I want to live like Alfonso Cevola:
You’ve visited Italy a time or two. Perhaps you’ve even lived there for a moment. Long enough to get a sense that something was tugging on you. And then you go back to your normal life. One night you wake up in your place and you look around. You’re alone. There is no sound of five Italians talking at the same time. Except in your head. You go to the kitchen. The bowl of fresh fruit is missing. Open the fridge. No Sicilian orange juice. A bottle of California Chardonnay stands in the corner, half empty. What are you going to do with your life?That tugging feeling persists as you make a cup of coffee. It’s 5:15 in the morning; somewhere in Italy someone is having a plate of fritto misto with a bottle of Sannio or Campi Felgrei. Somewhere a group of loud, happy, boisterous Italians are extending their Pasquetta celebration with a plate of strufoli or tarallucci dolci and a sip of Moscato from Benevento. Followed by further sips of home made limoncello. And then you look into your cup of dark, bitter coffee, missing all that life you would never see in that way again.
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What really struck me the first time I was in Italy was the extent to which it's a work-hard/play-hard culture, and the fact that they try to preserve a distinction between the two. If you get a cup of coffee, or a Coke, you get the coffee in a cup and saucer, and the Coke in a glass -- i.e., the whole point is to STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING and take some time to enjoy the coffee or the Coke, THEN resume what you are doing. This is in contrast to this country, where we are served drinks in disposable, take-away cups that allow us -- nay, encourage us -- to keep doing whatever we were doing. Heaven forbid we should interrupt our busy lives to take a few minutes to relax with a cup of coffee.
Oh, it cannot be too soon for me to go back to Italy! This story certainly stirred up Italian longings.
My friend Barry (Jewish) and I (Italian) have a many years-long friendly debate as to which group is superior.
The feud was nearly settled one day when he walked into my workplace with a magazine article on Italian Manned Torpedoes, the secret naval weapon from WWII. (An idea which was later stolen by the British Navy, but never put into practice, BTW.)
Of course, a whole new round of hair-in-the-cockpit jokes erupted as we recovered from our momentary slaying, dumbstruck, by the very idea.
Well, whatever you want to learn from Italian culture needs to be learned quickly. Italy's birthrate has cratered; they're well below replacement level at a point at which it'd be hard to recover.
Sad son, sad.
Grazie, Rod
Alfonso
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