My wildly passionate / toxic love affair with Italy
And the value of reverse culture shock therapy.
I can no longer count the number of times I’ve come crawling back, feeling like a shameful puppy who peed on the rug. She calls me up late at night, forgetting about the piss stains. I forgive her for force feeding me bread and pasta, and book a flight.
Entering another country sometimes starts when you get on the plane, still in your homeland. You notice a different fashion sense, hear people speaking other languages, see them making the sign of the cross as the plane roars down the runway, leaving the predictable behind. Landing in Rome, I am back in the familiar aura of this foreign culture. I found it vaguely repulsive, and at the same time experienced deja vu. All over again. The aroma of my cappuccino evokes warm memories, but I had forgotten about difference in customer service standards. The energy of Italians is in some ways the opposite of the passive-aggressive California chill vibes that I am at home in. People move quickly, talk loudly with lots of hand gestures, even when talking on their phones. Andiamo. Dai dai. Stereotypes often have a basis in reality. The way narcissistic young men were dressed felt icky: large hoop earrings, thick round glasses, stubbly 4 day beards, tall leather boots laced up tight. A part of the mythology and mystique is that Italians have a keen fashion sense, but I have a hard time seeing it. Until I see the old men hanging out in the square, plaid button up shirts under V neck wool sweaters, leather shoes and brown slacks, blazers and little caps with tiny bills that button to the top, resting on canes, shooting the shit.
Whose streets?
Their streets.
The first time I saw how Italian cops dress, I thought it was joke.
It’s real, too real. The fashion police exist. It’s unclear what they actually do, but they certainly think they look cool.
The cadence and inflection of Italian jars my ears on first exposure. Flamboyant enunciation. It’s the opposite of west coast English where all the words flow together in a linguistic purée and there is an intentional understatement of emotion. What am I doing here? Why do I keep coming back, if it doesn’t feel comforting, doesn’t feel like home? One of my other selves slaps this whiny kid lovingly. “If you wanted to be comfortable, you shoulda stayed home bub.” I’m exhausted, jet-whipped, and irritable on my connection flight to Palermo. I keep nodding off and getting woken by boisterous laughter and people brushing into me as they walk past. The downside of the ailse seat. The very American sense of a wide physical bubble quickly deflating in a cry of defeated imperial privilege. I catch the Trenitalia line which chugs slowly and stops as frequently as a house bound pug on its morning stroll. Sicily is to Italy what New Mexico is to the US. An economically deprived, heavily romanticized, multiethnic nation within a nation. Exploited, tortured, but smiling, alive, heart beating in the sun. The old families leave, or send their kid to college in other regions. The new move in, captivated by the beauty, open space and sky, and the fascinating juxtapositions of a uniquely seasoned cultural stew.
A Morning in Palermo.
I am an early riser. If I sleep past seven, something is wrong with me. Life is beautiful and miraculous, as any sunrise will tell you. Sleeping in is missing out, ignoring the hand life extends to you everyday. I don’t do late nights, unless forced to by noisy delinquents. You know who you are. Night time is for sleeping. Owls get no worms, and they are creepy bug-eyed depressives. I’m that early bird, a red robin singing to the sun as you roll over and avoid reality. Everyone is free to choose their own life path, and you have an infinite number of lifetimes to figure out why sleeping in is for teenagers. On second thought, keep sleeping. More worms for this bird.
I’m up watching the first rays hit the palms in the park near the apartment I’ll spend 3 nights in, drinking the pour over coffee I made because all that dark roast in a moka pot business is objectively inferior. Dark roast is an antiquated means of dealing with subpar beans. Yeah,OK, it’s goods with cream and sugar, and I will drink it, I’m not THAT much of an asshole. But I brought my taste of home: a light roast, freshly ground, unadulterated, bright and fruity, like a dry white wine. It’s 7:00 as I walk past cafes that are just opening, remembering that this country so renowned for its cuisine doesn’t have any sense of breakfast being the most important meal of the day. Say what you will about American cuisine, at least we do breakfast right. That is, savory. Large and protein-rich. Give me biscuits and sausage gravy, fried potatoes with ketchup, a ham scramble. Fry bacon then cook some eggs sunny in the fat, and put it all between sourdough toast with a tomato jam, too much butter, and arugula. Italian breakfast is all sugar, caffeine, and bread, while standing. Eating a pastry saturated in machine oil and sipping a tiny cappuccino while standing is barbarism. It tastes good, but so do corn dogs. I want to eat for an hour and half in a greasy spoon diner, a huge plate with bottomless watered down coffee, then go take a nap.
Shoulda stayed home bub. Poverino.
There is a Sicilian breakfast tradition that I love: Granita. Before there was gelato or ice cream, there was granita. A shaved iced kind of deal, based on a Persian beverage called sharbat (root of the words sherbet and sorbet) that was introduced to Sicily by Arabs, along with so many elements of Sicilian cuisine. Sharbat is fruit juice and sugar, and granita is similar. Around Sicily you see these big machines with a motor turning a colorful slushy icy mixture. There are classic flavors: almond, lemon, coffee. I’m into those, plus pistachio and mixed citrus. So I pull up a chair on a pedestrian street that will be bustling with throngs of idiots when they finally get in gear around 10 am, when morning is officially over, according to my clock. Another reason I get up early. A hot cappuccino and the bowl of creamy pistachio ice. I’m starting to feel better.
For savory breakfast, I get a classic beef organ sandwich that is famous in Palermo and is like the sunrise, not to be missed. You’ll see these guys standing behind huge vats containing stacks of thinly sliced mystery meat, with a stack of sesame seed rolls. Pani ca Meusa is sometimes translated as a spleen sandwich, but what I’ve tried appears to be mainly lung, which is often a fairly unappetizing cut. It’s made by first precooking the organs low and slow. When you order one, they pull a portion of meat into a pork lard bath and cook it fast, tossing the meat in the juice, then it is dropped onto the split bread, which gets soggy with the goodness. Grated caciocavallo and a sprinkle of lemon on top, and it’s yours to smash into your face, while standing in the street. Delicious, in my preferred dining ambiance, with a side of exhaust fumes. Urban terroir.
Enjoy the water
The preceding sentences are like life, not meant to be taken seriously. It’s just a ride. The roughness I experienced upon arriving in Italy wasn’t the fault of Italian culture. It was a product of my own cultural biases and expectations. There is this travel purgatory, an awkward day or two that’s hard to track, spent in airports and on planes, adjusting to navigating a foreign cultural landscape. Thrown off balance by the journey in the time travel machine. It takes awhile to recalibrate your internal clock and compass, to wash the smell of your homeland off your skin. Culture shock is part of it, which is a two way street. The important jolt is the opportunity to finally be able see your own culture, and how you have been shaped by it. When you’re inside of it, when it’s where your psyche has been marinating like a greasy dead meat sandwich, you can’t see it. We become aware of what our culture is, and how it has shaped us, when we step out and look back at it. When we embrace the out of body experience travel can induce, and can float above, looking upon ourselves as foreigners, which everyone else can see in one quick glance. Even the dogs and cats know you aren’t from here.
Being shocked by the waters of another culture that we have just jumped into is natural. But don’t climb out of that bracingly cold aqua so fast, to the safety of your towel and warm familiar home. Tread water, get used to it. Keep breathing, stay afloat. For some of us this cold dip starts to feel good, invigorating, beneficial. For the true freaks, this becomes an addiction, a high we chase around the world, seeking ever greater levels of culture shock.
Travel should be uncomfortable, unnerving, challenging. It should piss you off, make you feel out of place. If you want to be comfortable, stay home, go to the same restaurants where they have everything on the menu, drink the familiar drinks, hang out with people you know. For me, travel is therapy. In other countries, maybe the restaurant isn’t open when it says it will be on google maps. You might not understand how to order the food or obtain your bill, or who you are supposed to pay. I take time far too seriously. I have an unhealthy obsession with order and functionality. I expect the information to be on a website, updated, with reviews and an accurate time table. But that’s not how life works, and most cultures don’t share the neurotic Germanic traits that I have accumulated. Other cultures have their own neurotic tendencies, that their captive humans can’t see either, until they step outside, and allow the contrast to shine light on their own culture’s zones of darkness.
After four days of eating, visiting churches and museums, gardens and abandoned factories, I am remembering why I keep coming back. A cheese plate sampling a range of Sicilian cheese seals the deal. It’s the food, and the passion for it, the staggering range of traditional cheeses, and uncompromising seriousness with which old recipes, tools, and techniques are upheld. The preceding sentence is also full of cliche tropes, pieces of the mythology and romaticization of Italian heritage. The unbending, conservative insistence on sticking to tradition can be negative, stifling, nationalistic. Food here can be simplistic to a fault, the rules and recipes rigid and authoritarian. I’m no longer interested in saying if this is a good or bad thing.
I just want to eat pasta and gelato everyday, and enjoy the street life while sipping my Campari spritz.
I’ll be with her for another wild, passionate week and then I’m out. I’m not going to put up with her seductively delicious bullshit any longer than that, or I’ll get fat.
It’s like this every time.
It’s over Italy, we’re through.
Until September at least.
So good and so true! When working in Italy, mornings are hard due to having had no real food until lunchtime. (Obviously lunch and dinner easily make up for this.) Ideal meal schedule from my peripatetic teaching life? Swedish breakfasts: smörgåsbord. Lunch: Ladakhi momos in soup. Dinner: Whatever my Italian hosts give me.
I LOVE scrambled eggs and my big American iced lattes with the flavor and almond/oat milk, yet I’d eat a cornetto al pistacchio and drink only lattes macchiato every day for the rest of my life (not really the sacrifice I’m trying to make it sound like) if it meant I could find a way to wake up in Italy every day.