Grab Bag III: The Regrabbening of the Bag

OK, so, life is once again in ultra-high gear as I prepare for classes to resume on Tuesday, but rather than leg this blag totally languish, it's time to blearily update once more! After the jump: we're gonna talk a little bit Ravenna, a little bit Milan, a little bit scattered Bologna time - basically all the fugue state Italian time that led up to my arrival in Switzerland, which we will be discussing later and not today thank you very much. First, pre-jump: a little video of mostly Ravenna and Milan for a hot second!

Spare Bologna memory: at the Cineteca Bologna film festival, all introductions were in English and Italian, with translaters working in either direction depending on the speaker's home base. (Similarly, all films were subtitled in English, unless the film was in English, in which case it got Italian subs.) This lead to one of my favorite human moments of the festival, when a translator "translated" an Italian speaker's  remarks right back into Italian, only realizing after about a minute of talking that she had forgotten which way her translation was supposed to go.

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I stopped into a Bolognese menswear store with made-to-measure and bespoke offerings that are thoroughly out of my price range. As I browsed their RTW line, the shopkeeper asked me where I was from, and I said "Chicago" (well, close enough). "Wow!" he said, "so better here than back there, yes? What the fuck is happening in your country!" and I briefly thought, how lucky am I that this guy - who I became mini-pals with after running into him a couple times over my month in Bologna - immediately clocked me as somebody who would be on board for discussing the alarming rise of fascism back home. Just hours later, the Highland Park shootings happened.

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Ravenna really is a little gem of a tiny town. Rather eerily clean even by Northern Italian standards, its much-touted mosaics are indeed wonderful, even if I wish they hadn't given rise to a real glut of mosaic shop culture in the city center. (City street signs made out of mosaics? Fully in love! Tons of gift shops with cheezy mosaics made abroad? Less so!) I'm told the city's food is incredible (the menus looked great, but I had to return to Bologna for dinner) and I'd be very curious to return at a time when their also-great-looking cultural life is in full swing, instead of the summer doldrums of late July.

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I have a friend who works at the Cincinnati Playhouse and almost thought she'd have to quit her job because her pollen allergies to the valley there were so acute. I had a similar situation in Milan, where I was immediately concerned I had COVID, testing negative but feeling miserable until almost literally the exact moment that I crossed the border into Switzerland

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My friend Jenny joined me in Milan for some crazy life unpacking, catching up, and general joy. We spent a good deal of time in my apartment rental, clearly the home of an English-Italian translator with a specialization in early English literature, and talking through the wild turns of life and our long and often-distant friendship. (We also wandered around the Duomo and a few other Milan landmarks. Wanders and rambles are my favorite.) This was my first relaxing-with-a-friend stop on the trip, and it fed my soul more than just about anything else could.

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We visited a trattoria near the flat, where the following things transpired:

a) Jenny asked where the bathroom was, and was told "It's outside, past the red car, on the right."

b) A trombonist and accordion player entered the cafe and serenaded the room for a few tunes

c) As we left, the gruff older man who'd (begrudgingly?) pointed us to a table when we'd arrived, asked where we were from. When Jenny said Barcelona, his eyes lit up as he said "ahh, Catalunya!" and both of them launched into a lengthy conversation in Spanish as they discussed their travels and sojourns in Spain. Once again, I desperately wish I could get my European languages past "clumsy and slow" to "fully fluent" for moments like these

d) While Jenny and the fella were chatting, a younger guy stopped by with his wife; a former guy of the neighborhood, he hadn't been back to the trattoria in three years due to the pandemic and travel restrictions. A real privilege to see the connection of a community and the joy of a homecoming.

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Speaking of limited language skills, I visited a Japanese restaurant in Milan - the kind of global city where you want to try some international cuisine, with a surprisingly high concentration of Japanese options - where my brief and stumbling thanks in Japanese led to a brief conversation with the co-owner about her home back in Japan, her changing gears on moving to Italy, and my own travels in her home country. Gang, guess who misses Japan again, did you guess me? YOU GUESSED CORRECTLY good work you cowards.

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My last night in Milan - my last night in Italy - I scored a counter seat at Trippa Milano, an explosively great and unpretentious little spot that requires some real reservation-hunting jujitsu. It was, basically, the best (an onion salad, which I ordered mostly under the theory that it would have to be great, confirmed first by the owner's endorsement and later by the dish itself; some of the best filled pasta I've ever had in my life; a great piece of fish; and a tiramisu that was fine, I knew I was probably making a "here cos we need to make one, not because we love it" choice) but the energy of the kitchen and the staff was uniquely joyful, making it a perfect conclusion to my time in Italy when a few of the cooks in the kitchen wandered up as I was settling up to ask how everything was, and seemed genuinely jazzed when I told them this was my last meal in Italy after a month and a half, and that I couldn't have asked for a better sendoff.

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There's probably a lot that I'm missing - though zoom interviews, schoolwork, allergies, and friend times meant I didn't do a ton of out-and-about-in-Milan stuff - but these are the things that remain. As always, I'm eager to revisit Italy (though I'll confess that southern Italy currently is way more my jam than northern Italy, to the extent that I'm wondering when I can next revisit Palermo) but other horizons loom before that day can arrive.

Up next: Switzerland! Which, after Italy, felt very organized and clean (in ways both good and bad) and also... how to say this... mountainous? Like, nice? And nature-y? And mountain-y?  There are alps there, is my point, and I will explain more about this unique perspective of mine later, goodbye for now, enjoy the holiday weekend and stand up for labor rights always!