Muoviamo chi muove l'Italia

Traveling within Italy is a special test of patience. Admittedly, since my first travels there in 2001 to now, Trenitalia has stepped up its game considerably; breakdowns, delays, and late departures are less and less frequent on regional, intercity, and high-speed trains alike. What with the advent first of the high-speed Frecce (rossa, bianca, and argento) and next of the concurrent Italo high-speed train line connecting major points of interest, one can get almost anywhere within two to four hours. But logistical problems persist, more frequently among users of these new services than in the administration of the services themselves.

Traveling out of Italy is no exception. As I was reminded Monday flying back to North America for a conference, Italians - especially older Italians - continue to struggle as Italy attempts to update its approach to domestic and international travel, not always successfully.

To start: here a few facts about airline management in Italy. Alitalia, Italy's largest airline carrier, was founded as Linee Aeree Italiane in 1946. Although it enjoyed an illustrious reputation for many years, it also suffered consistent financial problems and labour disruption that led to its bankruptcy in 2008. After many failed attempts at making good of government assistance, it was liquidised and partially purchased, that year, by the private Compagnia Aerea Italiana. A band of Berlusconi's acquaintances, they preserved the Alitalia name and the "Italianness" of its brand, but made distinct changes to the Alitalia's operation, at the expense, of course, of Italian taxpayers. Most notably, in 2009, they sold 25% of Alitalia's shares to AirFrance-KLM, consistent with "old Alitalia's" belonging to the SkyTeam partnership since 2001.

It bears mentioning that the lion's share of Alitalia's problems purportedly stemmed from its treatment of pilots and crew members, who often lamented unfair or disproportionate retribution. Labour squabbles of this kind have all but become synonymous with Italian workforce practices across the field - in the air, on the ground, and mostly in government subsidised federal entities. Between 2004 and 2010, Alitalia witnessed a number of (perhaps fundamentally ineffective) strikes. By the end of 2013, it again sat on the brink of bankruptcy, and announced the implementation of a 500 million euro rescue package.

Of course, since very few official policies are made transparent in Italy, Alitalia's use of this new 500 million euro rescue package remains a mystery to Italian people, who see no material manifestations of it at Alitalia and SkyTeam counters at airports. On Monday at Peretola, I saw no agent on stand-by at the automatic check-in machines, only two on duty at the check-in counters, and no one directing traffic between them. Person-to-person check-in was made unavailable, as travelers were instructed to print their own boarding passes and make their way only then to check-in counters for baggage drop-off, where their luggage - but not their boarding gate - was labeled. At Rome Fiumicino last summer, I waited an hour in line at the passport check point because too few kiosks were open to service the passengers of three contemporaneously landed flights pouring in, many of whom, not knowing any better and undirected by airport staff, wound up in the wrong line, slowing the process for everyone. Things are slightly more organised at Milan Malpensa, but customer service remains outside the list of priorities even there; information is provided in a clear and coherent way, but only to anyone seasoned enough to know where to look for and find it.

It is very possible that Alitalia personnel is bearing the brunt of budget cuts; it would not, after all, be the first time they did. It's just as likely that what I saw at Peretola spoke to a renewal and attempted upgrade of airport management practices across the board in Italy and alongside the digitalisation of daily customs more generally. In theory, check-in machines were installed there to replace human bodies with the same basic function; it seems logical that the remaining human bodies present should offer services not covered by the automatic machines. Likewise, and catering to an at least minimally educated population, clear signalisation should do just as well as a human body at directing airport traffic and ensuring the proper following of procedure. What is not being accounted for in either case, however, is the learning curve necessary to make the switch from old to new practices in a country that in many ways is stuck in the 1990s.

In other words, these airport "upgrades," not yet universal, simply don't work in Italy because many Italians lack the cultural preparation to receive them, and because visitors to Italy, already in unfamiliar territory, are unrealistically expected to understand them without assistance.

Fundamentally and historically, Italian culture is based on human interaction "outside the lines." When eating at a restaurant, it is often very much possible to order something not on the menu by asking for it explicitly, or being brought a plate of the chef's personal recommendation. Automatic tellers of any kind are few and far between in most Italian cities, and even in places where they are more available, people often prefer to stand in line and be serviced than to service themselves. As my boyfriend put it, Italians as a people are accustomed to presenting themselves money (or, in the case of airports, passport) in hand and receiving the service they need. Fai da te (do it yourself) is only a very slowly growing concept in Italian cities -- it doesn't even exist outside of them. This reliance on human interaction might owe in part to the fact that  many services rendered in Italy are "outside the lines," too -- illegal, under the table, or otherwise illegitimate. No matter, asking the average Italian to read his way to the right automatic check-in teller at the airport, print his boarding pass, and queue up in the right line - and not in the open space reserved to SkyPlus passengers - without trying to cut in front of those who got there before him is, I won't say an impossible feat, but a very deliberate summoning of a headache. All the more so when dealing with an older generation of Italians who will and do block up automatic check-in machines for half an hour at a time because they don't know how to navigate the interface and can't find anyone around to help them do it.

That is not to say that the situation can never change, that Alitalia must forever resort to catering to a population that is unaccustomed to progress and not yet prepared to deal with it. Italians of my generation, cell phone users since the age of 16 or 18 years old in most cases, navigate these and other new policies with ease and often help those who struggle to do the same. But there are other solutions to the problem of this lack of clear communication. A change in marketing, a different distribution of expenses, the on the ground presence of at least a few non-disgruntled personnel to direct users to the right places and procedures might be a more appropriate place to begin overhauling a system that has grown too expensive to support its users. Airports, at least in theory, are locations of international hospitality. Relying exclusively on the shrewdness of the ideal traveler is an unrealistic burden on those who are not.

One of Alitalia's mottos, and the title of this post, is "Muoviamo chi muove l'Italia" -- we move those who move Italy. Perhaps it would be advantageous to Alitalia to stay true to its promise and consider the basic needs and characteristics of those it aims to service (or have service themselves).

Songs of Experience

Here's a bit of travel literature excerpted from a larger project still in the works. Look for semi-regular posts to follow, and leave your messages and comments! I'd love to know what you think.

Happy reading :)

***

Apparently, as I would eventually come to learn, and despite the ongoing complications surrounding pension plans there – or lack thereof – Italy is good to its senior citizens. Or, at any rate, its senior citizens are good to themselves. In Pisa and its surrounding boroughs, from June 1^st to September 20^th, 2013, at least, anyone over the age of 65 and earning less than 20,000 euro per year – and three of their guests – were eligible for free admission and equipment rental at thirty-five participating beaches. That doesn’t seem like much of a benefit, but in a country that typically charges anywhere from eight to thirty euro for an umbrella and/or (depending on the reputation and classification of the beach – and more on that later) a lettino  or sdraio, when you factor in the cost of gas, parking and, eventually, lunch and snacks, it is, indeed, a good deal – and a big deal in a long summer of 90+ degree weather.

           

When beaching alone, I am always more likely to rough it on the sand in the spiaggia libera with only my (usually tiny) beach towel (or hotel towel, more frequently), some sunscreen, and a few magazines. But then, I am usually on a student budget. Umbrellas and lounge chairs are superfluous to my survival.

            

Now that I come to think about it, students have much more in common with senior citizens than with any other demographic, excluding, perhaps, young children.

            

I can only imagine that something similar was happening in Pesaro when I visited for a day in June 2012. I should have known by the train ride over from Florence; an eighty year-old woman, surrounded by a wimple of widows, told me within minutes of sitting down to take my feet off the seat facing me and place them on the floor where they should be. In my defense, they were only leaning against that hard plastic place between the lip of the seat and the rubber slope underneath it. Besides which, the train was empty, the number of vacant spots far and away outnumbering the passengers present. Also: this woman was seated two rows behind me. But I suppose or would assume that by the time you hit eighty, your moral vision is much stronger than your prescription lenses, and it behooves society to adhere to it, as an unspoken rule.

            

I should also mention - and not to further aggravate the stereotype, but as point of fact - that my train left at 5.20am from regional track 14 at Santa Maria Novella, Florence’s central station. All the telltale signs were there.

            

Rain was in the forecast that weekend, so I was surprised to notice, when planning, a conspicuous lack of vacancy in many of Pesaro’s beachfront (or almost, as mine ended up being) hotels and other accommodations.[1]  Perhaps even more surprised than I was, however, and judging by the look on her face at my arrival, was the hotel receptionist. My room was ready, but was I a group leader, an animatrice, she asked? I told her I wasn’t. Was anyone expecting me? I told her I was traveling alone, and we reverted to commonplace observations on the weather, the ominous appearance of the clouds overhead; she suggested a morning visit to the beach before the rain rolled in. Good advice, I thought, still contemplating why she might mistake me for a camp counselor of sorts. I saw no children anywhere.

            

Increasingly, something became clear to me. On the staircase up toward my single-occupancy double-room, I ran into an older couple prepared for a seaside stroll. A snowy-haired and snowy-faced man smiled in his white T-shirt and light green Bermuda shorts as he held a door open for me – and, eventually, some steps behind me, who I can only assume to be his wife. She was a slight woman in an ambiguously colored sundress, salty locks cropped short and tucked neatly behind tiny, heart-shaped ears under a white visor.  They nodded at me as I strode past them easily. Later, I saw them sharing piadine in the lurking shade, and wetting their toes in the frigid water, hand in hand.

            

Looking around me, I saw a number of others – of their age group and general disposition – do the same. There were the double-daters, twin couples in decaying one-piece swimsuits, worn and threadbare. There was the elderly mother, accompanied by her middle-aged daughter, in Birkenstock flip flops, a wide-brimmed hat, and, bravely, what looked to me like orthopedic toeless socks. There was the woman who had brought her young grandchild, both in fresh, flowery prints attesting to their mirrored internal ages. The beach was practically deserted under the sky’s promise of prominent showers. But dispersed throughout it were small pockets of likeminded, like-dressed seniors wise enough to lather sun block on their shrunken shoulders despite the clouds overhead – a notable difference from Italian youth. Near me were a few men probably my age or a few years younger with music in their ears and sunglasses over their eyes, less for protection from the sun than for the guarantee of anonymity. We were the few and the minority in a salt-and-pepper sea.           

           

I was decidedly out of place.

            

I never expected it. How could I? Some preliminary research on Pesaro had described the city as a friendly, residential place, home to growing families, one of the distinguishable handful left in an Italy that now welcomed fewer than 8 or 9 per 1,000 new Italians per year, an Italy that relied on its older citizens to define nearly a quarter of its (declining) population.[2] Of course, what I saw on the beach and at my near beachside hotel wasn’t entirely representative of the city itself. Leaving for dinner and a solitary evening walk later that night, I noticed a group of fifty or so seniors gathered in the hotel’s reception-area semi-enclosed terrace. But that was as far as their influence spread for as long as I was out. The streets and piazze of Pesaro, increasingly as I came closer to its core, appeared to me like those of any other Italian city: vibrant, active, and festive from the cool hours of twilight to dawn. Of course, age and vitality are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories. But in my mind, the line was nearly drawn. The restaurant I eventually chose for my evening meal, partially refreshing but in equal part jarring, was chock full of younger teens sharing pizzas and copious two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola. Children overran the historical center’s main plaza, easily and effortlessly clamoring closer to the live performers at its far end and leaving a trail of parents (none too concerned, but some flustered) in their wake. Perhaps most notable, however, were the abundant bellies of expecting mothers: round, unmistakable, traveling in packs, they were usually also accompanied by strollers carrying recent family acquisitions. This was the Pesaro I’d researched and the Italy I’d perhaps cluelessly and misguidedly come to imagine as genuine and universal.

            

I was headed to Urbino the next morning – which, aside from the fight I’d had two nights earlier with my boyfriend at the time, was the real reason for my weekend trip. I both needed a moment’s reflection and had never been to one of Italy’s – and Europe’s – major centers of Renaissance culture. As a Renaissance scholar, the oversight was unforgivable. No train-line extended to Urbino: Pesaro was the closest I could get, so I’d made the best of it and decided to spend one day beachside, and the next indulging my academic whims. I’d made sure to map out the route to Urbino from Pesaro, carefully tracing the way to the bus stop and the number I was to take from there. But breakfast at the hotel was included with my room, and because I generally preferred asking my university to sponsor my transit expenses rather than my weekly caloric intake (when submitting receipts for both proved too rich for the department’s blood), I took advantage of the offer and headed to the dining room, dropping my bags off at reception on the way – I’d be back for the train ride out.

            

A waitress directed me to an entirely unpopulated cluster of tables and I was told to make myself comfortable there and help myself to the (sparse) continental breakfast buffet. I did, heaping a small assortment of sweet breads and fruit onto my plate. I set it down on the table I’d chosen (also, as per personal custom, closest to the exit) and headed next for the coffee, when another waitress stopped me. I was in the wrong place, she said. The group tables were across the hall, and I could order my coffee at the table or at the bar, she’d bring it out to m ….. but wait. I wasn’t with the group, was I? 

She examined my face while I looked across the hall. I recognized my elderly floor-mates as they made their entrance into the carefully and subtly decorated ceremony and reception room. “The group” was a conglomerate of their people, the people on the beach, the people gathered for dinner on the terrace the night before, Italy’s golden population benefiting, as I learned, from a groupon, or a special package, or a summer promotion, or something like that. It wasn’t’ a retirement home’s field trip. Animators were welcome, but not necessary. Participants weren’t always old, my waitress explained. These promotions were open to families and younger people, and sometimes the crowds were more varied. But at this time of year – mid-June – and this particular year, more families stayed home, spent quiet weekends in their yards, and saved their greatest expenses for their ferragosto vacations. It was true, after all, that Italy’s welfare system mostly excluded anyone under the age of 63, if male, or 58, if female, who had given at least 40 years of his or her life to public service (the private sector worked differently. But then, the public sector jeered at the private sector’s assumed elitisim, despite its lack of hard and fast resources). It was also true that close to 40% of its population, most of it between 18 and 35 yearsold, was unemployed, uneducated, or untrained. There was a time when the two needn’t be mutually exclusive – a local beach weekend and a weeklong beach vacation in another region with different customs, (only sometimes) different waters, a dialect even a neighboring village might find strange or offensive. But now, a beach weekend was mostly an occasion reserved for a more sophisticated clientele, with private or publically subsidized funds, no fixed responsibilities – by choice or by government restriction – and nowhere else to be in the world.

            

Despite my lack of commitment to anyone (minus my dog, whom I’d lovingly if hesitantly left with my parents for the summer), I was not, indeed, with the group.

            

I suppose I imagined most in that condition – in the condition of having nowhere else to be in the world – would spend their time in the comfort of their homes, as I might, as I had been known to do in the past. I tried to imagine myself fifty or sixty years older; I couldn’t. I pictured wrinkled temples on a spotted face anyone’s but mine – generic, imprecise. I saw loose, comfortable clothing, imagined a perennially aching lower back, uncertain footsteps on dry feet below swollen ankles – but none of these were mine or inspired emotions I could understand or recognise. Yet the loneliness I imagined I might feel then seemed more likely to predict adventure than an existence tethered to a doorframe – or to a whole community of similarly progressing people. Quite simply: I couldn’t imagine myself ever identifying as old or capable of restricting myself, voluntarily or otherwise, to a congregation of people that did. I was shocked neither at the age of my fellow beach-goers nor at their engagement with walks of life I more frequently associated with youth and vitality, but at their ability to do so surrounded constantly by so much age. I suppose if no one felt himself a day over 40, it could work, it all made sense: there is strength in numbers, especially among undervalued or overlooked members of society. But my knowledge of what aging meant in my own Italo-Canadian family, among relatives, natural and acquired, in other parts of Italy, precluded that possibility. In my experience, aging was a slow descent to death, one physical ailment and stale juridical lament at a time. Aging was a return to the indoor sphere that ushered in life and prepared it for greater things – only this time, on the way out, and beginning in time with the body’s eventual decay. Aging was enslavement to routine and the overbearing need to ensnare others in it, too. I was fortunate enough – and still am – to have fabulous role models in my life, all over eighty years old, all distinctly remarkable. And I was fortunate enough to see from their point of view from time to time, that life goes on with or without your cooperation; living was a choice, not a consequence of birth. Still, I’d always imagined that older life throve best when surrounded by younger life. Seeing so much of it together all at once, and me beside it and dangerously close to it so prematurely (I thought) scared me.

            

Returning from Urbino that evening, I decided to take one last walk along the Adriatic shore before heading back to the train station. It was nearly sunset and the crepuscular light sat low in the sky, hovering feet, it looked like, from sea-level. The beach was lined with dark blue umbrellas and little else: some people were enjoying the view from the end of a long stone pier, some mothers bought household goods at stands located strategically meters from the beach area’s entrance. I sat at a beachside bar and ordered a small coke, in a can – no glass: just a straw. There was next to no one around me except the similarly-aged bartender, either at this establishment or the others within eyeshot. An older gentleman sat across the terrace and pulled out a cigarette as I neared the end of my Coke can. In that moment of almost complete solitude for both of us, I wondered which of us would be more comforted by the quietly imposing presence of “the group.”

---

[1] Somehow, I still haven’t learned my lesson and routinely forget to read the fine print in hotel room descriptions. Usually, when they say “beachfront,” unless they also make some mention of beach access discounts or extravagantly priced seaside rooms, they mean a 700m walk, sometimes along a highway, from their urban setting to the very entrance of the lido and boardwalk. When you factor in that you’re traveling in Italy, where the accuracy of measurement, like most other things, is relative as a rule, you can almost certainly expect 700m to look more like a mile. What starts out in your mind as a five-minute walk from your room to the beach in practice turns into a 20-minute hike under the sun and over the boiling asphalt to the scorching sands another 500m away from the nearest sliver of shore.  

[2] Italy’s birth rate has ranked 207 out of 221 countries surveyed for the past fifteen years. 

Italian Hospitality

Among the many stereotypes that surround and, abroad, define Italians (pizza, mafia, mandolino) is their characteristic hospitality both to foreign visitors and, more locally, to friends, family, and guests. Perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, Italy is famed for its openness, friendliness, and the warmth of its welcoming.

Consider another long-standing stereotype: the doting and attentive Italian mother.

I have encountered many models of Italian hospitality (or lack thereof) during my travels here over the course of the last thirteen years or so. All of them lead me to the same conclusion: like, I dare say, all other populations, Italians are human first, and hosts when they can be and within their means.

In 2011, Cosimo the cab driver took me on a thirty minute driving and walking tour of Policoro, Basilicata (at no additional fee) so I wouldn't have to wait for my (late) bus to Paola, Calabria alone.

A few days later, Tina welcomed me at my Bed and Breakfast in Catania with freshly baked chocolate cornetti and, more meaningful to me, conversation -- every day of my stay there.

In 2012, while vacationing briefly in Sardinia, I was offered free blueberry wine with my meal -- in omaggio, I was told, perché è la prima volta che viene dalle nostre parti (on the house, since it's your first time visiting the area).

It's the kind of hospitality you might both (rightly) expect as a tourist, and almost always find.

Then there are also those moments when you arrive at a Bed and Breakfast in Brindisi, Puglia, meet briefly with the owner's son, who gives you a map of the city, a few generally useless geographical indications, and leaves you to fend for yourself for the rest of your (one-week) stay, never coming by to restock the breakfast cabinet, check up on you, or provide you with clean towels. There are the times when you stop strangers on the street to ask for directions somewhere, and they can't be bothered to help you (between cigarettes); the moments when you are given false information over the telephone that misdirects your plans; the days when you are finagled into spending twenty euro on a cab ride to a place that, you were told, was not 700m but 4km away.

And these are tourist experiences, too.

They leave you feeling undervalued and helpless, taken advantage of and abused. Worse, still, are the moments of missing hospitality experienced not as a tourist, but as a person embedded in the daily rhythm of a city's local culture, even if still not entirely familiar. In Rome, once, a woman I'd seen on my train ride in from Florence walked over to me as I struggled with the automatic ATAC (public transit) ticket booth. I'd been in her position before; I understood how frustrating it was to be slowed on a frantic daily commute by someone who had no idea what she was doing and was inadvertently holding up the line. Still, I suppose I expected some degree of common decency from her as I clumsily fumbled with various unclearly marked buttons. Instead, I watched with horror as she pertly told me I was doing it wrong (but didn't correct me), and pushed me aside to buy her own ticket.

More recently, I was asked to please remove my charger from an outlet because my neighbour at the library needed it for her own computer. I was baffled. The solution seemed simple to me: had I been in her position, I'd simply have moved to another seat where a charger was readily available. But somehow, despite my protest and suggestion that she plug in elsewhere, I found myself unplugging my laptop, and pushing my charger into the other nearest outlet -- broken. Presumably, she'd already tried that one and knew better.

Each of these instances is accompanied by another prevailing stereotype: Romans are abrupt; Florentines are cold; Southerners are swindlers.

But for every moment of ostensible "every man for himself" is another of overwhelming and humbling generosity. Each time I visit them, friends in the Veneto go to great lengths, even at a moment's notice, to organise dinner with me, whether it be pizza takeout or a home-cooked meal prepared excellently by one of my by now surrogate Italian mothers. Although I don't see them frequently, friends in Florence and Bologna do the same. Distant relatives in Molise throw a feast in my honour every time I pay a (brief) visit, and others in Sicily routinely invite me to spend a portion of my vacation with them, all expenses paid, nothing to worry about. Even strangers have provided this kind of unexpected kindness. My roommates in Milan during the summer of 2012 frequently met me with a warm plate of pasta after a long day at the library; my Florentine neighbour in the summer of 2013 gave me a roll of toilet paper and a carton of milk when I first arrived to my then empty apartment; fellow patrons of Trenitalia have offered me coffee on board, just because; beach-goers on the shores of the Ionian have extended me iced coffee because it was hot, and I was without sun-hat or cold beverages. I have found signs of human goodness everywhere.

Of course, the more ritualistic displays of hospitality are also at least in some part motivated by a concern with fare bella figura -- or making a good impression -- less for patriotism than for personal pride. But finding pleasure in being a good host whose efforts are vocally appreciated has never precluded a genuine preoccupation with guests' needs and level of comfort. Appearance is just as important as fact to Italians -- but not more important. Being a good host also means seeming one, being acknowledged and remembered as one. Primarily, though, it means going the extra mile to ensure a self and culturally-imposed standard of excellence.

So, as most stereotypes, it is both true and untrue that Italians are exceptional hosts. Sometimes, they are. Sometimes, they aren't. In essence, they care deeply about their friends and loved ones, and if you are among them, you will be treated well. If you aren't (or aren't yet), as anywhere else in the world, it behooves you to fend for yourself, use good judgment, and develop thick skin. It won't always be necessary, but it's always good to have.

Paying it forward never hurts, either; nothing guarantees a good experience more than a positive attitude.

Lions, Tigers, Bears, and ... the Pope?

Last week, I talked to you about attending Carnival celebrations in Venice. Well this weekend, I tried another variant on for size at Orbetello's annual Carnival parade (and competition).

Never would I have imagined two such vastly different approaches to the same feast. Below you'll see some pictures that will help you understand why.

Venice - along the Grand Canal during Carnival

Needless to say, the geographical proximity of the meridione as we pushed our way south to the Lazio-Tuscany border -- both central regions just a touch above the official start of the Italian "south" -- was clearly felt and left its mark; I can only imagine what Carnival looks like in Naples!

(Look for more on the questione meridionale soon.)

Venice - Band performing in Piazza San Marco

What in Venice was a string of bright if serious events -- Renaissance drummers and flag-throwers; traditional Carnival masks -- was in Orbetello a multicoloured display of costumes ranging from the expected (princesses and pirates) to the outlandish (minions and air fresheners) atop and surrounding elaborately engineered floats standing more than 50 feet high and blasting contemporary dance hits from their competing speakers.

And confetti. Did I mention the confetti? In my hair. In my hoodie. In my purse. And, undressing, in my underwear (God knows how) and socks.

I guess it's kind of like Project Runway: there's only one theme, but (in this case), twenty different designers. The only difference is that no one gets sent home.

Orbetello Scalo's float pulled by a tractor

Theme: Atlantide (or: Under the Sea)

The view from behind

Orbetello -- Pope Francis makes an appearance (with escorts)

Orbetello - Folk Band

Orbetello -- The People's Band

Look for videos of Venetian and Orbetellan Carnival on my Youtube channel (link also available in the right-hand sidebar).