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.