At the same time, I was sad to say goodbye to Italy. I packed a lot into the past six weeks there: I met amazing people, explored my grandmother's birthplace, ate some of the best meals of my life, hiked in the Alps, visited the Coliseum, rode a boat in Venice, gawked at Michelangelo's David, and got lost in the maze of Genoa's back streets. I loved my time there, and I will remember it fondly for the rest of my life.
It's been awhile since I've written, mostly because I've been in a what-does-it-all-mean phase, struggling to assemble words for what I've taken away from the experience. I've put my life on hold, spent down some savings, and have been living out of a backpack at age 38 for almost three months. For that level of investment, there must be a commensurate payoff, intellectually and emotionally. And I feel like I've started to perceive that payoff, but it is hard to articulate it yet because the value of what I've seen and done is still swirling around in my mental atmosphere and it hasn't settled at all yet. I'm still processing.
So. Part of why I wanted to make this trip was to think more deeply about how I live my life and how my choices and circumstances are influenced by being American. In Morocco, it didn't take a lot of reflection to notice the differences: they're stark and in many cases fairly objective. Role of religion, gender discrimination, economic condition, blah blah blah. I knew a lot of it before I ever set foot in Morocco, but being there drove the lessons home indelibly, and with twists I hadn't expected. But sussing out what makes Italy different from what I am accustomed to is much subtler and more subjective. (Except for the tomatoes. The tomatoes are just better there--that assessment is both stark and objective.)
Here's the problem. As I try to articulate for myself and for this blog exactly what it is that I like so much about Italy, and what makes it unique (at least in my estimation), everything I try to write reminds me of Pulp Fiction. Do you remember the scene when Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) are riding in the car, and Vincent is telling Jules about Europe?
Vincent: "But you know the funniest thing about Europe is? Its little differences. I mean, they got the same sh*t over there that they got here, but it's just, there it's a little different."
Jules: "Example?"
"All right, well, you can walk into a movie theater in Amsterdam and buy a beer. And I don't mean just like no paper cup, I'm talking about a glass of beer. And in Paris, you can buy a beer in McDonald's. And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?"
"They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?"
"No, man, they got the metric system over there, so they wouldn't know what the f a quarter pounder is."
"What do they call it?"
"They call it a Royale with Cheese."
"Royale with Cheese!"
"That's right."
"What do they call a Big Mac?"
"A Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it 'Le Big Mac.'"
"Le Big Mac."
"Yeah."
"What do they call a Whopper?"
"I don't know. I didn't go in a Burger King."
I have always loved that exchange, but I'm a little terrified that when I write about Italy, I'm going to sound like Vincent. The truth is, for the past six weeks, I was entertained and charmed and puzzled by plenty of equally silly and insignificant differences between Italy and the US. And, scarily, one of the most fundamental differences I've perceived has a lot to do with fast food. (You can understand my apprehension now, right?)
One of the things that this trip made me think about was how important living well is to Italians, and what they sacrifice in service of that value. In Italy, most businesses close for three hours in the middle of the day so that everyone can go home and have lunch with their families, take a quick nap, walk in the park, or read a book. People in professional, high-performance jobs here can still take a couple of hours in the middle of the day to have a picnic in the park over lunch. On Sundays, businesses are closed. In the evenings, businesses are closed. For the entire month of August, most businesses are closed. All of these practices cost money in the form of lost sales and (arguably) reduced productivity. But for the most part, Italians seem to work to live, not the other way around, and they choose to absorb the economic consequences instead of working more to earn more. Fitting in time for a real life beyond work is a towering priority for people there, whether the time is devoted to family, to books, to travel, to food, or other things. Activities outside work are recognized as essential, core pursuits of life, and so the work schedule is built to accommodate them.
As an American, I find it bizarre and almost a little disconcerting to see hundreds of tourists walking down a major shopping street on Sunday night, past dozens and dozens of shuttered storefronts. You can just feel the stores losing money. And I have to say that sometimes as a customer it is really inconvenient not to be able to, say, pick up a bottle of shampoo except between 8:30 and 12:30 or 3:30 and 7:30 Monday to Friday. The commerce seems to be organized around the less-and-less-accurate assumption that every household has a homemaker who can take care of errands and chores during the daytime hours. But these businesses have weighed the potential profits from extended hours and judged that the leisure time is more important. Or the people have done so, through their elected representatives, in cases where laws prevent the businesses from being open longer hours.
This is exactly the kind of blind spot I was interested in identifying during this trip: an area where, because of my hard-wiring as an American, it never occurred to me that a society could organize itself differently than ours does--and yet in this case, Italians do, and they like the results. It's a reasonable question: why should my convenience trump somebody else's opportunity to spend time with their family? Especially when all it costs me is the need to plan my purchases a little better--by remembering to get to the store before it closes on Friday evening, for example. Even if you regard more sales/higher profits as a perfectly acceptable answer to that question, it's still valuable to have considered the alternatives, right?
Italian cuisine reflects similar values. At least from what I saw, convenience is not the chief priority, except when it comes to grabbing a quick snack of pizza or gelato in the afternoon, or a freshly brewed espresso or cappucino. The slow-food movement was born in northern Italy, and it celebrates the use of fresh, local ingredients, prepared patiently and with great care. European refrigerators are smaller than American ones, not because people eat less or cook less, but because people like their food to be very fresh, so they shop for groceries every couple of days. And while there are a growing number of supermarkets, it's still very common for people to buy their fruits and vegetables at a fruit and vegetable store, their poultry at a poultry store, their red meat at a butcher shop, their bread at a bakery, and their milk at a dairy. It can take time to gather the ingredients for a meal, no doubt about it. Their way of doing things usually results in great quality, but it is more work. And their lighter professional workload contributes to their ability to choose that option.
Even beyond food and work schedules, you see subtle signs of this commitment to living all over the place. I am a book fiend, as most of you know, and I've been absolutely bowled over at the number of fabulous bookstores in this country. And they are filled with people who are actually buying books, not drinking overpriced frozen coffee concoctions and reading magazines that they don't plan to purchase. As I've chatted with various Italians I've met, on multiple occasions, right after asking me what I do for a living, people ask me what I like to read and who my favorite authors are. These conversations didn't take place in bookstores, either--one of them occurred on a ski slope with a mom and her two young kids. Ninety seconds after I got introduced to her two absolutely adorable children, Eleanor and Mateo, she was telling me how much she loves American Beat Generation authors. Mateo is ten and was excited to tell me that he's also reading an American author at the moment: Jack London. How cool is that? People here have spare time, and that means they can read for pleasure. Most Americans who I know either don't read much for pleasure at all, or they have a massive stack of unread books piled up beside their bed which they are usually too tired to open at the end of the day.
I could go on and on about this, and I may revisit the topic again, but suffice to say that one of the best parts about having spent this time in Italy was that it raised a lot of thought-provoking questions. What is the cost of the convenience that we as Americans demand? We place a lot of value on efficiency (how many Americans do you know who regularly shop in a bakery, a fruit and vegetable market, and a butcher shop for daily items instead of going to a supermarket?), but what does that efficiency cost us? Do we balance our priority on efficiency with any other values or is it a trump card?
One question that keeps coming back to me is whether Italy's attachment to leaving room in life for family and personal pursuits is somehow related to a value shift during World War II and the years under Mussolini. Italians had a difficult time of it before, during, and after the war, and I wonder if that tempered their choices and value systems. I haven't experienced anything like that in my lifetime, so it's hard to try to put myself in people's shoes who have; still, doesn't it seem reasonable that people who have survived a brutal war would place a premium on being able to spend time with family and in quiet and happy pursuits? And those values might have been handed down to the current generation? Maybe?
Making sweeping generalizations about a country after spending six weeks there is hazardous, obviously, and vulnerable to all kinds of misinterpretation. But the important thing to me hasn't been my factual assessment of the country but the questions it raised that are making me reconsider how I want to live my own life. I'm still working it out, and it's going to take time.
Anyway, it is now very, very late and I have to leave for the airport early tomorrow morning, so I'm going to sign off. But if any of you have thought about these kinds of questions as you've traveled or met people from other places, I'd love to hear what you've taken away from the experience. Leave me a comment?
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