last Sunday I noticed in addition to
the gatekeeper a person from a private security agency. So there obviously
was some concern about an anti-American backlash to war in Iraq.

Berlusconi

I have mentioned that I was surprised that Berlusconi –head of Italian
govt. — supported the USA in Iraq because he was going in the face of
Italian public opinion, and he gave his foes an issue around which to unite.
With coalition governments, as in Italy, I assume the goal is to keep your
coalition united and to try to keep the opponents’ coalition divided. Well
Berlusconi is either more clever than I thought or more lucky. As soon as
the war started, the center/left (his opponents) split apart on how to
respond to it. They are still split and he is reaping the benefit of
pictures of jubilant citizens of Iraq welcoming liberation.

Easter

The Italians use really big, hollow, chocolate easter eggs as a gift for the
season. You can get these custom made with a special gift or message inside
them. Lamb is a common Easter meal. An animal rights group has a poster
with a cute little lamb on it in which the group notes how many lambs are
killed at Easter time in Italy. The message urges people to change the menu
for Easter, but the suggested example of an alternative –potatoes — is not
likely to replace lamb.

Newsletter Number 28

Spring

As soon as Spring came, the Italians began dressing in lighter clothes,
riding their bikes for fun around town, etc. It wasn’t that the temperature
was suddenly warmer on March 21. It was now “officially” Spring, so one
could start to act as one does in warm weather.

Another Useless Sign

I took a long bus ride to Vinci with some visitors from the USA. At front
of bus was sign that you often see also in the USA — it is forbidden to talk
to the bus driver while bus is in motion. Of course the bus driver, of his
own initiative, undertook a series of long conversations with the passengers
near the front of the bus. If you could somehow enforce the prohibition on
that sign, the driver would undoubtedly quit his job as unbearable.

Help I’m Becoming My Mother!!

My mother’s first language was Italian. Now I am learning it, but I’ve done
something else that is more typical of her. Except for a few periods in her
life that were (thank God) short in duration, she did not drive a car. So
when she went shopping, she had a little two wheeled cart she took to the
store. Now I’ve bought one too as the most efficient was to get my
groceries home.

Change

For some reason Italians shops and merchants often have little change in
their cash register. It is very common for them to take out their wallet to
make proper change. Sometimes that isn’t good enough. Recently I gave a
shopkeeper a € 50 bill (which are commonly disbursed by cash machines). She
could not make change for a € 13 purchase. So she gave me the goods and told
me to pay her the next time I was by the store. (Another illustration of the
surprising level of trust in a country where people nevertheless lock their
houses behind three sets of doors.) At the market I made a € 7 purchase
and the man could not make change of a € 10 bill. He finally told me to
take two of the €7 items for €10.

The Local Soccer Team

Recently the fans attacked the owners who had to be saved by the police.
Why? Well the team has done poorly in the past few years, but the specific
incident that enraged the fans is the sale of the team to IKEA, the Swedish
household furnishings company. There are not many fans at games here. It’s
hard to see how owning this team is a good business investment. When I
asked a friend about this, he said the team provides a good basis for tax
right-offs that are based upon inflated invoices. If you ever want to read a
very amusing and insightful book about life in Italy and Italian soccer
(including the dark side of the business) get “The Miracle of Castel di
Sangro” by Joe McGinnis. A much better introduction to life in Italy that
books like “Under the Tuscan Sun.”

Washing Machine and Stove

My Italian washing machine has 14 different settings and a temperature dial
that allows you to choose an exact temperature from cold to 180°. As all
European machines do, it takes about 2 hours to run through a wash cycle. I
actually don’t find that it gets the clothes cleaner than my American
machine (I should say “machines” because I have two at my home in USA.), but
it is nice to have special settings for silk, wool, cotton, etc. Although
you can buy general washing detergents in Italy, they also have detergents
that are made especially for specific colors — one for we, one for
black, and one for other colors.

The stove has gas burners (which have to be lit by hand because Italians
don’t waste gas on pilot lights) and an electric convection oven. The oven
does cook foods quickly.

Spoons

The American teaspoon does not exit in Italy. Spoons come in two sizes. One
is the size of a tablespoon (perhaps a little smaller) and the other is a
very small size to stir your expresso coffee.

The War

Everyone here who opposes the war in Iraq nevertheless says that Saddam
Hussein is a terrible dictator. The emphasis of the opposition is mostly on
inevitable civilian casualties, especially women and children. I attribute
this to two factors. One children and older people in general are held in
higher regard here than in USA. I am not saying that in USA people don’t
give a damm about children and old folks, but they care more in
Italy. This is clear in a number of ways including both laws and customs.
Also, whereas the USA had two home front civilian casualties in WW II (a
couple killed in Oregon by a bomb balloon sent over the Pacific by the
Japanese), the Europeans had many such casualties. The result is that it
takes a “higher level of justification” in Europe to go to war than it does
in USA. Many Americans thinks that the Europeans set the bar too high as to
what justifies going to war; many Europeans think that America sets the bar
too low. This is not a question with a simple answer. I think it is
something over which reasonable people can differ.

Bilingual Child

Some friends came to see me who are staying in Italy with a couple where the
husband is Italian and the wife is German. The couple has a young child who
is perfectly bilingual. When the young girl talks to her father she speaks
Italian with appropriate hand motions. When she speaks German to her
mother, her hands at at her side.