Grab Bag Vol II

After the jump: random memories and conversations from my pre-Bologna travels! (Real-time update is that I'm writing this in Milan as part of a few scheduled posts since I'm heading into a more unplugged path that'll take me up through Switzerland to visit friends in the UK. Today's temperature is 107 degrees! I'm very calm and normal about this!)

There's basically one remaining hand-painted signmaker in Naples, and once you recognize his work you see it everywhere! Also make sure you visit Lello's mozzarella-focused salumeria in Naples! It changed my liiiiiiife!

Ever since I started coming to Italy in 2016, it has never stopped making me laugh that if you use a ticket machine in an Italian rail station (not as necessary now with the extremely usable Trenitalia app!), selecting the English option prompts the LOUDEST VOICE IN THE HISTORY OF TIME to blare out "BE-WARE OF PICK-POCKETS!" with some good advice about how to keep an eye on your things, and helpfully doubling as a heads-up to pickpockets about who the non-Italian-speaking tourists in the train station are.

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I think we were 2/3 of the way through a street food tour of Catania before I realized that our guide had been using the term "scrambled bread" to mean "breadcrumbs." I absolutely refused to correct her, and if any of you do so you're a bad person. It's time for us all to start accepting the superior phrase, one of the better culinary phrases available: SCRAMBLED BREAD.

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Also in Catania, passed a cargo van that had been spray painted with the words "The Evil Islam." A useful reminder that as much racism and hate as we got in America, every culture I think cultivates their own racisms. (I have a grander theory about this, and about how each culture's most virulent racism tends to map onto its colonial histories in a way that very much validates Ibram X Kendi's understanding of racism as an evolving post-facto justification for atrocities, but that's not really grab-bag stuff.)

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On an hourlong hike from Ragusa Ibla to Ragusa Superiore, I passed a group of Sicilian teens singing in harmony what sounded exactly like like a U.S. college fight song and was struck that I didn't know  enough Italian to know if that's what it was, if it was some kinda fascist anthem, or what. Regardless, I've been struck at how much public singing happens here - in Bologna in particular, every night you hear CROWDS of people singing songs that pop up like wildflowers as you wander through the city. It's not an earbud country, but a bit of a make-your-own-music country.

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There have been days here when I'm exhausted and a little culturally battered and I just want to lie around reading a book all day. Sometimes I indulge and sometimes I get out into the streets simply on the strength of "you're in Italy, you have an obligation to live fully!" A delicate balance of competing shames is whaat keeps me functional in society.

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Ana, a Swiss pal I made in Naples who spent a long day and evening ambling aimlessly around the city with me, has dedicated large swaths of her life to travel, sharing my love for monthlong stays but perhaps lacking my "it's been two months, I am ready to nest again" limits as she's able to sustain extremely long-horizon travel. We chatted about the fading radicalism of her friends back in Zurich as they settle down with families, about the repatriation of artifacts and the slow, stubborn aftereffects of colonialism, about literature and theatre (and in particular theatre's abilities to engage in political thought). As always, delightful to make connections with people on the road who I might never have connected with outside of us both being travelers.

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Also lucky to be the American some fellow Michiganders identified in my Naples hostel, early on their post-college-graduation backpacking trip, and delighted to have them asking for advice on some of their future stays. I'm not always great at the socializing element in a hostel (sometimes I really need to retreat to that single room) but it's always nice when it feels like those connections lift everybody's boat.

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Massimo, the father of the adorable family whose cottage sat next to mine at the agriturismo Le Mandrie, may share my tendency to be overly polite, as we each I think kept signaling that we'd be happy to chat and share some time but didn't want to impose. When we finally did break through - prompted by his excited "Wow! [His pronunciation gave the exclamation four distinct syllables] This changes everything!" upon discovering that I taught theatre at the collegiate level.

We had a couple of chats, most delightfully one sitting in chairs outside our respective cottages as he briefly outlined his background in classics, and how he sees Americans as focusing on the contemporary in a way that mirrors a classics-focused Italian education in reverse, both of us somewhat admiring what the other's system makes possible. He bemoaned, with good humor, the death of "probably stupid, probably sexist" disposable movies from within non-dominant culture in an era where everything being greenlit has an eye on the global streaming market. It was a pure joy, and in his occasional exhortations to me to "LEARN ITALIAN!" I was duly chastened! (I'm struck at how much more French I've retained than Italian - I can still navigate my way here even in smaller towns where English isn't a fallback option, but I'm nowhere near as conversational as I was in 2017.)

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Meanwhile, Barry and Jacqueline from Belgium, who I'd chatted with when asking to pet their dog on the grounds of the agriturismo, asked me to join their table for dessert one night, Barry ordering limoncello for the whole table preemptively, "Because I know you'll say no," he winked at me, having previously discussed my Polite Midwestern Upbringing. (Their dog was back in their room for the night, where she'd spent most of the day hanging out with the agriturismo's farm dog, now her best friend.)

The conversation roamed. Jacqueline had traveled quite a bit, had lived in Rome for five years, had visited America. "No thanks," said Barry, "Europe is far enough for me." We discussed how Europe seemed to place more value on quality of life - on time, family, the whole human - rather than America's more brutally capitalistic focus on production above all. "It's here too," said Barry, "We call it the western winds."

They reflected on having visited one of the cathedrals in Assisi and seen a bell inscribed in multiple languages with "Niemals Krieg," "Never War." And here we are again, they said. Both retirees, Barry had taught for most of his career but had spent the past decade or so working with refugee resettlement; his feelings on Ukraine were complicated, in part because of the European hypocrisy on the refugee front. "If you look at the most expensive cars in Belgium, the odds are they have Ukrainian owners," he noted, a hint of frustration evident in having seen the European populace rise up for these more-affluent, more-cosmopolitan (albeit still displaced) refugees, after years of hate and fearmongering against the exponentially-more-needy refugees of Syria, Afghanistan, and all the other corners where - as often as not - western powers' meddling has led to their displacement.

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As always, when I remember that it's good to move beyond my shy-at-first instincts and actually connect with people, travel is a joy. That's been less present in my "get work done" stops of Bologna and Milan, but I'm hopeful that the weeks ahead in the trip get me back in the habit. More on those stops... soon??