Shake yo' ass ... watch yo'self

I have been a semi-serious independent athlete since my CEGEP "Fitness Through Weight Training" class. For those of you counting, that's twelve years of running, cycling, cross training, spinning, pilates, dancing (all kinds), yoga (hot and cold), capoeira, half marathon training, gym memberships, and at-home programs (like Insanity and P90X). I exercise for the same reasons most (sane) people exercise (despite some claims that I am not all there upstairs): because it's fun, because it can be social, because it releases endorphins, lets off steam, staves off illness (and, often, boredom), boosts my energy, and keeps me strong.

I am currently training for a marathon (happening in March), and as all marathletes know, running every day is neither enough nor the proper preparation for a 42km race. Getting a gym membership, even if only for the use of the pool, was a no-brainer.

I've been to Italian gyms before. More precisely, I've trained (once) at one, and visited another. Neither one was a good fit for me; the first was small and crowded, the second enormous and elite. The one I settled for best represents both my fitness interests and my social class. Still, as observable in all three, this is the general demographic of an Italian gym (minus the trainers, thank goodness):

Firstly, 75% men (except in the pool, where the women dominate)
of which:
25% in their late 20s to late 30s "using" the weight room and REALLY using the spa area
25% in their early 40s to mid 50s REALLY using the weight room and pool

25% women
of which:
30% in their late 20s to mid 30s who have mistaken the gym for the club
20% in their late 30s to early 40s who stop moving just before they start sweating

and the rest, in both categories (50% of women, 50% of men), are the golden oldies, who *actually* bring it. 120%. Every time.

There's something wrong with this picture, wouldn't you say? Not least is the fact that I more easily identify with the 65+ crowd than with my own contemporaries.

I see my female cohorts arrive at the gym fully made-up, bejeweled, and in their best (often newest, tightest, and most revealing) gym attire. Their Nikes (or, recently, New Balance, since it has become *trendy* here, but we'll get to that later) have never seen an outdoor road or a drop of sweat. They spend more time admiring themselves in the locker room mirrors before class (or arranging and rearranging their carefully messied hairdos) than changing into and out of their clothes. You won't find a single one of them in the weight room or on a treadmill. You'd even be hard-pressed to find one in the swimming pool. You will find them, however, doing yoga, pilates, or following any other low-impact, sweatless class  imported from America (where it was big five years ago) whose only aim is to help them maintain the perfect bodies they inherited genetically or acquired through natural selection (and suicide diets). It's a crime to weigh more than 60kg here (per woman of average height). You'd better increase your daily downward dogs if you do.

Few of my male cohorts share these classrooms with them. They, instead, lurk outside them in the weight room, occupying machines often for fifteen minutes at a time, of which only three are spent lifting (or pushing, or pulling, or stretching), and the rest are spent in idle conversation with their neighbour, who is working at an identical pace. They needn't do anything more: like the women in their age group, they also arrive at the gym with perfectly sculpted physiques acquired, seemingly, through the exclusive consumption of a can of tuna daily, or from the time they spend in the hydromassage basin, Turkish bath, and sauna (since 60% of their gym time is spent there).

I won't fault the mothers - women in their early 40s who are likely at the gym in an attempt to escape their overwhelming daily routines for the little free time they have in a day. It's enough that they manage to commit to a fitness program, no matter its level of intensity. For everyone else, fitness is a spectator sport, it seems. (Although with no one working, one wonders what gym-goers look at at all aside from themselves in the mirror.)

I have had this conversation with my boyfriend many times. (He only recently renewed his gym membership after a long hiatus caused by the same frustrations I experience when I go there.) He maintains that Italians - especially young Italians - go to the gym to be seen and "pick up." But every young Italian man knows that Italian women neither pick up, nor let themselves get picked up. Ever. Winning them over requires months of arduous courtship: gifts, kind gestures, grand dinners, and a demonstrated ability to consistently Say the Right Thing. What's more, in cities overrun by foreign students, like Florence, young Italian men have learned quickly that the fastest and easiest way to "pick up" (or be picked up) is to aim for an enterprising and more or less independent American or Australian at any of the city's typical student-visa watering holes (the Sant'Ambrogio or Santa Croce areas, for example). In fact, the only men I see attempting to "pick up" (much younger) women at the gym are those in their middle age who have taken the experience gathered in their forty-five years of life for granted and get cocky about it.

So what gives? Why has the sauna become synonymous with fitness in Italy, while the real work remains undone?

For all intents and purposes, gyms in Italy are status symbols. For young people, frequenting one means making it in the world of fitness and beauty. You don't go to the gym to get fit or beautiful. You go to the gym because you already are fit and beautiful -- by society's standards, at least. And the more fit and beautiful you are, the bigger, brighter, and more beautiful your gym will be. I saw men enter and exit the Virgin Fitness Center in San Donato - one of the city's biggest, cleanest, and most luxurious gyms - in perfectly tailored three-piece suits and ties. It isn't a stretch to say that to Italians, the gym you attend says as much about you as the car you drive.

And fitness in general (as is the case with everything in Italy) is inherently linked to fashion and fashionability. When I lived here three summers ago and went running for the first time, even when taking an unpopulated route outside the city center, people looked at me like I was out of my mind. They could see no value in my exerting myself in that manner in the heat of the summer months without concrete incentive or the backing of a mob mentality. Three years later, running has become a "fashionable" activity here. People do it to fit it and make of it a (half-hearted) life philosophy. There are aperitivi for runners (which differ from regular aperitivi only in that the people attending swap their high heels or leather boots for their pristine "formal" New Balance shoes); running gear has gone mainstream even among only would-be runners; identifying as a runner - a deliberately solitary sport for many - now means being lumped together with a group of intended teammates. It seems Italians found the silence of the implicit solidarity among runners deafening, so they made it scream. Running here is not a sport. It's a scene.

It's the exclusion of other scenes, too: rarely will you find a "sporty" person who likes to dress up when they go out. Being sporty - without really being athletic - is its own religion.

It's a different world altogether for me, for obvious reasons. In Baltimore, I frequented the university gym or other facilities near campus which, catering as they do to a university population, boast a diverse crowd of focused athletes at all levels, from varsity teams-in-training to graduate students dealing with dissertation frustration, to elderly faculty members just trying to stay active. In Montreal, even the professional gym I expected to feel completely out of place in created a welcome atmosphere for those of us who, unlike its regular attendants, were neither bouncers or stunt doubles nor professional dancers. In both places, the gym was a place I went to to be me. Unapologetically. Unabashedly. Without concern for what others thought of me or what I looked like. I went to the gym to do me. Everything else was just a detail. My attitude toward the gym has not changed here. The only thing that has is that of those around me. In Baltimore and Montreal, gym-time was "me" time for everyone. Here, it's popcorn time.

Two summers ago, I followed a yoga class in Florence. It was meditative yoga, and the class was made up of middle-aged people. We spent more time talking about the positions than holding them; more time socializing at the end of class than participating in it. Our mouths were very fit, indeed.

Songs of Innocence

Another (overdue) bit of travel literature for you, about my travels to (and through) Basilicata. Enjoy!

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I had never been to the Basilicata, and quite honestly, had neither the interest in nor the intention of going there, ever. (I would later discover, via a memorable taxi driver who I think was called Cosimo, that both Francis Ford Coppola and Nicholas Cage, his nephew, are from the region – a fact that surely should have increased my enthusiasm about it but didn’t.) It is beautiful in a way the rest of Italy proclaims itself to be, but isn’t, exactly. Flanked by generous coast in abundant hues of green and blue, the hills of Basilicata are truly alive.

Still, if I’d had a choice, I’d have skipped it entirely. There are sheep and Sannite ruins in Molise, too, the region of my father’s origins, and I’d managed to avoid them (and his family there) for the last 26 and a half years; no sense in making the detour for Francis Ford. Basilicata was an uninformed blip on an otherwise immaculate itinerary for one.

I arrived in Policoro, a beach town on the Ionian shores, past midnight. What I thought would be an overnight train from Brindisi to Catania had turned into an overnight layover, two connecting buses to Paola and Cosenza, Calabria, and the train in to Sicily and over the strait of Messina. Were I defining the term only loosely, I could at least add Basilicata and Calabria to my list of places “visited” in Italy – a badge I wore proudly around non-Italians, and still more proudly around Italians themselves. I could colour in those blanks on my map. I could consider almost complete my tour of the meridione ten years in the making, having already hit the major hot-spots – Campania and Puglia – and on my way to the most canonical of all: Sicily. Well, to be fair (and I am always fair), Sicily is a world of its own, conspicuously.  But we’ll get there. As I did, eventually.

            In other words, Basilicata was, for all intents and purposes, a mistake. A fortunate one. One you appreciate having made, in the end. But still a mistake. Even in its splendor, Basilicata was a passing thought, an oversight misunderstood.

            The importance of research mustn’t be underestimated. As a scholar, I could say so. After six weeks and a tour of Italy’s most prestigious (and complicated) libraries dedicated to the work of a lifetime then already five years old (and still growing), I got it. I understood the precious nuances of a capricious schedule: open Mondays to Fridays, but only until 2 on Mondays and Wednesdays, only until 1 on Fridays, and up until 7 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Continuous distribution, hourly distribution, interrupted distribution; 9, 10, 11, 12; 9-12 and 2-5; open stacks; closed stacks; by permitted consultation only; see: reference section, but never after 4. Preparation was a way of existence in Italy. Precision (but not promptness, on the bureaucratic end, at least) was neither a luxury nor a virtue, but a matter of survival. Life was in the fine print, and I knew it. Still, booking my train ticket south, I hadn’t noticed, or didn’t want to after what had been a disastrous and emotionally taxing week in Puglia, the little bus diagrams beside connections that I interpreted as stops along the way. The four-hour delay had registered as a programmed pause rather than a jolt in the voyage. So at the very last possible minute, hours from my departure, when I realized I’d likely be sleeping at the station in Policoro that night, I was nothing if not profoundly embarrassed. Research was my job.

            I didn’t sleep at the station that night. I had absolutely hated everything about the Bed and Breakfast I had stayed at in Brindisi, but at the very least, it had come fully equipped with internet – a tool I more than happily exploited to book a hotel: a one-night stay in a three-star establishment on the water. I never went swimming. When I woke up the next morning (at 6am; my first bus was scheduled to leave the station a little before 7, though transportation scheduling is never quite either an obligation or a guarantee of anything in Italy), the front desk had called me a cab, and by the time I checked out, my driver had already loaded up my luggage in the trunk of his car.

            What kind of woman was I, he wanted to know? He only asked because I seemed young – too young to be traveling on my own. He liked my earrings, he mentioned, and the grace with which I wore them. They had been a compensatory purchase in Brindisi, intended with their platinum sparkle to make up for the severe lack of joy the city had brought me. Two silver balls dangled comfortably from their rectangular nestle dripping down from my earlobes like swinging pendulums. Italians appreciate simplicity and geometry: years earlier, a casual white dress plumed with an ad-hoc green pattern had served me well all summer long; did I like Pucci? He might like me, they observed.

            Anyway, I seemed young, said my cab driver, Cosimo. And from his middle-aged perspective, he might be right to say so. I didn’t mind. Happiness was a date of birth in the early 80s, or so I was later told. He took his duty (as an Italian male of any age) of catering to me very seriously: we arrived at the station early and rather than leaving me there to fend for myself, he took me on a guided tour of the village, complete with commentary.

There was more to hear than to see. Policoro is generically scenic, but otherwise unremarkable when compared with Italy’s conventional “best.” But Cosimo spoke amorously of his hometown with pride. He was giving me his land and, in those thirty minutes, his beating heart. Italians are nothing if not generous with their love.

“Did you know that there are Sannite ruins in this part of Italy?”

I knew, but it seemed rude to say so. I held my tongue as we stepped out of the car and onto the rural path that led to what were once domestic buildings, now a few piles of decadent stone.

“This is an ancient holding. You must have seen it coming out of the station yesterday, it’s just nearby.”

I felt guilty for not having noticed it sooner. It was not particularly impressive, but Cosimo was convinced of its exceptional beauty. He motioned to a short brick wall a few feet shy of the car, and shifted gears as we took our seats there for a moment, breathing in the early morning air.

 “Do you like it here?” he asked.  “I have never been married, but this place is as close to my heart as a wife would be. I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that “my stay” consisted of one night’s 5-hour sleep at a hotel fifteen minutes away that I neither had the opportunity to explore, nor to leave temporarily. So I told him I wished I’d had the chance to stay longer. It didn’t feel like lying.

“If you ever return – and I hope you do, and I think you should – you should let me take you to an olive-pressing demonstration at one of our olive oil factories. You were saying earlier that you like Tuscan olive oil, right?”

Right. I did. I still do.

“I think you’ll love our olive oil. It has a different taste, it’s not as bitter. Some say it’s a little heavier, but it makes the best savoury pastries I’ve ever had. Have you had taralli? They’re traditionally from Puglia, but we make them here as well. Those are made with olive oil.”

It’s hard to say now whether I had already known that bit of information then, having read it on a package of the savoury looped cookies my mother routinely purchased at our Italian bakery back home. I liked to read food labels; nutritional information brought me closer to the ingredients I was eating, so I appreciated my driver’s inclusion of what he couldn’t know was, to me, a particularly familiar detail. Perhaps it, or perhaps the warm wrinkles around his soft and kind eyes, or Policoro’s relative geographical proximity to my father’s Molisan village infused me with a sense of nostalgia I couldn’t understand: I’d never been here before. Most likely, I’d never be here again. Yet in this one instant, as the sun steadily lifted its rosy head over the station and shook out its golden locks over Cosimo and me wandering along the southern Italian countryside, I felt at home.

“Last summer, I took a lady on a tour of our vineyards,” he said, climbing back into the car. “She was visiting, just like you, and she was also alone. Well, she was a lady of a certain age … closer to mine than to yours. I think she’d seen her share of company over the years, and was glad to hoof it on her own. Still, she was happy to share some of her stay with me. I took her to my favourite spots, and she e-mailed me when she got home, just to thank me. She said she might come back this year or next.”

I wasn’t surprised. Cosimo seemed to me a thorough and attentive host, as most lonely people are. I understood the condition of being alone as a peaceful one, though not unambiguously. Being – and, perhaps more importantly, traveling - alone is the freedom to plan your life by the minute or not at all. It means having the liberty to seek out a deserted solarium on the outskirts of a remote fishing village and taking the risk of diving into the agitated waters before it without the constricting warning of a cautious voice. It means sharing every moment only with nature, and experiencing a heightened sense of objective (if personalized) reality. But it also means living many restless moments in the company only of your own thoughts – good or bad. It means accomplishing great feats of courage and resourcefulness without celebration or external validation. It means that the only thing separating you from the friendship of another person is a fleeting conversation – on a moonlit shore, on a highway lined with plane trees, on a hike to the summit of a long-coveted mountain – that instantly brings you together in some way that soon becomes clear to both of you. Loneliness is an easy opportunity for human connection at even the slightest sign of its potential. Cosimo got it.

He was telling me something but, my glance drifting somewhere (or nowhere) in the distance and my mind with it, I hadn’t heard him.

“If you’d like,” he repeated,  “I’ll leave you my card, so that if you come back here next year or the year after, I can take you on that tour. It would truly be my pleasure. There’s my e-mail address and my telephone number right there.”

It struck me as strange and a little funny that a taxi driver should have his own business cards. Still, I watched him as he pulled out a small stack from the old brown leather wallet he kept under the dash of his car and handed it to me tentatively. I thanked him with a smile and a handshake that seemed entirely too formal: in our short time together, Cosimo had revealed himself to be a comrade and an ally, a voice in the ongoing musical composition of my voyage.

Thinking back, he may have been my favourite part of Basilicata.

I climbed out of his cab and thanked him again as he handed me my luggage, pulling it out from the trunk where he had strapped it down with care. Would I be okay bringing this up to the bus? I would, I assured him. I had done it before, many times. He smiled and got back into the driver’s seat, but didn’t move from there: Cosimo watched me walk to the bus stop, board with my bags, and settle in. I saw his car sit motionless across the street from the station as the bus prepared to leave, and in the window behind me, watched him follow us until the road forked and his next caller took him in a different direction.           

I missed him on the bus in to Paola, although, with Daniele Silvestri (or was it Gianmaria Testa?) blaring in my ears from my even then obsolete iPod, I almost didn’t have the opportunity to. Cleaning out my wallet that night of recently acquired receipts and other trinkets, I found Cosimo’s card. I put it away somewhere I told myself I’d find it, somewhere important. I’m not sure where it is.

The Tipping Point

Last month, I directed a pre-collegiate summer camp here in Florence for (filthily rich and entitled beyond hope or reason) American students. The program itself was not the best one I've ever managed, but many of the parental complaints my staff and I fielded had little to do with its quality: "My daughter can't get chicken on her pasta;" (Nope. Sorry.) "There was no pool at the four-star hotel booked in Rome;" (Did you think all four-star hotels came with a pool, spa, and tennis courts? Oh you did? My bad, really.) "My son's photography teacher doesn't speak English;" (She does, actually. She just has an accent because - guess what? - she's ITALIAN.) America and Italy have had a difficult relationship for centuries. Americans accuse Italians of being culturally exclusive and behind the times; Italians accuse Americans of wanting to bring America to Italy without making any real effort to adapt or adjust. It's tit for tat.

Most of this blatant display of cultural unawareness I chalked up to these students' families being rich enough to buy their way out of any unwanted situation -- a luxury I have never been afforded. But there is a fundamental difference in the way Americans and Italians do business that contributes in large part to the cultural discrepancy between them. It's in the service industry -- every country's biggest batch of human resources.

In many places across the US, waiters, concierges, and other members of the service industry are unsalaried, work for less than minimum wage, and quite literally live off their earned tips. In America, where tipping is implied and recommended but never guaranteed, providing horrible service is tantamount to not eating for a few days. No matter what, the customer is always right. If he wants the Niçoise salad with salmon instead of tuna, no anchovies, his eggs scrambled instead of hard-boiled, caramelized onions instead of olives and feta and baco-bits thrown in on top, he gets it, no questions asked. He's the one paying the bill (and, for many waiters, the rent).

In Italy, where it is uncustomary (and unexpected) to tip -- a service fee is usually included in the price of a sit-down meal -- the service provider has both the final say and every right to make your life miserable if you are anything less than a model customer. Here, waiters are paid by their employers and don't need to rely on tips for sustenance. So here, if you want your Niçoise salad any way but the way indicated on your menu, you should be prepared at the very least to repeat your order several times, be openly mocked by the wait staff, or have your request flat-out refused as you are (not so) gently encouraged to select something else. It goes beyond the national appreciation of cuisine as an art of careful arrangement. It speaks to the pride of a people who will not yield to (what are often seen as) unreasonable requests.

That is not to say that Italians are not accommodating of special dietary (or other) needs. Every restaurant I took my students to last month had an option ready for celiacs, vegetarians, pescatarians, and lactose-intolerant eaters. What they did not have was a "build-it-yourself" option, an "add what meat you like," option or a "free modifier" option. Because things are not done that way here.

 It's a little difference, but it goes a long way and extends to other sectors of the service industry, to the same fundamental result. In Italian hotels, clients are asked to endure room mix-ups, late check-in (when rooms are not ready), and room service billing inaccuracies. But they should expect to encounter resistance if they ask for leniences in return (late check-out or a discounted meal). In America, patrons not given the fullest extent of hospitality are usually offered a complementary night or some kind of retributive service. In Italy, if you are being loud in your room, the concierge calls in with a noise complaint and asks you to stop, upon threat of expulsion. In the US, upper management wouldn't rouse from its extended nap if you tore your room apart.

It follows, then, the gap formed between American expectation and Italian reality -- and vice-versa. Italy wants the perfect customer; America wants the perfect service. Apologies are made for bad service in Italy: a slow aperitivo will usually be justified with a comment about the quality of the food (waiters are slow, but the food is SO GOOD IT'S WORTH THE WAIT). You might never go back to the place with slow service, but it's no harm no foul -- you've paid your bill and likely wouldn't have left anything extra even if the service had been excellent. In Italy, slow service occasionally (and not always) cuts customers. In America, if systemic, it gets waiters fired.

And strangely, when customers do choose to tip in Italy - as I did in pseudo-American establishments or places that repeatedly treated my group well despite their many (and silly) exigencies - their additional euros don't buy them better service or (often) better treatment; they get them a discount on their meal. In America, a discount is most often offered as an apology. In Italy, with few exceptions, it is most often offered as a reward. It's not so much a reciprocal scratching of backs as it is a mutual tickling of wallets. Occasionally, leaving a tip in Italy means, as a repeat customer, skipping the line, getting the best table in the house, or meeting with the owner. Seldom does it amount to a faster or more reliable rendering of service.

To be sure, there are (many) other factors that contribute to the cultural disconnect between America and Italy. The rhythm of daily life is another: where Italians are (mostly) happy to take their time (assumedly, to do things well), Americans consider haste a characteristic of efficiency: if it's not fast, it's not worthwhile. It's a tied game, as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to who gets it right more often.

Advocacy for cultural awareness and acceptance (my first line of defense) aside, I'll give you an insider's tip about how to bridge the service gap as an American expat in Italy. It goes back to Seneca (I think): you'll catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar. Give Italian servers a show of good faith. Be complaint. Be respectful. Be easy-going. It'll pay off dividends in the long run.

That, or go only to hotel-recommended restaurants with hotel-provided vouchers and watch the magic happen.

Light clothing (even in the winter)

Read my article on I gatti mézzi's fifth album, Vestiti leggeri here.

Enjoy!

Lights, Camera, Action

It's been a culturally overwhelming seven days for me. You might expect me to want to write about Italy's (no longer so recent) World Cup match-up against England. You might think, "hey, there's gotta be a lot to talk about there from a perspective that understands and appreciates the mentality of either side," and you'd be right. But because the World Cup is being written about to death, from all possible angles, I'll leave the commentary to the pros (and wannabes -- I am neither).

(But yes, for those curious, watching the game in a piazza along the Arno was everything you might expect it to be -- loud shouts, fickle fans (their support soon turning to criticism with the team's every faux pas), massive celebration, and an unofficial but unanimously decided collective poking fun at Paletta. I'm not sure why, but I think it has something to do with his hair.)

The week's other notable if less discussed event was the June 16th inauguration of Ponte Vecchio's new lights. And wasn't that just a box of stereotypes unambiguously confirmed.

Here are the facts:

Stefano Ricci, of the Stefano Ricci House of Design (male fashion), donated 400,000 euro to Florence to replace the lights illuminating the Ponte Vecchio with LED energy-saving ones, and to clean up the bridge more generally. That meant removing all graffiti and providing general maintenance. This part, including the installation of the new lights, was done in the days leading up to the June 16th inauguration despite Ricci's commitment to the project months earlier.

The reason for the delay? As it so happens, June 16th was something of a special day both for Florentine fashion - it celebrated 60 years of facetime in the city's downtown core - and for the Ricci family itself, who celebrated an impressive 40 years of activity on the Florentine fashion scene. So this event lined up neatly with the yearly launch of the Florence Pitti Uomo celebration -- a summer-long event.

Of course, no inauguration would be complete without an appropriate party -- a party that probably cost at least twice what the restoration of the bridge itself cost and that included a water show by French troupe Iliotopie and performances by Giancarlo Giannini (an Italian actor) and Andrea Boccelli (no need for an introduction).

A party, moreover, that while masquerading as accessible and inviting to all Florentines -- the Ponte Vecchio will remain open, Ricci insisted -- in many ways came across as an expectedly exclusive event. The Santa Trinità bridge was reserved for Stefano Ricci's personally invited guests, and access to all other bridges was protected by brigades of bulletproof shield-wielding carabinieri AND police. On both sides. At all entrances.

So what does this teach us?

It teaches us that the preservation of Renaissance masterpieces -- of which the Vasari corridor is one -- is important to Italians, especially in places of rich cultural history; but that this preservation is still in many ways only secondary to an industry that has ostentatiously and perhaps aggressively claimed itself as the most representative facet of Italian culture; an industry that, for all its attempts at inclusivity and universality -- and I think Ricci's was genuine and heartfelt -- continues to cater specifically to its own.

Only in Italy would a fashion designer throw a million euro party to underline his investment in Florence's cultural patrimony and energy savings (80% or 15 thousand euro). To say thank you, he claims.

I sound cynical. I know. Apologies. What bothers me about this display is neither Ricci himself nor the scale of his show, but the piggy-backing of the Ponte Vecchio restoration on a celebration of fashion and design -- or vice versa, I'm not sure. To me, inaugurating a project of this cultural importance, but having it coincide with fashion week is like waiting months to celebrate your oldest child's graduation from medical school on your youngest child's fifth birthday party (at Chuck E. Cheese's). Why not have two separate events? Are they not both worthy enough of attention? Pitti Uomo is not going broke any time soon. What's another party? Couldn't the celebration of the Ponte Vecchio have been about the Ponte Vecchio?

Of course, I say this as a middle child (of three) and as someone who has always found it important to individuate accomplishments, projects, and events as they arise to make sure they are all given equal attention and attributed equal importance. Perhaps I am uniquely bothered by a celebration that pretends to be one thing and succeeds at being another. It was truly an impressive show. I saw little of it, but what I did see moved me. But I would love to see this kind of attention and care given to, say, the June 24th feast of Saint John the Baptist, Florence's patron saint -- and a distinctly Florentine celebration of history and culture. I have been in Florence for four San Giovanni celebrations. Never have I seen carabinieri or police at the entrance to any bridge anywhere. Never have I seen a show that even remotely resembles either what Stefano Ricci organised for his June 16th event, or even what Pisa does for its annual Festa della Luminara.

If Pisa can do it every year (without the presence of a notable fashion industry), why can't Florence?

Yes, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event (you only celebrate 60 or 40 years once), not an annual event. Yes, and after many months of austerity, it was a useful hit of colour and morale for Florentines. Yes, it was concrete evidence of an Italy that (at least privately) backs its words with actions. It just wasn't really the appreciation it should have been, in my humble opinion.

With a (projected) million euro, Florence could probably put together at least 3 decent celebrations of its own history (beyond the repetitive calcio storico and its never-changing Renaissance parade; I'm pretty sure those same costumes have been used for the past 50 years). Just food for thought.

If I were Vasari, I'd either be laughing from atop my corridor or rolling in my grave.

Burning down (or warming up) the House

Well, it has been a long while since I last wrote. Mainly, that's because I have been, in chronological order: 1) trying to procure a work/holiday visa from the Italian consulate in Montreal; 2) after much travail, successfully procuring a work/holiday visa from the Italian consulate in Montreal; 3) assembling various documents for my dog's travel passport to the EU; 4) preparing a conference paper for a panel on Italian studies in Zurich; 5) flying to and attending said conference; 6) touring Zurich and Innsbruck; 7) redecorating my Florence abode; 8) visiting with my boyfriend's family in Orbetello and Manciano/Pomonte/Saturnia; 9) taking a short detour to Capalbio to visit the Giardino dei Tarocchi; and 10) completing a course syllabus on Italian regionalism, proposing papers for panels at the RSA's 2015 meeting in Berlin, and completing a draft of an intended publication.

So, phew. That was a lot of stuff.

But I have been meaning to write about Italian housewarming traditions - or the perceivable lack thereof - since May 15, when a close Italian friend became a homeowner for the first time, in Montreal.

I have known this friend since my McGill days, and she has seen me through some of the darkest periods of my life. So when she, excited, requested my presence at an intimate housewarming affair on the night she closed the deal officially, despite the million and one things going on in my life, I couldn't say no. I had been told that it was considered good luck in Italian circles to bring salt to a new homeowner -- a friend had once brought me some when I first moved into my own place (although I was renting it) without roommates in Baltimore. I wasn't sure, however, if the tradition was bogus. The fact that I was being invited to a housewarming by an Italian friend did nothing to assuage my doubts about the validity of the tradition -- she has been living in Canada for the past twelve years. She's about as Canadian as I am at this point.

My curiosity led me to do research, as it usually does, which brought me to two items of interest. The first is this list of "Traditional Italian Housewarming Gifts." The second was my boyfriend's staunch and unflinching affirmation that housewarming in general, let alone traditional gifts associated with it, simply doesn't exist in Italy. Or at least, that it isn't really a thing in most places in Italy.

As it so happens, both things are only half right, as more research confirmed.

As anyone who has lived (or lives) in North America knows, housewarming parties are a big deal in Canada and the US: people have them all the time, as often as they can, every time they move into a new place. They usually happen when the home is already set-up and ready to accommodate guests, since the point of a housewarming party is to prepare the new home as a place of hospitality. It's a social inauguration, if you will. It's true that this particular celebration doesn't exist in Italy. As important as socialising and hospitality are to Italians, none (or few, and almost none within Italy) feel the need to underline it in the specific context of buying or moving into a new house. It goes without saying. If you're going to live in your own place, you're going to have your friends over for dinner. Repeatedly. Without need for excuses, explanations, or reasons. Just because. (This is one thing I have always loved about Italians vs. Americans. In Italy, you never need to "sell" your event or appeal to your audience's likes, dislikes, sports preferences or television schedules. If you want to have dinner with some people, you don't need to throw a theme-party, an Oscar party, a Super Bowl party, a Fourth of July, Memorial Day, or Labor Day party. You just need to call and invite them over. Un punto e basta).

But it is customary, when visiting a new home, to bring the homeowner a token for various forms of good luck. It's even more common for the homeowner to bring these trinkets to their new homes themselves. (Because when it comes to luck, Italians are on top of their game.)

Not all of the items on the list, however, resonate with Italian audiences, as both my boyfriend and my friend the homeowner confirmed. Let's go through them.

1) Wine and bread -- Nope. Never heard of this tradition. There's wine and bread at every Italian meal. Why should a "housewarming" celebration be any different?

2) Rice -- As a symbol of fertility, rice is more typically associated with marriage in Italy. It is both used as confetti at the religious (or civil) ceremony, and, more traditionally still, placed in the wedding bed made the night prior to the wedding by a team of virgins (allegedly).

3) Candles -- Yes. For light. For warmth. For fragrance. Not necessarily for change, as the list suggests.

4) Olive oil -- Nope. Read item 1. Ibidem.

5) Brooms -- Yes. Little ones to hang on the entrance door or other doorways. Symbolic brooms to sweep away misfortune. I suppose you could bring a full-sized Oskar-style broom to an Italian homeowner if you really wanted to .... would come in handy if you were going to help her/him to move in. Otherwise, I might just stick with the figurative format.

6) Salt -- Yes. And it is customary to scatter it in doorways.

My friend also brought lentils with her, despite their more customary use on New Year's eve and day. Then as always, they are said to bring prosperity.

I settled on salt (for flavour), something that I thought was my friend's favourite candies (and turned out to be chili pepper lol), beer, and empanadas. We sat around a tiny porch table, three matching chairs, and a box, and watched the little candle she'd brought over for good tidings burn.

It was a lovely cross-cultural evening -- just the way I like them :)

Coping with a (mafia) crisis

Among the leading stereotypes surrounding Italy are the pervasiveness of the mafia, and the fundamentality of football (or, in North America, soccer) to Italian cultural identity. This past weekend, and despite every theoretical attempt at keeping them separate, these two institutional strongholds came together to prove both stereotypes true -- to the disappointment and dismay of many Italians, for reasons that expand beyond their typical lament.

Here's what happened: on Saturday evening, Naples's football club faced off against Florence's in the championship match of the Coppa Italia (Italian cup) tournament. Naples hosted the game on its home pitch to the screaming excitement of a sold-out stadium. That is, when the game finally started. For hours before it, Naples's tifosi (fans), the Ultras, dominated the scene with a display of riotous outbursts uncustomary even to the Italian south, responding to the injury of one of theirs presumably at the hands of the Fiorentina's fans. The rioting ended when a mysterious tattooed man in a black T-shirt, assured of the rumor's falseness, called off the hoots and hollers and gave the green light to begin the game. That man, spectators later learned, Genny a' Carogna, was a camorrista -- or, in other words, a boss in Naples's mafia, the Camorra.

His appearance and, more specifically, the importance it was given on the scene, instantly sparked a conflicted reaction that within minutes spread through the annals of Facebook, even among non-football enthusiasts. There were the comments we might all expect -- This country should be ashamed of itself; I am disgusted with this place; How disgraceful --  comments acknowledging both Italy's frustration with the power of its mafia groups, and its inability to change the status quo that their influence has generated. But by the match's end, this indignation, once directed (rightly, if ineffectively) at a state that repeatedly leaves its people wanting (both morally and economically), was rerouted and dumped heavily onto those displaying it. "This match isn't about the mafia, it's about soccer. Why is everyone talking about the Camorra, when they should be focusing on the game as our national sport, pass-time, and pride?"; "The mafia has always existed. What's so different about today?" These were the new proclamations taking shape. In their own way, this latter group was probably foreseeing what eventually followed: by the next morning, Genny a' Carogna had become a brand of its own, the subject of countless internet memes, even the figurehead of Facebook fan groups. The space between Saturday's game and Sunday dinner had witnessed the development of three variants of an entirely Italian coping mechanism: 1) Rejection of the Institution and Self-Loathing; 2) Resigned Acceptance Mistaken for a Progressive Attitude; 3) Resort to Well-Intentioned but Perhaps Pointless (or Even Counter-Productive) Humour.

 What's more is that participants in each of these variants believed they were getting it right (to the exclusion of the other two), that their attitude was the one most befitting of the situation.

There is no need to rehash the history of Italy's mafia. It's not all The Godfather by any means, but by and large, what you read about it is true: there is at least one mafia group unofficially governing each of Italy's regions. Some are better known than others: Sicily has Cosa Nostra (Our Thing); Calabria has the 'Ndragheta, Campania has the Camorra. If you've read Roberto Saviano's Gomorra or seen Matteo Garrone's filmic adaptation of it by the same name, you'll know what local mafia presence means in concrete terms: fiscal control of enterprises at all levels (small to large), property ownership and abusive rent control, loansharking and debt collection, political corruption, misuse of state resources, black market monopolies, drug cartels, movement of illegal weapons, laundered money and, perhaps most problematically, the recruitment, training, and brainwashing of youths for mafia preservation and growth. If you've studied Italian history or literature to any extent, you'll likely also know that mafia presence in Italy is neither a thing of the only recent past, nor a plague to Southern Italy alone; mafia groups exist throughout Italy, some dating as far back as the early nineteenth century. You'll likely also know how dangerous these groups can be to anyone who refuses to adhere to their code -- the 1992 murder of anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone most immediately comes to mind -- a code centered on omertà, or silence respectful of the mafia and its ties.

But let's get back to our Facebook protesters, shall we?

If Italy were my country of birth (and not just of gradual adoption), I, too, might want to cry out against the Camorra or otherwise publicly display my disappointment in a system that had managed to fail even the only communal source of joy left to my people. But then, my complaints would likely fall on deaf ears. If my political leaders hadn't listened to me and to millions of others like me in the past, indeed, if they'd found it reasonable, instead, to negotiate with mafia groups in order to advance their own political agendas until then, why should they listen to me or to anyone else now? What would be the point of my political protest? What good could come of it? Mightn't I be better off, or at least more serene, focusing on the more pressing issue at hand? After all, don't they always say:

Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference ...

And mafia strength is certainly not something I can change.

Or, in turning a blind eye to an issue so clearly ubiquitous, would I only be adhering neatly to the law of omertà that had ruined my country and its peace? Maybe the best approach would be a subversive one. Rather than waving my banner against the mafia or in accordance with the silence it had culturally asked of me for years, I should draw as much attention to it as possible -- only to mock it and if not to domesticate it, then at least to reclaim its impact on my own terms.

They are competing models that, despite their common root, continue to cause stir among friends (at least online). The second group views the moral finger-wagging of the first a snobbish, hypocritical, and useless behaviour. To it, the first group responds by underlining the need to react outwardly to a state of emergency that,  no matter how long-standing or precedented, can otherwise never effectively be addressed. The third group's preferred external reaction is one of farce, of which both other groups disapprove; the first, because it quite literally makes a mockery of an issue that has serious consequences nation-wide; the second, because it puts the spotlight on and renders celebrity an entity worth eradicating from the face of the earth. But at least by making fun of it, we're all laughing, aren't we? And everybody knows that:

If you weren't laughing about it, you'd be crying 

or

Better tears of joy than tears of sorrow 

or

Laughter is the best medicine.

Each group has its catch-phrase, its central philosophy, its modus operandi. It's hard to prefer any one to another. What remains striking, to me at least, is the synthesis that comes of this dialectic exercise and in response to its earlier thesis (group one) and antithesis (group two): misdirected humour. It's the synthesis that perhaps comes of all Italian dialectic exercises; it's the final and half-hearted plea of a nation that for centuries has found solace in beffe, burle, caricature and other grotesque inversions of reality. In the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries (as in Mario Monicelli's much later Amici miei triology), the beffa - or practical joke - was used to make fun of members of society either too easy not to dupe or too reprehensible to spare discomfort and embarrassment. It was a cunning man's sport, used to exclude unwanted members of society (or, more generously, to laugh momentarily at someone's simplicity and gullibility) not in lieu or for want of a more serious or appropriate alternative, but simply for jest, for the personal satisfaction that sometimes comes of giving someone his just desserts. But, I think, there is an unbridgeable gap between this kind of light-hearted and active joking, and the passive creation of a Facebook page dedicated to Genny a' Carogna memes. They generate nothing if not more publicity for Italy's mafia groups, already notorious the world over. But they are not alone in doing so. Members of the other two groups do the same in their approaches, too. Whether they are railing against him, chastising those who do, or photoshopping him into different backgrounds and situations, all of Italy is talking about Genny a' Carogna and the Camorra. And few are doing anything about it.

But not all talk is cheap. News reports released yesterday confirm that Genny a' Carogna has been banned from all stadium events for the next five years, on the grounds not of his ties to the Camorra, but of his decision to wear a T-shirt deemed controversial and prone to instigating violence (it called for the liberation of a Sicilian inmate incarcerated for the murder of a police officer). It is an official decision that will likely find its way into - and successfully out of - a court of appeals, and one that fails to speak to the larger problems surrounding the presence of the Camorra in Naples. But it at least demonstrates that someone, somewhere, was listening to Italy's variegated social criticism, and felt the need to concretise it in some way that the general population simply can't. It's as much as you can hope for as a person dependent on the responsibilities and privileges of public officers. It's a success in its own right.

Italy's three grief models may never agree with each other on the proper way to cope with a collective crisis, and perhaps they shouldn't: it is their disagreement and the propagation of the conversation it breeds that keeps Italian officials aware of, if not interested in, its country's collective concerns, and holds them accountable to their reaction to them.

Tintern Abbey

This month's piece of travel literature, on my half-planned first trip to Parma (and the unexpected friend I made there).

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I decided to go to Parma for reasons, only one of them considered good. I had never been; it wouldn't take long for me to get there; someone's mother I knew grew up there; it is home to the world's best prosciutto. Often, when I retell this story in Italy, I skip the first reasons and, conditioned by a culture that always sanctions culinary adventures, go straight to the last. "I wanted prosciutto di Parma, so I went to Parma," I'll say, "found a deli, had a few slices, and left." It's reductive, but it's more or less true: I spent fewer than four hours in Parma, and one of them eating. When (half-heartedly and usually jokingly) asked why I decided to take a train an hour and a half northeast for a product I could have easily found in Pontassieve (where I was staying at the time), I usually respond, "wouldn't you?" or, "isn't it worth it?" or (and this is a crowd favourite) "but it's not the same in Pontassieve," and am met with great approval. The story generally ends there, and we move onto other travel tales or, more frequently, a discussion of what to eat for dinner.

Of course, I hadn't taken a train an hour and a half northeast for prosciutto. Or even to visit Parma. Actually, I had planned on spending the day in Bologna, a much more justified location on an American tourist's map. But after climbing the Asinelli tower - which is what I had gone to do - and with nowhere specific to go, muscle memory brought me back to the station, and I decided to head over to Parma, just a thirty minute ride away. And because I had never been, and because someone's mother I knew grew up there, and because it's home to the world's best prosciutto.

I only talk about my experience visiting Parma's ducal palace, gardens, and library in reference to my research travels there in the summer of 2012, even though I had visited all three places four years earlier, and before stumbling rather half-consciously into the deli where I eventually had my now famous afternoon snack. I do it to preserve the dignity of the prosciutto, because it makes for a better story; going to Parma to take a walk around its centro storico is decidedly much less appealing to an Italian audience.

And I almost never mention the encounter with an Ursuline order of nuns that still defines my relationship with Parma -- in my own mind.

The Ursuline order of nuns was formed sometime in the 1500s, most famously in Brescia (1535), but most importantly thereafter in France. It was a cloistered order with an educational aim: Ursuline sisters took seriously their role as educators complementary to their Jesuit brothers, leading them to open the enclosure of their convent for the specific growth of Catholic education for girls. In Italy, Ursuline convents proliferated especially in the north; Parma's is made more famous for the eventual tenure of Princess Maria Antonia of Parma there in the early nineteenth century.

But I didn't know any of that when I arrived at their doorstep outside the walls of the ducal residence. I didn't know any of that until my academic curiosity led me to research it, much later.

There was a period in my life, roughly from 2000 to 2007, during which I believed fervently in signs. Universal Signs. Signs From my Subconscious. Signs From Above (or somewhere similar). The kind of signs Paolo Coelho, in his infinite (if somewhat redundant) wisdom taught me I should seek out, believe in, listen to. Toward the end of that time, I had a dream about nuns, or a reflection on my private-Catholic-school education, or a momentary disillusion with the pressures of secular existence (as I perceived them) that led me to look up international orders of nuns, pick the one of my liking, and choose my nun name (as put to a vote among friends). I was to be Marie-Antoine/tte, Ursuline sister, somewhere in Italy. By the summer of 2008 and by way of a litany of disappointing outcomes to difficult events, I had both rescinded my dream of donning a habit and stopped believing in signs. But randomly finding an Ursuline convent, in Parma, that an unintentional namesake had made famous, caused me to take pause, both as it happened and, to a larger extent, as I discovered the full range of the coincidences it entailed.

I don't remember the afternoon with any clarity. It's not among the episodes that stand out in a particular way in my mind about my life. Parma was an impression left on the soles of my feet and somewhere behind my retinas that registered, eventually, onto film and hard copy prints hung on my first apartment wall. Above my bed. In bicycle tires and red brick. What I remember are the curves of its streets, the sunlight dipping behind its orange-walled homes. I remember thinking, without the knowledge about it that I would acquire only later, that all of Emilia-Romagna looked the same; in essence, Parma might as well have been Bologna (or, as I observed years afterwards, Modena, or Ferrara, or Ravenna). I remember my soft-shoed footsteps tiptoeing into the silence of empty courtyards to steal photos of perfectly white-washed walls or wrought iron gates. I remember the late-afternoon heat cascading down my neck and wrapping itself around my shoulders as evening fell. I remember being lost.

And I remember the plaque outside the open gate of an Ursuline convent drawing me to it from my position across the street. I remember the little flower garden behind it beckoning. I remember the yellow air hanging inches above the paved road that led from the external gate to the convent's entrance door -- also left wide open, inviting.

I had not expected such hospitality.

Despite the call for guests implicit in the convent's open state, I entered tentatively, looking around me. I don't remember now if the white-dressed sister that eventually greeted me did so from a formal position of reception, or whether she responded instinctively to the smells and sounds I brought with me into her home. It was unusual for a nun of the Ursuline order to wear a white habit, I thought; surely, this was a sister with special exemption from cloistered life -- a teacher, or a nurse expected to service her community in a way other members of her order couldn't. She looked to be in her early sixties, and was the only one I saw that day, so I had no opportunity to compare her dress or behaviour with anyone else's.

She welcomed me with a smile that spread beyond the arbitrary limits of her face. I asked if I was disturbing anyone, if I might look around the convent now that I was here. Of course, she said. The sisters were always happy to have visitors; she would show me around.

She took me through a short, cool, and narrow hall, and up a marble staircase with iron handrails. At the top of it was a row of rooms, most behind closed doors, but some left open for the curiosity of those walking by. At the far right, was a bathroom. To its left, a small study with heavily-shelved bookcases lining the walls anchored by a small table at the room's center and, a few feet away, a light blue couch, old but sturdy. We turned left into the chapel parlour that, despite its Catholic decadence, had perhaps once hosted secular visitors. A magnificent glass chandelier hung from a domed ceiling above floors that shone with the same marble pattern as the staircase that had led us to them. It was mostly a standing room; a few armchairs set up before a coffee table laden with cross and Bible lent it a hospitable air, but otherwise, it was a sad and stale space, no longer accustomed to attention or appreciation.

The Sister asked me if I'd like to sit for a while; I said no, thank you -- I was happy just to have a look around. Soon, I should get back to the train station, since friends were expecting me in Florence around dinner time.

"What do you mean?" she asked. "You've just come back."

She fixed me, wide-eyed. I felt myself flicker, but must have made no show of it: her gaze remained consistent. Her comment had, of course, thrown me. That I should wander into an Urseline convent that just happened to be open at the time of my passing by was enough the stuff of strange astral alignment. That she should recognize me as a once habitual resident was too much even for my former sign-adhering self. I was to make something of this encounter, I could tell. But I didn't know what and I didn't know how. I didn't even know why, but I felt, as one feels a kick to their shin, the weight of sleeping pulling down their eyelids, or the distinct pangs of insistent hunger, that this was a moment worthy of my reflection and reaction.

"Come back?" I responded. "I've never been here before; it's my first time visiting," I said hesitantly.

"Oh. But that can't be right. I know you. I've seen you before, you've stayed with us. You've been here before, I'm sure of it."

She looked at me earnestly, and I detected on her skin and in the wrinkled corners of her mouth the formation of an unspoken plea, the resistance of a faith barely noticeably flinching.

"Maybe I look like someone who has been here before," I answered, smiling, as unsatisfied with my response as she was. "Or maybe I have a familiar soul."

Theologically, she was not supposed to appreciate the second of my answers in any way. Catholic dogma preaches against the reincarnation of the soul, unless with its own body after the Second Coming and the final judgment it brings with it. But from her four feet eleven inches, she reached a hand onto my shoulder, and I felt comfort. Whether mine or hers is another question entirely.

We toured the rest of the floor; the one above it hosted some of the sisters, she explained -- there would be nothing of interest to me there. Then, we headed back down the long marble staircase to the place where we began. There was a small flower and herb garden in the yard if I wanted to see it. I could spend as much time there as I liked.

I thanked her and extended my right hand. She took it between both of hers and pressed against it from both sides. "God bless you," she said. I watched as she walked away, her white veil trailing lightly behind her in the perfectly still air. It only occurred to me on my train ride home that, contrary to what I might have expected, she had not asked for a donation. Which was just as well, because I had forgotten to offer one, and most likely didn't have any small bills or loose change with me, anyway.

I sat in the garden for a long time, individuating as many flower species as I could. I didn't get far; growing up in Montreal had left me sensible mostly to plants amenable to a harsh North American climate. There were things here I'd never before seen in my life, or that I could recognize only through the distant memories of my travels to which they were secondary and remained nameless. I lingered on the rose bushes and the Jasmine -- two easy and familiar favourites -- and wondered what I was to make of this unexpected meeting and the strange twist it had taken. I asked myself what someone who still believed in universal signs might find in being mistaken for someone in such a formerly relevant context, and with so much conviction. Earlier in the year, some friends had spoken to me about the Law of Attraction and the tendency to reap the energy that you sow, often when you least expect to. But I didn't believe in such flimsy philosophies and settled on coincidence, or at the very least, on inexplicable bizarreness. I had joked about being an Ursuline nun in Italy. Then, one recognized me as her sister, or her comrade, or at least as a friend. It was just a strange, silly thing.

I had gone to visit Parma for reasons, only one of them good. I had never been; it wouldn't have taken me long to get there; someone's mother I knew grew up there.

A mother I had never met, but one I'd heard spoken of frequently with great pride and the complicated ambiguousness of unconditional love and lingering filial resentment. For the mistakes a mother makes. For the misunderstandings that come of generational separation. For the complications created by geographical distance. For the familial schism that follows divorce. A scholar and a teacher, like I was. Over the previous two years, this unknown mother had taken dimension in my brain and in my heart. I'd seen where she lived once; I'd leafed through the many books she kept on local architecture and ancient design, on the growth of cities, and the decline of the Roman Empire. I knew her tastes, her lines. I longed to examine the folds of grey in her dark hair, the spaces between her teeth that showed through when she laughed. (I assumed they did, because her son's did, and her son had a face I knew well and loved, too.) But this was the end of a moment; the encounter I'd for so long imagined would now never happen, and this mother's face was forever to remain, in my imagination, a softened assembly of the male features they generated, the ones I knew so well. I had come to Parma to know something of this prematurely lost mother, to feel something of the kindness and warmth I imagined to be hers as I scanned her bookshelves and her kitchen cabinets. I had come to Parma to meet her.

And instead, I was leaving it not a daughter, but a sister, in the protective custody of a different warmth, a different educator. Instead, Parma had recognized something of the kindness and good spirit in me, making it impossible for me to come away a stranger.

I left the convent gardens just as the reminder of a skipped lunch gripped my stomach. Parma was home to the world's best prosciutto, I considered. I found a small deli counter with an outside terrace on the way to the station and stopped for half a kilo of meat and some parmesan and grissini to go with it. A middle-aged woman in a threadbare apron brought it to me, sun in her eyes, and for an hour, I sat and ate it slowly.

Violence against women -- en Vogue (?)

Vogue Italia's April 2014 edition features (prominently, as of the first page) photographer Steven Meisel's Cinematic: a photo-video narrative intended to mimic classic horror films, and in some way (Vogue readily admits) to address the issue of violence against women. It's not the first time Meisel headlines for Vogue (see the equally macabre August 2008 issue). Nor is it the first time the notorious fashion-magazine now celebrating its 50th year of publication confronts controversy. But Vogue has come under fire for what some are calling a campaign that glamourises, idealises, and misinterprets real issues surrounding domestic violence in a country where this problem has become (or continues to be) so current (30% of women suffer domestic violence, only 10% of whom report it to police) that it is now referred to as femicide.

A fact that bears pause if you consider that femicide for many years referred most routinely to honour killings in cultures that have commonly (and mistakenly) been identified as less evolved than the European ideal.

This post is by no means an apology for Vogue Italia or an endorsement of an editorial (and perhaps political) move that, by my estimation, clearly misses its mark. Nor is it, however, a condoning of the mass's misguided (and a little uninformed and unimaginative) battle cry against it. What it intends to be is an evaluation both of Vogue's Cinematic (and, more problematically, the language used to describe it) and of popular reaction to it.

In other words, this is one of those instances where, from the heights of my horse, I pronounce that everybody got it wrong.

The most frequent attack on Cinematic - and one that Vogue itself addresses in its (unreadable -- who translated it?) letter from editor Carlo Ducci - is its cheap appeal to obvious controversy to make sales. Ducci writes, in an excerpt from said letter:

"Saying NO to violence against women enables us to be, in our own way, useful. And to convey, as our civic duty, a message against barbarism. It doesn’t matter if we run the risk of causing a general uproar with the media or arousing criticism; or if we are accused of exploiting pressing issues just to push our way in newsstands. What is important for us is that at least one of the dozens of women suffering violence every day can feel our nearness. And that those who follow us may feel stimulated to take action, condemn, and support women in trouble. And that they all see that all of us at “Vogue Italia” are on their side: by utterly and radically condemning all types of violence. This awareness urges us to make some noise."

What he fails to account for, however, is the way in which this exploitation occurs and manifests itself.

A little context: in the summer of 2013, Twitter exploded with posts about various Italian campaigns aimed at raising awareness about domestic violence, with the hopes of eventually eradicating it altogether. Most compelling among them (in my opinion) was a contest engineered to compensate the best ad-length films to treat this issue in a constructive way. These various initiatives, like rolling stones, gathered moss and made some stir (not as much as they - or I - had hoped). People commented, followed, tweeted, and retweeted, and added a little of their own. But that was almost a year ago, when it would have been more appropriate - or at least more publicly accepted - for Vogue to broach the same issue. Since then, it has (predictably) died down again in most news circles (despite the propagation and promotion of all-female led businesses, blogs, and news outlets in Italy). Vogue's meaning was well-intentioned, and perhaps even sufficiently couched in popular discourse and informed by current trends. But it came a year too late. Emerging only now, it seems nothing more than an after-the-fact reflection, flippant and unconcerned, on a topic that spent an entire summer - last summer - making waves. The question I ask is, why now? Does Vogue intend to be the Saviour of Women that swoops in to rekindle the dead flame of their issues and make them heard? Unlikely. Least of all with a man spearheading its intended movement. (I mean, Vogue Italia has a strong female figure in Franca Sozzani, and as much as I generally disagree with everything she says, I wonder why her voice is entirely absent from an issue that explicitly claims to address her half of the human species.)

The second claim that comes against Cinematic is its "glamourization" of domestic violence - its transformation of the issue into a fantasy lightened by the beautiful clothing photographed that almost justifies it. It's chic to be beaten, is what many critics of Cinematic claim to be its take-home message. In ways obvious to anyone who has actually looked at the whole contents of the photo-shoot and its associated short film, that interpretation is obviously wrong (if we are willing to entertain the editor's very naïve approach to domestic violence and still more discounted artistic interpretation of it). Cinematic features an equal number of male and female characters and roles clearly divided by gender: the men are the perpetrators of violence against women, the women the tormented subjects of these predatory attacks. Except for one woman - and the film's (and photo-shoot's) protagonist. She appears on the cover in exhausted victory over her male assaulter, who she does defeat in the project's short film. The film's narrative comes closer to defending the project overall: in it, the stills that in the photo shoot distinctly show men terrorizing women in gorgeous clothing, unmarred by the bloodiness around them, move quickly together to tell the story of a woman who, despite the constant threat of a presence who never truly makes himself visible, overcomes her fear -- and her attacker. Men are all but absent in the film, which places greater emphasis on women, both as victims and, eventually, as victors (or victorias, perhaps). The stills, however, reverse any good the film does by easily setting up a dichotomy that only in one photo is effectively overturned.

A photo of a woman (in white patent leather platforms) holding a bloody cleaver in her hand.

We are to assume, as the film and the cover shot make clear, that she, like the shoot's protagonist, has killed her attacker -- hooray for women! We have emerged as mistresses of our own fates! Right? Right?!

Wrong.

The problem no one seems to address, here, is that Vogue Italia's only proposed alternative to domestic violence against women, its only recourse of action, its only imagined solution, is domestic violence against men. Only in killing their (our) attackers can women right the wrongs against them (us) and avoid the pain of impending physical attack. Only by becoming villains can they (we) also become victorious.

It's a problem, especially in Italy, where women are already villainised simply for being women; where we are called greedy, money-hungry, manipulative and false; where we are accused of trying to be men, without actually trying (that is, receiving the proper training) to be men; where we are held in contempt simply for climbing corporate (or political) ladders, which seldom happens without the intervention of nepotism or sexual misconduct -- in which case, we are called opportunists and whores. It's a problem because it reduces women to what is already considered the only card in our deck (and the one that, since the sixteenth-century, has defined us): our instinct and the impulsive behaviours it is said to engender. It's a problem because it assumes that women have no other way out, no model of empowerment that is not linked to primitive retaliation or self-defense. It strips women of our agency to be on the offense in a society that all too frequently leaves us in the defensive zone.

I don't often go on what pop culture calls "feminist rants" because I prefer to think of women as established equals to men, as winners in the fight against sexism, as beings who only by unflinchingly focusing on our worth and contribution to society - and not by lingering on issues of inequality that only further draw attention to it and worsen it - can ensure the successful survival of our species. I prefer to embrace and appreciate our differences from men, and to use them for a greater good. I prefer to think of my male peers as supporters and allies, not adversaries. This is why Vogue Italia's Cinematic spread is so offensive. Not because it makes domestic violence okay. Not because it relies on it to sell copies. But because it so clearly and thoughtlessly continues to propagate the idea that men and women are enemies, that one is more powerful than the other, that one must kill the other in order to survive, that they cannot cooperate. It insists on aspects of this so-called "feminist discourse" that advances no one, least of all feminists. It stagnates on an idea of gender-equality that is at least 30 years old and that has proven to be ineffective in its larger cause.

What is worse, it presumes to undo, with its "controversial look at violence against women" fashion-publishing's more common practice of espousing and profiting on dream-like alternatives to reality to ensure popularity:

"It is a controversial as much as an essential relationship the one that connects fashion publishing with daily life. A palpable and fertile interaction, continuous and constant, a mutual nourishment that brings them closer or takes them apart, embracing the dimension of the dream, an inalienable element in this publishing sector. A dream that in most cases is inspired by and nods to that part of our reality that most people define “light”, associated to entertainment, which  is undoubtedly intriguing." 

Domestic violence is indeed real. Violence against women is real. Hell, in Italy, even violence against women in pretty clothing is real. But the resolution of it that Cinematic offers is just as much an unrealistic dream as any other. Only this time, it's not the fictive promise of massive jewels or pristine yachts on sale.

In essence, I don't think Steven Meisel's project is bad. I think, as is the case with most (self-assumed) high-end fashion photography, that it is aesthetically beautiful, that it captures an (albeit limited) array of human emotion, that it effectively completes the narrative proposed to it. But it died at the hands of Vogue's editors, who insisted on publicly making it about violence against women, when they could have just taken the (to them) moral low-ground and left it at fashion's take on horror films. There are issues appropriate for Vogue, as a publication concerned with beauty and fashion, to comment critically upon (July 2005's critique of plastic surgery, for example). Cinematic works as the title of something that doesn't pretend to be anything more than an interpretation of that - of cinema and the fantasies that it, by its very nature, promotes. It ceases to work as the title of a campaign against domestic violence that, for reasons beyond the popular opinion I have come across so far, undeniably fails.

RED flag

I have opinions this week, and I thought I might give them free reign here (because if not here, then where?). Real opinions. Somewhat informed opinions. About things that matter (to me). So I hope you'll indulge me as I let you in on a few.

The first concerns the projected opening of a Feltrinelli RED bookstore in Florence's storied Piazza della Repubblica, right in the heart of its centro storico. For those unfamiliar with the news, in July 2012, Feltrinelli, one of Italy's best-known and most important (on a global scale) publishing houses and bookstore chains opened its first RED location in Rome. RED, both Feltrinelli's signature colour and an acronym for "Read, Eat, Dream," was conceived as the meeting point of two specific elements of traditional Italian culture: literature and food. It opened as a bookshop with gourmet food counters, somewhat like Eataly, and a space for people to meet and chat while browsing the proposed literary selections and maybe also enjoying an aperitivo. The second RED opened in Milan in September, 2013, and the third is slated for a Florentine inauguration in the foreseeable future, setting up shop where the recently defunct (2013) Edison Bookstore once stood.

There are just a few problems with this business plan, and with RED's mission more generally. To put it briefly: it at once caters to an Italian audience that no longer exists and attempts to generate a modified version of this audience in a place uninterested in bringing it back to life, and unlikely to succeed at encouraging its growth.

"Reading" is no longer a traditional Italian practice. It hasn't been for a while. Recent years have witnessed the closure of the Libreria del Porcellino, Libreria de' Martelli, Libreria de' Servi, and, as previously mentioned, the Edison Bookstore in Florence. Once a household name, in 2012, Mel's Bookstore passed into the hands of IBS -- primarily an online book dealer (like Amazon), and the Feltrinelli International that still stands in Via Cavour is ostensibly breathing its last breath. No official announcement of its closure has been made, but each time I go back, I am welcomed by another empty room and stacks "in transition" to somewhere else - most likely a storage bin.

That is not to say that Italy has stopped reading, or even that Italian readers have shifted their attention exclusively to online book purchases, audiobooks or free downloads (although a lot of that has happened, too). It means, rather, that "reading" has become an alternative - not mainstream - activity, and it means there is no room (and no demand) for it on Florence's crowded downtown streets. It's a sad reality for those of us who do cherish the existing stores that still carry paperbacks, but that doesn't make it any less true.

These formerly book-friendly venues have most often been replaced with the second item on RED's agenda (the third is just redundant): eateries. Because no matter what else, come hell or high water, Italians will always need to eat -- and enjoy doing it (and rightly so). Venchi (chocolate store and gelateria) and Eataly have set up shop in Piazza del Mercato Nuovo and just steps from the Duomo, respectively and there enjoy the fortunes that for their buildings' previous tenants ran dry. But the Libreria de' Servi suffered a different fate, to a different end, and perhaps for a mostly different population. It has turned into the Museo Leonardo Da Vinci along a trajectory that conveniently (more or less) lines up the Ponte Vecchio, Piazza della Signoria, Piazza della Repubblica, and Duomo, and is just a block over from the Galleria dell'Accademia and the home of Michelangelo's David. In other words, in the case of the Servi bookstore, the interests of Florence's intellectual community - and the Libreria de' Servi was, in fact, an important tool for scholars of Italian literature, history, and culture - were sacrificed for the assumed interests of its tourists. It's hardly blameworthy: from December to October, Florence's economy relies heavily on the pockets of its foreign visitors. It's only right to repay the favour by giving them what (we think) they want.

Assuming, then, as a successful model, the replacing of Edison bookstore in Piazza della Repubblica (hereafter, PDR) - a primary tourist destination - with another bookstore  is not only a disappointing, but a risky attitude. Not least because the bookstore that for so many years opened its doors to American ex-pats and Italians alike failed in the very spot RED hopes to inhabit. It failed. Despite the tables set up for around-the-clock study and light eating and, toward the end of its tenure, the heavily discounted books on sale throughout the store, Edison failed. Why did it fail? It failed because a piazza that was once known for its hospitality to foreign students (and their local or likeminded, cosmopolitan friends) has fallen to the more pressing - or more lucrative - demands of the general population. When I studied there in 2005, at the Centro linguistico italiano Dante Alighieri, my classmates and I met daily at the historical Gambrinus café before class. When I came back on my own in 2011, Gambrinus had (just) been replaced by the Hard Rock Café (Italian friends actually took me to the inauguration, as if this was something I would surely like to do out of some presumed sense of 'patriotism' as much as they did out of curiosity). Once a gathering place for the students at the Palazzo Rucellai Institute (now the Istituto degli studi internazionali) just around the corner, PDR has slowly transitioned into nothing more than another tourist destination -- with the mini-market set up on its edges to match.

And tourists don't read. Or at least, they don't go to Florence to shop for books. And, with the Rinascente shopping center and its famous rooftop terrace restaurant defining the piazza's outer limit, and the still more notorious Giubbe rosse restaurant and café impressively flanking an entire side, no tourist goes to PDR looking to read, eat, OR dream at Feltrinelli. Least of all when there is a Feltrinelli not but a three-minute walk away in Via de' Cerretani.

I am not sure if it's noble, presumptuous, silly, or over-confident of Feltrinelli to try to preserve (or restore) Piazza della Repubblica's illustrious literary past (after all, Le Giubbe rosse started out as a literary café and in that way established its reputation from the late eighteenth century onward) by pushing itself in and adding something 'new.' I don't know if I am comforted or insulted by the idea of openly pairing books for sale (that are not recipe books) with food, or of hoping to boost book sales by also offering victuals and libations. Either way, with so many competing distractions and short-term customers (Giunti and IBS both have a base of loyal local customers), I am not convinced that RED will be able to pull its two-million euro weight in the long-term.

I'm not even sure I want it to. As strongly as I feel about literature and the integrity of the printed book and as much as I love to see new book ventures succeed, I think I would rather see a moderately-sized (and, ideally, independently-owned, but let's not get picky) shop thrive in a venue appropriate to it - near a university campus, or in a neighbourhood reputed for its eclectic intello-artistic clientele - than a multi-million dollar glamourisation of what I still think of as humanity's most humble, honest, and unassuming pass-time. When I was growing up (and by now you'll think I'm a cranky old lady harping on the 'good ole days of yore'), reading and dreaming were synonymous terms -- you couldn't do one without doing the other. I didn't need the pomp and circumstance of bright lights and novelty pizza to inspire me to expand my horizons. Nor did I need a space explicitly engineered for my dreaming to imagine the most fantastical things I could conjure. But then, I grew up reading encyclopedias and, when they weren't available, cereal boxes, or anything else I could get my eyes on, and, later, compiling my own very serious, very researched collections of curiosities: Countries of the World, Their Flags, and Their Capitals; Flowers and Shrubs; Poems and Short Stories; Dog Breeds and Behaviours. (I swear. My parents kept some and still have them.) For me, the cup of tea has always been secondary to the reading - and the dreaming - it accompanies. Sometimes, I even forget to drink it.

Of course, RED has enjoyed considerable success both in Rome and in Milan, and more likely than not, I will be the first one to walk through its doors when it does open in Florence, either to make myself believe in its project, or to convince myself that I was right to be skeptical about it. Or maybe both. Or maybe just to take in the mixed crowd of hobnobbing local fighetti and in-and-out tourists looking for cards and calendars (you know, the ones with the old ads for Campari, or the Venetian carnival costumes). If RED succeeds, I'll be glad that someone found a way to bring reading back to PDR. If it doesn't, I'll be glad the legacy ended with Edison: an establishment that, in my time, I grew so much to love.

Pudding Time

Food has been on my mind quite a bit these days. It might be because I started putting some of my recipes up online (insert shameless plug of S Squared Recipes here), and it might be because, legitimately, food is one of the topics of Italian culture most shrouded in misunderstanding. Either way, I decided, today, to either bust or confirm a few myths surrounding the preparation and consumption of food in Italy and by Italians.

Are you ready? This one might upset you. Let's just move forward in list format to soften the blow a little.

1. Italians eat SO MUCH.

Oh my God, you guys, whenever I go to Italy, I gain, like 15lbs, it doesn't even make sense, there's so much food!!! Italians eat so much!!! Every meal is like a four or five-course meal ... how do they stay so skinny??

So I started with my favourite. In all fairness, until I traveled extensively there, I was under the impression that this stereotype held true, too. Up until a certain point of time and especially in certain regions, I'm sure it did. In the 1970s and 80s, when Italy was a more affluent society at the height of its culinary game (some argue), yes, food consumption was a big thing. In Sicily, for example, where food is priced rather reasonably, it's not uncommon to eat lots of it, and still today, the promise of food is also the easiest way to socialise and to guarantee a good turnout of friends on any average evening. But long gone are the days (if ever they existed) when every meal was a banquet and every banquet an embarrassing display of gourmet riches. Let's sort out the facts from fiction: it's true that Italian cuisine, like many other cultures, offers different courses and servings: the antipasto (or appetizer), primo (or first course, usually pasta based), secondo (or second course, usually meat or fish based), contorno (side dish), and the dolce, caffè, ammazzacaffè (dessert, coffee, and digestive). In some places, you'll also find the cheese course snuck in right before dessert and accompanied by fruit. But I've only ever had meals composed of all six courses on special occasions. Granted, in Italy, having your niece over for lunch on a random Sunday afternoon might be considered a special occasion -- in other words, there might be much more opportunity for these elaborate meals to arise. But they are not a daily occurrence. In real life, Italians limit themselves to a primo OR a secondo più contorno, both when cooking for themselves and when eating out. In some cases, they'll also throw in an appetizer or dessert to share, but that's more or less where they draw the line. THAT's how they stay so skinny. Just because there are six courses on the menu doesn't mean you have to (or should) sample them all in one sitting.

2) Italians only eat pizza and pasta.

No, they don't. In fact, Italy has one of the world's most varied kitchens (in my opinion). Each region develops its own precious specialties, which range from beef (in Tuscany) to fish (in coastal regions like Puglia or Campania), to stuffed or layered pasta (in Emilia-Romagna), to mushroom-based plates (in Piemonte). There's lots to choose from within Italy's national cuisine, and when Italians tire of it (which seldom, but occasionally, happens), there's also lots to choose from outside of it. In Florence alone, I've had Chinese, Thai, Indian, Japanese, Moroccan, French, and American food.

3) Italians make the best pizza in the world.

This one is more of a specification than a refutation. It's Neapolitans, not Italians that make the best pizza in the world. And there is a difference -- a huge one. The pizza you'll find in Milan, Genova, Venice, or even Rome, unless it's from a pizzeria owned and run by a Neapolitan, is not anything like the pizza you'll find in Naples. Okay, maybe it's something like it. There's dough and toppings involved, but that's about where the similarities end. The texture and height of the dough change (Neapolitan pizza has a thick, usually well-cooked crust), the toppings change, the ratio of sauce to cheese changes ... it's its own beast. So look for Neapolitan pizzerie when you travel within Italy, or be disappointed that you had a crappy, thin-crust pizza in Verona. You were expecting better, aren't Italians the masters of pizza? No. No, they are not.

4) Chicken primavera pasta (or similar) is a real thing.

It isn't, and I blame the Olive Garden (Lord, help us) for making everyone believe it is. In general, and with the (remarkably rare) exception of carbonara and amatriciana sauces, Italians don't really like to put chunks of meat in their pasta. They consider it degrading, or they don't particularly relish the idea of combining the primo and the secondo in the same serving (remember when I told you about how Italians like for things to be in their right place?). Either way, it simply does not occur (often) to Italians to put cubed chicken or pork or any kind of meat (except fish. Fish is a different thing), really, in their pasta, especially with other vegetables and heavy cream. That is not to say that they will never eat pasta and meat together in the same plate. Ragù (meat-sauce) and stuffed pasta like tortellini or ravioli are notable cases in point. It's not that Italians are anti meat + pasta. It's that the combination must be done in a certain way to make it real or appetizing. Chicken primavera is not an acceptable option. While we're at it, neither are garlic breadsticks (unless they also come topped with tomatoes).

5) Nothing in an Italian fridge goes wasted.

Wrong. Well, I mean, like the best of us, Italians try to put everything to good use. But while in America it might be common to leave a package of opened ham in the fridge for a week or more without worrying about its edibility, in Italy, if something is not eaten within 3-5 days of being purchased, it's out. Are you crazy? Do you want to get sick? That prosciutto has just been SITTING there for three days! It's an attitude that merits both blame and praise. On the one hand, it does seem a little wasteful unless only the perfect portions of everything are bought. On the other, it encourages the use of fresh ingredients, usually bought the same-day. Of course, this means going to the grocery store daily (or at least twice a week), but that might be a small price to pay for nearly-guaranteed freshness and quality.

6) Italians are food snobs.

This one is true, at least to an extent. They prefer to think of themselves as "connaisseurs," but the simple fact of the matter is that some behaviour Italians display toward food smacks of downright elitism. They almost categorically refuse to acknowledge even the possibility of leftovers (my boyfriend lets me keep mine in the fridge, with the understanding that I will be the only person to ever touch them), let alone their viability as recycled meals. They refuse to combine certain ingredients, or to dissociate classic combinations of others. (Once, I was called "American" for coating my pasta with burro e basilico (butter and basil) rather than the traditional burro e salvia (butter and sage).) They refuse to try new ingredients (BACON? GROSS), and they absolutely cannot tolerate the misrepresentation or inadequate interpretation of dishes they deem to be basic (how could this person possibly mess up this saffron risotto? I was making this when I was 3 years old!). Outside of Italy, they dismiss any ingredients that are non-Italian (what the hell is HAVARTI?), and limit their scope to the familiar and safe. So, yes, they have a special relationship with food, and it takes a while for them to broaden their horizons, but they do. Present them with an impeccable dish of any culture that makes use of a majority of ingredients they know well, and they readily appreciate it. Come on. They're not monsters (most of the time). Also, let's be honest, they might be anal retentive about their food combinations, but many times, they're just right. I have yet to be recommended a mixture of ingredients (in any form) that doesn't work perfectly. So, you know, you gotta give them that.

7) Vaccaro's (or similar) is the authentic Italian dessert experience.

Alright. Vaccaro's is just a Baltimore thing, that people unfamiliar with Baltimore might not understand, but in concept, it's very simple. It's a "pastry shop" that offers peanut-butter based mountains of marshmallow ice cream with unicorn-themed sprinkles and baco-bits shavings and calls them Italian desserts. There are places like Vaccaro's coming out the whazoo across North America and giving Italian desserts a bad - or incorrect - name.

The real Italian dessert experience is as much an appreciation of the classic tiramisù, amaretti, or cantuccini con vinsanto as it is an exploration of desserts imported from other cultures and given an Italian twist: the Pan di Spagna, Torta bavarese, Sacher, or Zuppa inglese. I might still contend that the French have the world's greatest desserts, but Italians deserve a fighting chance. Just, please. Don't limit your understanding of Italian dessert to Vaccaro's or - and just as egregiously - to gelato. With few exceptions, gelato is something you can only get (at a gelateria) in the summer, and is less a dessert than a generally refreshing snack acceptable any time of the day under the scorching Mediterranean sun. You can have it after every meal if you really must, but you'd be missing a world of opportunities.

8) What is this weird breakfast with NO EGGS?!?!

It's less of a stereotype than a general shock to the American system. Italians don't eat eggs at breakfast. In fact, they don't eat much at breakfast. Sometimes, and if they're really indulging, they'll have a bowl of cereal with their morning coffee. But most often, it's a coffee and a pastry - a viennoiserie, as the French say - usually a croissant (cornetto), brioche, or bombolone or ciambella (donut). At home, it might be a store-bought viennoiserie or fette biscottate (like Melba toast) with butter and jam or nutella. Either way, there's not a whole lot of protein going on at the Italian breakfast table. They'll have the occasional pancake, but best of luck to you if you try to serve it with ham or breakfast sausages.

And while on the topic of breakfast and coffee ...

9) Coffee is espresso. Espresso is coffee.

Yes. I mean, there are a million ways to make "a coffee" in Italy (maybe not the Starbucks million, but quite a few). There's the caffè corretto (with liquor), caffè macchiato (with a shot of milk), cappuccino (only to be consumed before 11am), caffè latte (latte), and more. But when you say "caffè" -- just straight-up, 100% roasted bean -- what you're asking for is a single shot of espresso (not EXpresso), no frills. So if you say you want "un caffè," don't be surprised if they don't come out with a tall Americano to-go. That's not how things go there. I know I don't need to talk to you about coffee culture in Italy, about how "getting coffee" means standing at the bar for five minutes (at most) and drinking your coffee at the counter from a ceramic cup. But just in case, that's what you're in for. It's not an "I'll get my Starbucks venti and sit at a table and pull out my Mac" kind of scenario. Nor is it an idyllic "I'll just talk with the cute bartender all day long while I twirl my hair around my finger" kind of scene: chances are, at least in the morning, there are at least 20 more of you at the bar all at the same time, and your bartender can barely remember your order, let alone notice the brightness of your baby blues (well, actually, that might not be true given the reputation that precedes Italian men, but you get my point).

10) Lunch is almost never a salad (sorry).

In fact, the insalata usa poco in Italia (salad is not very common or popular in Italy). Personally, I pride myself on the innovativeness and creativity of my (many) salads (my repertoire grows daily). But In Italy, they're not really a thing. You can get a mixed salad, but it's usually just a sad little gathering of some tortured lettuce, underripe tomatoes (because they use the good ones for bruschetta or tomato sauce), large slices of cucumbers, and shredded carrots -- with no dressing (they'll bring you olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, and pepper, and leave you to your own devices). Accordingly, finding salad for lunch is a difficult feat -- Italians are more likely to have a panino (sandwich) or a slice of pizza, or even a primo than a salad.

And yes, it's one paninO, two (or more) paninI.

Along the same lines:

11) (bonus) Italian rustic cuisine is vegetarian.

I mean, not really. Again here, things have changed historically and as a function of economic prosperity. A rustic kitchen is typically associated with a home with limited income: the kitchen is "rustic" because the cook can't afford fancy ingredients. As a result, many rustic Italian dishes are deprived of meat (or at least of the best cuts of meat), simply because rustic chefs could't afford to buy it. But calling rustic cuisine vegetarian is a (large) leap. In fact, "vegetarian" is not really a thing in Italy. In the US, it often means (or should) eating lots of vegetables prepared in different ways. In Italy, if you don't want meat, you get a primo,  you don't go actively looking for things made out of vegetables instead. Vegan food is still less of a thing. In Florence, there is all of one vegan restaurant, and maybe only a handful of "vegetarian" places, at least two or three of which are simply smoothie shops. The green wave gains access to Italy in different ways. It's not unlikely to find asparagus, chicory, or broccoli on a conventional Italian menu. But they're all side-dishes, not main courses. I don't think they will ever be main courses. It breaks my heart, because I make a killer potato-asparagus and broccoli-egg salad, but what can you do? I'm only Italian on the inside, and only, my Italian friends tease, a half of a half (so, I guess, a quarter?). I believe in the green, but I may be alone.

So those are my top 10 (plus a bonus) Italian food myths. Feel free to ask about or comment on any others that come to mind. In the meantime, buon appetito!