Everybody Loves a Carnevale

For those unfamiliar with it, Italian Carnevale is something like a hybrid cross of America's Halloween and Brazil's (and New Orleans's) carnival. In the weeks leading up to Lent and culminating with a great feast on Shrove Tuesday (mardi gras), children dress up and, with their friends, parents, and relatives, celebrate everything whimsical and beautiful that life has to offer before the austere fast of the Lenten weeks ahead. Well, traditionally, anyway, that's what Carnevale meant. It also meant dressing in the costumes of commedia dell'arte (Italian improvised Renaissance theater) characters -- Arlecchino a notorious favourite -- and bestowing luck and warm wishes on your neighbours in the form of a shower of paper confetti and twirly shooting stars. The last bit is still true: barely after arriving in Venice yesterday for Carnival celebrations, my boyfriend and I were ambushed by the paper trailings of a young boy near the stand at which we purchased our Carnival masks. I took it as a good omen.

As long as we're on the topic, tradition has also named Venice the heart and central nervous system of the Italian Carnival since 1162, when la Serenissima claimed victory over Aquileia, and its citizens rejoiced with masked balls, drinking, dancing, and general merriment in Saint Mark's square. It wasn't until the Renaissance that Carnival became a more widespread feast recognised and legitimised - to an extent - by the Catholic Church and celebrated in other Italian urban centers as well. Still, to this day, you can't say Carnevale without saying Venezia in the same breath; Saint Mark's protected pride has basked in this fame for centuries, even if from behind elaborate masks.

You might expect it to be prepared for the immense crowd and massive flux of tourists that arrive each year to participate in the feast. You'd be wrong.

A simple Google image search of "Venice Carnival" yields an overwhelming and almost embarrassing (but most certainly breathtaking) array of traditional Carnevale masks in all shapes, sizes, and colours, and their corresponding larger-than-life costumes. You'll find them against the background of Saint Mark's Square, the Canal Grande, inside the Teatro La Fenice, and posing with gondolieri and civilians alike.

What you find almost no evidence of are the infinite throngs occupying every atom of free space in the city's tight streets and over its bridges, the people shoving each other in all directions to get by, or to get ahead, or simply to get out of the way, the children sitting on their parents' shoulders just to see the lip of the stage at the center of Saint Mark's, or the severe lack of crossing guards or pedestrian traffic direction officials.

Quite simply: Carnevale in Venice is a prestigious tradition, a vibrant celebration, a happy feast. What it isn't, by any means, is organised.

In other words, it's very Italian.

We discovered this somehow unexpected reality early: a projected 20-minute walk to Saint Mark's turned into a 2-hour struggle cramped like cattle in a herd of disgruntled locals and tourists (Italian and international alike) through the city's winding streets and, finally, into its main square, which was gloriously and very surprisingly not bare, but not at all as busy as we both thought it might be given the difficulty with which we reached it. It seemed like we'd waited two hours in line to get into a club that wasn't anywhere near filled to capacity -- and we'd suffered (emotionally) doing it. For no particular reason: there were beautiful things to see in Saint Mark's, but nothing that justified the two-hour wait to gain admission to it. We missed those while trapped in the huddle, though we'd arrived at least an hour early for a number of them.

The logistical flaws in our trek were obvious: there was no bidirectional traffic flow, no planned itineraries for entrances and exits from key sites, no clear signalisation, no opportunities for respite from the crowd, for breaks, for redirection. Once you chose to follow the horde, Venice left you no way out. More interesting to me, however, were the reactions of those sharing our plight. They ranged from sympathy to outrage, from impatience to aggression, from mild disapproval to diatribe. We heard some winning comments:

"It's all because of these tourists. They don't know where to go and they block up all the streets waiting for people to make way" (said as four lanes of human bodies going in one direction were forced to thin and yield to two lanes of human bodies passing in the other direction).

"People have no consideration. They're animals" (said by a person occupying the space of three with his medium-sized dog, large bag, and protrudent umbrella).

"It's useless trying to create more rows of people to move forward. Everyone should just keep to their right, in single file, and let others pass. Then everyone would get through" (said by someone who, at the first possible opportunity, forced his way through the throng of people -- markedly to its left).

"There's really no need to push me. We're all going to the same place" (said by a person inadvertently or perhaps very voluntarily pushing the person in front of her).

"This is so disorganised, it's an embarrassment. Why didn't they think of unidirectional itineraries or other ways to encourage traffic flow? Where are the vigili?" (said by a local who most likely had the opportunity to sit on the committee that would eventually make decisions about pedestrian traffic flow and hire the vigili necessary to ensure it).

I can't say I disagreed with anything I heard. In theory, they were all correct. In theory, they all had very valid points. In practice, they were as Italian as they come: lament the state of the economy, but please, avoid paying your taxes. Lament the state of the environment, but please do continue to drag your massive cars through the country's most important and most revered public spaces. Lament the lack of organisation and proper care, but do refrain from getting involved to improve or prevent it. It's not just an Italian way of being, but it is a very common mentality among people here, especially among those who have never left home and haven't seen anything worse than pedestrian traffic stopped up on a Carnival Sunday in Venice.

Of course, my current lamenting falls in line with theirs. Thank goodness, however, it ended when we reached Saint Mark's and found ourselves whirled up in the most spectacular splendours of the Venetian Carnival, teatro itinerante or not; sfilata missed or not. So did everyone else's. The only thing more Italian than criticising others and complaining about one's state of misery is the profound enjoyment of life in its simplest manifestations, and without particular prompting or the creation of hype. It's this consistent joie de vivre in the face of so much ugliness that keeps me coming back here and searching out new experiences in which both poles of Italian mentality and behaviour are exposed.

The true Carnevale is both things, too: a bureaucratic nightmare, and a stunning tribute to life. Or, traditionally: a moment of gratitude for life's blessings, and a reminder of its perennial curses.

Religion and Politics

You know the old adage. "Especially when among people you don't know well and at an otherwise civil event, the only two conversational topics to avoid are religion and politics."

Well, not in this part of the world. If there are any two things Italians like to discuss most, they are, exactly those: religion and politics. More specifically, they are the Vatican, and Italy's consistently tumultuous post-Berlusconian government (Berlusconi's tenure actually sidelined religion as a topic for argument for a while, but Pope Francis, it seems, is affording Vatican city a well-deserved and welcome, I think, comeback).

You know what? I say bring it on. Outside of Italy, talking about Italy most often means swapping stories about travels along the Amalfi coast, discussing classic recipes ("I've been perfecting my Amatriciana lately") and expressing (contemporaneously) awe at the richness of the country's contained and collected art, and frustration at the way its museums are run. Whatever. Let's roll up our sleeves and talk about Renzi and Letta. Why not?

It's systemic, this need to critique the country's inner workings at the hands of two of its historical strongholds, and it follows Italians outside Italy. All it takes is an encounter with other ex-pats to revive this discussion, which I have come to believe is inherent to Italian DNA. I met a number of Italians unexpectedly staying at the riad hosting my Moroccan travels last summer. Within five minutes of our shared dinner, it was abundantly clear to me what we'd be talking about that evening. To be fair, theirs was not a self-centered interest in politics, as can often be the case: like anywhere else in the world, Italians who have never left Europe often find it difficult to converse beyond their immediate threshold. My companions were curious about Canada's politics and governmental system, especially when compared with the infinitely more notorious American system. Still, the small-talk was kept to a minimum. Here we were, a table of strangers getting to know each other by way of our preferred political parties and the strengths and weaknesses of their platforms. To a certain (large) extent, in Italy, politics = identity almost as much as one's favourite football club does.

More recently, I hosted a dinner party (a Mexican fiesta, in keeping with an earlier post about cultural diversity here) mostly among people I was meeting for the first time. The topic of choice that evening was neither the nature of our work, nor our individual interests, our shared cultural experiences, or our common acquaintances, but paying the canone RAI, (essentially, TV tax -- look for more about this topic soon) and Pope Francis's "political" election as a Vatican city figurehead and rubber stamp. What's more, it came naturally to all participants (but me) and elicited a great deal of debate. One (though not I) might even go so far as to say it made for a successful evening.

Were I psychoanalysing Italians as a whole and on the basis of this generalisation, I might claim deflection, avoidance, fear of intimacy: talking about politics is the easiest way to avoid talking about yourself, making yourself vulnerable to your audience, or engaging on a more human level with those around you. But I know better. It's also the easiest way to involve most people present, since religion and politics are not only the two things everyone here has in common, but are often also the two things about which everyone can more or less see eye to eye. Because political inclination is so ingrained in Italians, it also affects the way they select their friends and significant others. I have yet to meet a politically polarised couple or circle of friends here. If you are a left-wing thinker, chances are, so are not most but all of your friends. If you are atheist, chances are, most of your friends display at least moderate skepticism in the Church. The contrary is true by default: walk into any Church, and you'll find a tightly-knit community that by definition excludes and even shuns nonbelievers and keeps largely to itself. Exceptions are few and far between. Unlike in the US where Republicans and Democrats can regularly, if not always comfortably, break bread, here the unspoken rule is: liberals among liberals; conservatives among conservatives; and, a step further, "alternatives" among "alternatives." The last category is usually composed of hippy types who are too far left to be included in the general population's political spectrum. There's always a separate neighbourhood for them; here in Florence, it's Oltrarno.

Historically, moreover, what we know today as Italy has, for centuries, been home to both the papacy and the Roman empire, and their power has been (and, many argue, continues to be) intertwined from the start. Few other cultures have been founded on such an overpowering coexistence -- America and Canada certainly haven't -- and while it's true that a country's politics is often fundamental to the integrity and interest of its literary and artistic production, the preoccupation with politics and religion in Italy has been constant and consistent from the Middle Ages onward. It isn't everywhere else in the world. Where some cultures' national literature will intermittently represent political concern with the rise and fall of governments, movements, and pressing social issues, Italy's fascination with and critique of its country's religious and political management starts before Dante and is still present today. All greatly revered Italian authors have dipped their pen in the ink of the Church and Empire. More recent ones may have done so by way of journalism -- Pier Paolo Pasolini was a regular contributor to Corriere della sera --, by documentary fiction -- Roberto Saviano and, before him, Leonardo Sciascia expose the underbelly of Italy's "illegal" (but widespread and just as potent) government --, in their memoirs and in privatised moments of their work -- Carlo Emilio Gadda intersperses his real life experiences of war in the fiction he writes. What unites them all is a common concern for the affairs of their shared state.

Having the Church and Empire at your door for centuries means having more opportunity to write about them, that's true. Canada has the Quiet Revolution and the question of language, both arriving at their peaks in the 60s and 70s (although it is experiencing a different kind of multicultural (quiet) revolution today); America has slavery and racial profiling. The difference is that America has its problems since 1776; Italy has had its own, and the same ones, for the most part, since 1200. Americans are more likely to talk about television shows or local events over dinner; in the regular season, and especially among season-ticket holders, Montrealers are more likely to talk about the Habs. Italians talk about Berlusconi's media censorship and the many ways in which the Vatican is stifling Italian social progress.

Argomenti leggeri, insomma.

Occasionally, they do take breaks, thank goodness, in the more familiar (to me) form of gossip and the elaboration of personal goals and projects. Put them all together, though, and for the most part, the evening's catchphrase becomes, "(Political Leader X), che vergogna!" (what an embarrassment!)

To a certain extent, better Political Leader X than me.

Twitter: A month in review

There are many things I'd prefer sharing across platforms, but don't often get the chance to -- like Twitter posts. Twitter can post to Facebook, and Facebook and Tumblr can both post to Twitter, but none can also appear in Blogspot's individual blogs. So I've decided to include a new feature on this site: a monthly (or almost) update of some of my more relevant tweets on Italian culture and events. React! I welcome your comments on everything from my appreciation of Italian hand gestures to my Master Chef Italia preferences! Follow me at @tlouisa

"Si può utilizzare il sostantivo maschile "cane" anche in riferimento all'animale di sesso femminile?" La redazione: http://t.co/dQpyPlp0Wv

— Treccani (@Treccani) December 12, 2013

Nel clima d’Italia, dove tutto si risolve nel compromesso, poco tira aria per certe storie, per certi integralismi. Gadda, Verso la Certosa

— Adelphi Edizioni (@adelphiedizioni) December 18, 2013

http://t.co/UfhFtgCwsc The best part is that the real Italians among them are so easy to identify :)

— Tania Zampini (@tlouisa) January 24, 2014

A lesson I will perhaps never learn: cobblestones + (high) heels = sore feet. On the plus side, this means I get to buy #newshoes

— Tania Zampini (@tlouisa) February 4, 2014

Il sorpasso - Roberto muore vivendo (per la prima volta). Or: The power of superstition (and cosmic... http://t.co/3EQBKCLNNo

— Tania Zampini (@tlouisa) February 5, 2014

Se non è riso, saranno patate #faceliftaproverb

— Tania Zampini (@tlouisa) February 5, 2014

"Hold your pants on." #muddledidioms #ESL

— Tania Zampini (@tlouisa) February 12, 2014

#MasterChefItalia's Almo is from Bari. On the other hand, he does wear neon green sneakers. #ambivalence

— Tania Zampini (@tlouisa) February 15, 2014

Orario Continuato

It means, loosely, "open all day," and you'll see it frequently on Italian storefront windows and business websites, independently owned or industrially-sized.

But you may not have known that.

Europeans in general have made a reputation of their daily pace. Especially when compared with the American work ethic - lunches on the go, bluetooth conference calls between meetings and on the way home, drive-through everything - it does seem as though this side of the world effectively takes the time to appreciate the finer things in life. But only an extent of public opinion on the matter is accurate and still current. The 9 to 5 in Europe - and in Italy more specifically - is not all bike rides and long breaks.

Something like fifteen years ago -- so, just before the turn of the century -- something shifted in the way Italians did business. Until then, and mostly in rural areas (but not only), Italian shop owners and entrepreneurs afforded themselves the luxury (sometimes the necessity) of a midday sosta, or an extended lunch break. Typically, those who did closed shop between 1pm and 3pm, reopened their doors from then until 6 or 7 and, in the summer months at least, took another short break before doubling over to the evening shift until 10 or 11pm. In some places, this is still the case today, but only from June to August. (Working in Verona in the summer of 2007, I was surprised to see many shops closed during my short lunch break.) It is a daily breakdown inspired and informed by farming practices. Traditionally, agriculturalists awoke early in the day to tend to their fields. When they eventually broke for lunch, it was after several hours of hard physical labor, rewarded by a hefty meal and, time permitting, a short nap. They repeated their efforts in the afternoon and well into the evening hours until they came home to the well-stocked table that awaited them in preparation for the next morning's early rise.

Of course, because Italy is a country of exceptions rather than hard and fast rules, even this timeline was subject to change from shop to shop; some places were closed until 4; others shut their doors closer to noon. It wasn't (and still isn't) uncommon to arrive at a shop claiming it would be open at 3pm only to find it still closed -- for the following half hour. Last summer in Venice, a close friend took me to one of her storied and favored independently owned bookshops, careful to arrive there right after when she knew the manager (a man whose face and literary tastes she'd considered familiar for years) would be back from lunch. He wasn't. We waited fifteen minutes before he returned, hands still sticky from the gelato coppetta we'd watched him throw away at a nearby trash can. Orario (schedule), in Italy, is by nature and history a relative term.

As a result of this ... let's call it "flexibility," Italy is contemporaneously criticized for being a place of impossible availability, and celebrated for its accommodation of and concern with the needs of its working class. Because store times vary from place to place, it seems reasonable to exaggerate the common denominator: in Italy, we often think, everything is closed from noon to 4pm. Italians are either lazy or well-rounded, depending on whether the narrator's glass is half full or half empty. Either way, to a North American audience, the Italian workday is often synonymous with farce.

To a certain extent, it is a farce, as any Italian will tell you. A few years ago, the hot topic here was the construction of a high-speed train - TAV, or treno ad alta velocità. Essentially, the ferrovie dello stato (or state railway lines) proposed the development of a series of high-speed lines to improve transit between distant destinations, even internationally - Milan to Salerno; Turin to Trieste and Lyon. A great number of Italians are against the growing TAV efforts as deals are continuously struck with the French government, mostly, popularly, on one basis: Italians work poorly. Implementing the TAV would create more problems than it would fix, they say. Getting a train from Florence to Palermo without having it dissembled into parts and packaged on a ferry would mean building a bridge across the strait of Messina. Economic questions and taxation aside, what I've heard most often among my Italian friends and peers in reaction to this possibility is something to the tune of "if Italians worked the way the Japanese work, it might be doable. But Italians are unreliable and sloppy. More importantly, the government is slow and ineffective. This TAV will never get built." It's hard to say they're wrong: Rome has been promising a third metro line for years, and it's still only at the beginning stages of construction.

Other examples of shoddy workmanship -- or, cose fatte all'italiana (things done "Italian-style") exist on a smaller scale, too. Many hotels and agriturismi will conveniently "forget" to write you a receipt (to avoid taxation); when it isn't a nightmare (as it is most frequently for foreigners), bureaucracy is often a joke that laughs in the face even of loopholes; in more technical fields, whenever a shortcut can be taken, it is taken, even if the quality of the work being done necessarily suffers. Sure, Italians are sometimes professionally irresponsible.

But they aren't all or always lazy. What's more, they don't take four or, in most cases, even two hours off for lunch. If they did, they wouldn't do it just to smell the roses, either.

Many people traveling here in the summer, when Italy enters an alternate universe almost exclusively fueled by tourism and aiming to uphold tourists' expectations, go back home with beautiful images of an Italy eternalized, for better or for worse, in expressions that have become its defining symbols: la dolce vita (the nice life), il dolce far niente (the sweetness of doing nothing). The reality today, however, and since the late 90s, is that most Italians, especially of my generation, work six days a week, from 8am to 6 or 7pm (or until 3pm on Saturdays), take one hour off for lunch, have no syndicated breaks, and work more than one job -- just to pay the bills. Rent is extravagant (in any city center, 700 euro will get you an 80-100 square feet studio, often excluding utilities and additional expenses like parking). Life is expensive. Those who work for themselves (or who work freelance) work all the time. Not even larger companies are spared the worst of the current economic crisis: they might pay their workers less, but they pay them for greater contributions of time. Fare straordinari (working overtime) is a way of life. Orario continuato is the norm. Coming home for lunch, once a hallmark of Italian culture, is now a luxury that often still requires a particular effort. Students aside, the only person I have ever known to come home for lunch while holding down a steady job was my neighbor last summer. She took the twenty minute bus ride back to Piazza del Carmine every day (and then back out again) just to stretch her dollar: a home-made lunch cost maybe 1 euro. Her monthly bus pass was already paid either way. You do the math.

Walking by a series of closed shops in Ravenna right around lunch time in the summer of 2011 was a heartwarming sign of hope for me. It meant, I imagined (and perhaps I was wrong) economic success and stability. It meant that the Italy of stereotype and heritage was not altogether dead.

Dal fruttivendolo (alla COOP)

Teaching my students how to do the groceries (fare la spesa) in Italy usually looks (and sounds) something like this (minus the "sei pazzo, ti do un pugno in faccia" bit). That's okay. More than anything else, it's an exercise in vocabulary -- fruits, vegetables, cold cuts, milk, eggs, other key products --, learning and using measurements (etti and kg), an introduction to the partitive use of the particella "ne," and an opportunity to get students talking comfortably with each other in a situation that theoretically simulates real life.

 Only, it doesn't. Alright. Sometimes it does. But it no longer has to in most places.

 There was a time, not that long ago, when the most quality-effective and budget-friendly way to shop for groceries in Italy was to stop individually - and, often, daily - in locations specialized in one of a shopper's various needs. There's the fruttivendolo (fruit merchant, literally) for fruits and vegetables, the macelleria (butcher) for fresh meat, salumeria (deli) for cured meats, the latteria (dairy store or creamery) for milk and cheeses (also sometimes found at the salumeria), the panetteria (bakery) for breads, foccacce, and schiacce, and the pasticceria (pastry shop) for pastries, cakes, cookies, and other sweet delights, the pescivendolo for fish, the tabaccheria for tabacco, bus tickets, stamps. It all makes perfect sense; Italians, as a people, like everything in its right place. In fact, a large part of their food culture is based on this very principle: certain ingredients can - and should - be eaten together, but improper combinations (which are not that difficult to make, as gastronomic rules here tend to err on the side of rigidity) are considered fatal enough to get you banned from the kitchen and stripped of any culinary credibility.

 Coccoli are to be consumed exclusively with stracchino. Don't you dare get squacquerone instead (the nerve).

Not surprisingly, Italians aren't big on "fusion."

In some places, usually smaller communities both in the north and in the south, this way of shopping is still current. But by now, the "Supermarket" alternative, once considered a poor man's "mercato coperto" (indoor market), has grown to industrial proportions. What started out as an out-of-the-way but convenient one-stop-option for those with cars willing to drive outside city limits (or nearly) has grown into the most popular choice, especially among city-dwellers, and even among casalinghe (housewives). I learned the hard way: never do your groceries on a Friday night two hours before closing unless you want to wait in line at the cash register for twice as long as it took you to find everything you needed.

And you can find everything you need at the supermarket.

What is more, you can find it the way you would in America. That is to say, local options are made just as available as imported options (or almost, except when it comes to produce, which still depends on local seasonal availability). Processed goods are presented alongside fresh goods (available at individual counters, like in the US). The many "erie" shops described above are contained in the concentrated space of a store floor. Even in a small village like my father's, in Molise, where there is only one, supermarkets - although realistically closer to privately owned "mini-markets" - offer variety and selection beyond the basics. Cosimo's got you.

Let's step back a little. As history has shown, Italians do notoriously prefer local (or at least distinctly Italian) products ... just not in the way Americans are coming to prefer their own. Shopping local in Italy grew out of need: for a long time, Italians lacked any other options. Of course, history has also shown us that Italians and Americans follow opposite trends at opposite times. Where Italy is now veering toward America's "Big Bang" approach to food consumption, even in Italian-conceived enterprises like Eataly, Blue-state liberals continue to make a growing case for buying local and stimulating local economy. You might think it would make sense for Italians to want to do the same in their current economic crisis -- that is, to revert back to a model that helped them thrive internationally in a period that witnessed the increasing valorization of "artisanal" everything. You might think that a move toward the more industrial and capitalist model represented by a large supermarket chain is part of what led to Italy's economic downfall. You might even be right.

But it's difficult to say with any certainty which came first: the agglomeration of supermarkets in major urban areas, or the radical rise in price at local specialized shops. In theory, the franchises that still dominate most of central and Northern Italy - Esselunga, Coop, Pam - were all founded between 1957 and 1967. But When I came to Florence for a short study abroad program in 2005, the only real alternatives to Mercato San Lorenzo or individualized shops were the Dico steps away from home (where I could find cleaning products, but not fresh milk) and an Esselunga in a remote place (it seemed) that no one told my roommates and I existed. Our preparatory guides to touring and staying in Italy focused on conversing with street merchants and relying on the availability of their local businesses. It worked most of the time, but never on Sundays, and rarely past 6 or 7pm on any other day. Since then, I have only seen supermarkets grow and flourish in Florence -- and in Florence proper. Over the past three years, I have inhabited three different apartments here, all an easy walk to the city center. There is an Esselunga within ten to fifteen minutes (walking) of each, and a Coop within five minutes (driving) of two of them, or a fifteen minute walk away from one. And where they are overflowing with local residents weighing their fruit, ordering fresh bread, and lingering too long in the coffee aisle, the local stores closer to home are all empty, not quite out of business, but not quite in it, either; neither dead nor thriving.

My Florentine roommates explained it to me once: sure, they would love to shop at Sara's bakery just around the corner. But a loaf of Sara's bread costs 3.50 euro. At Esselunga, they pay half that amount for the same quantity at a minimal (negligible) sacrifice of quality. The bread is still fresh, still local. It's just that its ingredients have been controlled by a larger entity.

More than likely, as is the case with local bookstores competing with national and international establishments, Sara was forced to raise her prices to pay the rent, as the Esselunga down the street was putting her out of business. But the average Italian is not thinking of Sara: the average Italian is thinking of himself, and he has to pinch pennies, too. He might splurge on fresh tomatoes or apricots at the stand across the street from the piazza near work on his way home. But that's where he draws the line. He has priorities.

The greatest patrons of smaller businesses are still elderly customers loyal to shop owners and community focal points, and, sadly, tourists - but only because they don't know any better.

Of course, when inviting friends over to dinner, especially in large groups, shopping at Coop is almost out of the question; fresh everything or bust. "Bella figura" is still a thing here - Italians' guests deserve the best ... because the hosts can afford it.

Sunday night, my (Italian, I should specify) boyfriend and I went to Pam and picked up some Old El Paso soft taco shells. Fine. Call me "'na amerighan'" but I was happy. I certainly won't find those at Sara's or Girolamo's.