Updates from Italy
05.09.10. Pavia at war.
Yesterday I stepped back into the Pavia of the Renaissance. I had walked into town in the morning for exploration purposes, because one never knows how long one will be in a place, and there are still parts of the historical center that remain unknown to me. Just last week, for instance, I happened upon a street in which sits the local branch of the Jehovah's Witnesses. My path yesterday took me by the church of San Teodoro, most notable for some naughty statues found in its vicinity. I had passed by this twelfth-century church before, but had never found it open; yesterday, its doors were happily spread wide in preparation for a wedding. …
18.08.10. The chewable toothbrush.
I passed through the Frankfurt-Hahn airport a few days ago as I returned from a ten- day sojourn in France. It was confusing to fly in and out of Germany for a vacation in France, my first and last words of the trip being guten Tag and auf Wiedersehen; but it would seem to be historically-justified confusion, and an essential part of the Alsatian experience. Towns in that region have an old habit of country-switching, and even now that the borders are fixed, a simple walk across a bridge can take you abroad. It's best to listen for the alerts on your cell phone that inform you when you've crossed which border. …
12.08.10. To the sea.
12.08.10. To the sea. A late summer breeze has nipped the calendar and flipped us over to August. In Italy that means ferragosto, a holiday phase that can range from a few days to the whole month, depending on a given family’s wherewithal to vacate. Ferragosto is also the lens through which Italians view our summer vacations: President Obama, according to the national newspaper Corriere della Sera, will in coming days enjoy his own politically-correct “ferragosto” in petrol-pummeled Florida. Me, I’ve been vacating for some time now, alternating traveling with English teaching in Pavia, a situa- tion many of my friends with more structured obligations call “doing nothing.” Whatever I am do- ing, I am content and will not argue the point. But it recently gave me the opportunity to spend a week conducting English lessons in the Italian Riviera, a ferragosto hotspot.
My destination was petite Ceriale, a postcard town in the region of Liguria, where I would be staying with a Pavian family as an in-house tutor. Since October I have been doing lessons with the family’s boys, ages four, eight, and twelve. Although they are officially on summer vacation, mother and father thought it best not to let their sons’ English erode on the beach along with the wine bottles washing over from Spain. …
04.07.10. Mon bagage a ete retarde.
It doesn’t bode well for the traveler who receives two complimentary Delta toiletry kits. But this, alas, is what befell me during the course of my return voyage to Italy, which I undertook early last Thursday morning. I was to fly from Portland International (PDX) to Milan Malpensa (MXP), via Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson (drab ATL). Minimum time in the air: 17 hours. …
23.04-24.04.10. Too many cantonals.
We had worried ourselves a bit about what would happen following the completion of our play A Streetcar Named Desire on April 15th. We had worked on this production for roughly five months, and the final days were especially involving. As we gravitated toward our center, Reg. Julia ("Reg" for "regista," director), the confines of the theatrical world we had created for ourselves be- came ever tighter, and the distances between us fell away, both as persons and as actors. We entered ever further into our roles, such that Aline (Stella) could cry at will, and I (Stanley) got pissed off when we did our usual silly pre-performance warm-ups. What would happen when Reg, our core, vanished, and our personæ fell away, leaving us with only ourselves?
We would escape to Switzerland. …
03.06.10. Take me to the moon.
A few nights ago I went to the fair. It had been a balmy first of June, but the sunset brought
relief and the desire to roam outside. “The fair,” here, means Luna Park, which upon opening last week had immediately piqued my interest. It rises from the lots surrounding the local exhibition center, much like Eugene’s Lane County Fair, but it seems out of place just outside Pavia’s historic center and right alongside the town’s encampment of the nearly-homeless—a long, gravel lane formed between two rows of campers and motorhomes. How these squatters came to live where they do I couldn’t say.
The Pavian Luna Park, although possessing a footprint one-fifth that of the Lane County Fair, offers all that a fair should and is quick to impress itself upon visitors. A few hundred meters away one starts to smell the frittelle, the Nutella-toting cousin of the Fri-Jo or elephant ear, and then come the shouts and whirs and bleats, and of course the lights. At the point where my friends and I entered, there was, to the left, a precision soccer game where one could win jerseys and spumante with a well-aimed kick; to the right, a towering, multi-lane slide promising “DIVERTIMENTO NO STOP” (non-stop fun); and straight ahead, a cotton candy stand. All were indicative of where the night would lead us. …
24.03.10. Staying in Italy.
Around midweek the exchange students of Pavia begin to plan their adventures. The town is
inviting but tranquil, so anything beyond an evening of theater must take place elsewhere. Luckily, Milan looms thirty minutes to the north, and three airports within an hour and a half open the door to all of Europe and northern Africa. Students who have just arrived or who have idled too long will leave the region or the country; others who have been around a while might settle for a day trip. By Thursday or Friday many have left, escaping by train and bus, and by the weekend the youth is gone. Italian students leave, too, returning home to see friends and family and let Mom do the wash.
Meanwhile, I finish attending classes and teaching English lessons and coast into Friday eve- ning with a scraped tablet. I like to pass the weekend in Pavia. I’ll have some writing I want to do and a Saturday morning English lesson to prepare for. My university courses rarely give homework, so come Saturday afternoon I’ll take a walk and meet friends for a hot chocolate or gelato. On Sun- days, we usually end up at El Diablo for American Brunch. I try not to compare the food to the American brunch I’m used to; Italy does pasta and we do pancakes and that is that. But El Diablo does have unlimited refills of coffee and orange juice (whose color varies in radioactivity according to how they’ve prepared the concentrate, ranging from Fiestaware-orange to yellowcake), and they’ve achieved the ambience. The overriding theme is Brown …
11.11.09. Teaching English.
I love it when they ask questions. Five days a week I sit down with my little Italian friends to teach English, and I spend these lessons talking, scribbling, and explaining. I fear silence all the while. I know that when I stop—and I must stop—silence will fall. This silence frightens because if it lingers and takes hold, it may never lift, and I might be forced to spend the balance of the lesson in ludicrous gesture. So when the quiet comes I breathe and stare at grains in the table until in a burst of courage I look in my students’ eyes.
Seldom do I find rapture, but I am willing to settle for question marks. When students have questions, it means they are engaged. They might not understand everything, of course, but a certain level of focus and comprehension is necessary to ask a question. If they can for- mulate these questions in their mind, all is not lost, and if they can express them aloud, then we can have the kind of dialogues that tickled Socrates and breed successful lessons.
Last night I got my questions. …
28.10.09. Fashion, or, Has anyone seen my ringmaster?
I have spent much of my life honing my fashion sense. If we take elementary school as
our point of departure (the toddler years have nothing to offer but long stretches of onesies and nudity), we can see the first swift sprouts of my seeds of style: ribbed sideburns, knee- length socks and knee-length shirts, the latter with enough room to consume my legs and one of my smaller classmates. My fashion bonsai was vast and ungainly. Yet even then I knew that to prune with haste was to kill the tree, so I lay in wait. As I got older I kept the same stock of shirts, gradually growing into them, and I clipped with care when I found diseased branches (my Avirex shoes) and burls (my fanny packs). Other branches appeared discolored but I trusted them and let them grow, and through the years my mustard zip-off pants matured into members-only jackets which matured into fluorescence. The earth wasn’t formed in a week; I wasn’t born swaddled in neon. But one day there I was in eighties chic with my bonsai in full beautiful bloom. I danced and mounted speakers and put down my shears forever.
Oh how this world tests our hearts. I have been in Italy for five weeks and already my tree languishes. …
18.10.09. Politics.
My president last week won the Nobel Peace Prize. Throughout the presidential election
and during Barack Obama’s first months in office he has rallied Americans with his hopeful cry, and now the Norwegians, too, are on board. Some among his detractors and his support- ers—and I, too—believe this award is undeserved or at least premature. Obama has experi- enced early success in “altering the political discourse” in D.C., but his administration is still largely in its pupal stage. The butterfly promises to be magnificent, however, and it is this hope to which we and the Nobel committee cling. Such a widespread display of trust and faith is no small thing in a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world where we expect results in one hundred days.
This prize took a bit longer than a hundred days, but it is a tremendous accomplishment for Obama and the United States. I am proud that Obama won because today America is at war in two countries and I fear the world has painted us as a bellicose nation. We are a belli- cose nation. With this prize, though, comes recognition of our other face: one of democratic and humanistic ideals that can sometimes lead us into war, but, as articulated by Obama, can also pull us out of and take us beyond war. …
08.10.09. Attending university.
I read magazines in class now. My school hobby of choice used to be the crossword or
Jumble, but vowel-rich Italian is a problematic language for word puzzles (try to unscramble EOULIA). So I peruse the current week’s Espresso, which covers Italian culture and politics and other world news, and read the articles or gaze at the pretty ladies seen recently with Ital- ian president Silvio Berlusconi.
My classes are of course conducted in Italian, which would seem to demand a greater concentration on my part. Certain of my professors do in fact tax me with their high level of discourse or ferocious velocity. My linguistics teacher in particular fires off her material with staggering speed, her tongue a solitary manic hummingbird wing. She keeps her eyes closed and face screwed up all the while, and I have an inkling she is possessed by Noam Chomsky. Despite her pace, I understand ninety-five percent of what she says. As a collegemate who has studied in the U.S. explained, lectures are the easiest thing to follow in a foreign language be- cause of their linearity and linguistic purity. One doesn’t encounter the slang or crowd dy- namic that can make the dorms such a confusing and disorienting place.
Often, though, classes here are so easy to understand—and so tempting to sleep through—because the lectures move at a aimless crawl. It’s as if the lot of us have been plucked from our desks and dropped in a jury assembly room. We’re there because someone told us to be there, and we can see someone talking at the front, but why and about what we cannot be sure. …
02.10.09. College life.
The window off my room opens grandly. Large wood-framed glass doors swing wide to
reveal a pod of trees reaching up to my fourth-floor room, and the garden and street below. It would be a lovely balcony, were there actually a platform on which to stand. As it is, an or- nate metal grating is in place to keep me from stepping out and plummeting to my expatriate demise twenty-some-odd meters below.
The Italian dailies must take the blame for my occasional thoughts of accidental death or suicide. In my ten days here I have seen three front-page articles having to do with people falling to their deaths. Two were older folks, and one an infant. Older folks often have things worse than the rest of us—maybe their pensions are dwindling, maybe they just lack the sure footing on which they once depended to hike to school two miles in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways. They may be excused for their falls, and mourned as is the practice for those who leave us in tragic ways. But I don’t understand how the infant could have “precipitated itself” from a second-story window, this according to the paper. A one-year-old is barely strong enough to hold its head upright. It would seem that the parent must have placed the baby on their ornate railing giving onto the cobblestones below, then gone to make a cappuccino. Are we really so careless with each other?
At the collegio, the easy silence of my initial days has vanished. In its place, scratching at my back as I stare from my window: a slightly regulated chaos that has pulled me back four years to my first days at the University of Oregon. That period of dorm life started somewhat inauspiciously, as I ate some bad macaroni salad and spent what would have been my first night on campus curled up by the toilet at my parents’. Not that my absence that first night lacked a silver lining. I believe I gained a bit of an aura because of my late arrival; it was as if I, the savvy local, were simply arriving fashionably late rather than persuading my bacterial macaroni to drop its weapons and come out with its elbows up. …
25.09.09. Walking the streets.
I had nothing to do again today so I went walking. ‘Nothing’ weighs much more in an
empty dorm. In the city there are people walking about and chatting, and you can chat with them too if you feel so bold. You don’t, but these opportunities for interaction and the poten- tial phrases you construct in your mind ease the solitude.
I did however speak at length with Enza, who patrols the official university store every morning till noon. She was silent until I commented on their ongoing mug exchange, whereby anyone who brings a mug from a foreign university receives a UP mug gratis. They have a few dozen mugs, including ceramic representatives from Harvard, the University of Florida, even a university in Australia. Enza took great pride in the store’s collection, and when she discovered I was from the UO, for which they have no mug, she lobbied hard for me to pro- vide one to fill out their collection (Mom and Dad, now would be the proper time to pay a visit to the Duck Store).
Once we exhausted the topic of mugs, which was a much vaster topic than I would have expected, Enza gave me the scoop on the city. …
23.09.09. Al Collegio Ghislieri.
My first day at the Collegio Ghislieri began at eight a.m. in easy silence. I had not set an alarm, hoping instead to slip slowly from my dreams into my real-life dream world of sixteenth-century Italy. My room does have a heater in the corner and along the same wall a fluorescent light and gleaming porcelain sink. But the tiled floor offers a chipped tessellation of black, mustard and dull-coral diamonds that must be medieval. The rectangular desk in the middle of the room that is slightly too long to fit in any direction without blocking access to the shelves, sink, window or closet shows markings and gaps in the woodwork that hint at numberless years of frustrated students scratching and pulling at things. One might have been Carlo Goldoni, favorite son of the Collegio Ghislieri and masterful Italian playwright. The closet, once I move the desk to access it, smells of leather wrapped in a soiled jousting shirt. This is my real-life dream world. …