Updates From Italia
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.
But I sat down here today to write about bathrooms. I used one at the Frankfurt-Hahn airport this Monday past and wish to tell you about it. This bathroom, though within a budget-airline hub, displayed spectacular hygiene. All was touch-free, and the room’s pure shining white gave me the impression of being walled in by iPods. There were also dental goods to buy: a breath-freshening spray, a standard toothbrush, and, for the manually disinclined, a chewable toothbrush. … (continued here)
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 situation many of my friends with more structured obligations call “doing nothing.” Whatever I am doing, 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. … (continued here)
03.08.10. 00000119060341W.
Today I went to Carpiano. For those of you who haven't heard of it, Carpiano is about 20 kilometers southeast of Milan, and it is home to 853 families living in 894 housing units. People from Carpiano call themselves carpianesi and their mayor is Francesco Ronchi.
Carpiano also has an industrial area that is home to such heavyweights as DHL and, what concerned me on this day, SDA, an Italian express courier. My parents last month sent me a package to an address where I unfortunately am not, and I had to go claim it. The package might reasonably have ended up at one of the 10 postal centers in Pavia; but these must have been full, because the place of rest of my package was Carpiano (Ronchi, their mayor, by the way, was born in 1950, very luckily in Milan itself, although I don't believe he was the Miracle in Milan Cesare Zavattini would write about that year, and that De Sica would immortalize the next). … (continued here)
17.07.10. Ghislieri: A Retrospective.
Today I dismantled room 59. I made my way to Collegio Ghislieri in late September, following a map I received in Eugene and lugging my suitcase over pesky, yet lovable cobblestones. In two days, on Monday, I will move several hundred meters closer to downtown, right into Pavia's core: the intersection of Strada Nuova (the "New Street," so-named despite its age of several hundred years) and Corso Garibaldi. I had hoped to stay there all of next year; for visa reasons, I won't. But I will be able to enjoy several marvelous months in my single apartment with its balcony that overlooks the Ticino River, the classic red-tiled roofs of town, and the grandiose Duomo, the Pavian cathedral that boasts (according to Pavians) the third-largest dome in Italy. As the meals in Ghislieri's glorious dining hall count down to zero, as my remaining hours within these old walls diminish, I have entertained some nostalgia even as my excitement for the future grows. What follows is the resulting retrospective.
04.07.10. Mon bagage a été retardé.
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.
The first of these overnight bags, in fact, I volunteered for. When I arrived in Atlanta I found that my flight to Milan was overbooked and, rather than clutch my confirmed seat to my chest, I gave it up. The Seatless Dozen was leering at the Delta representative from their chairs at the gate, and she was offering a sky-high travel voucher and night in Atlanta for anyone willing to help her out. I had nothing pressing to do in Italy, plus my friend Selena lives in Atlanta, so I made the trade. The representative rebooked me and gave me a fistful of vouchers—as well as my first Delta toiletry bag—and off I went to enjoy one last night in the US, on Delta. … (continued here)
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. … (continued here)
23.04-24.04. Lugano, Switzerland.
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 became 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. Our Blanche DuBois, Gianna, is somewhat of a theater fiend, and had been preparing for another role as the protagonist in Stefano Benni's modern-day remake "PinocchiA," naturally in simultaneity with our Pavia production. Its opening in her hometown of Lugano was slated for the second weekend after Streetcar, so I went with Reg to see what Gianna was like on stage when she didn't have to be a crazy, victimized drunk. (She was still crazy, but a cute and cuddly crazy, and later a punk crazy.) … (continued here)
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 evening 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 Sundays, 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, with coarse wood from the floor to the banisters, while U.S. license plates and the Stars and Stripes splash color on the walls. The soundtrack also takes me home, roving through Frank Sinatra and Johnny Cash to meet a royal end with Michael Jackson. If the waitresses were more perky and there weren’t culturally-confused Italians ordering a hamburger with pancakes, the place might be Spike’s Keg O’ Nails in Grayling Township, MI. … (continued here)
27.02.10. Fun with mail.
What I had before me was a highly suspicious package. Had it been received at the White House, it may have raised the terror alert. What bothered me was not the cheery merchandise on top, nor the bunches of crimped red paper stuffed round, but rather the vacuum-sealed pouch below that I’d torn open. Its contents: three deep-fried balls and one very green pancake. It was in fact not so much a flapjack as a lilypad. And I desperately wanted to eat it.
For weeks, months even, I had been expecting this package. When at home, I go weekly to Addi’s Diner in Springfield for their famous turkey-platter pancake, and Addi promised me I would not have to go without while abroad in Italy. Two weeks ago she let slip that she’d finally made good on her word. … (continued here)
07.02.10. Traveling with the parents.
You are in a foreign country that serves delicious cuisine, and have come to a restaurant that offers many regional specialties. You can’t name any of them. Although splendid plates pile up on the tables around you, you can’t tell the soup from the meat on the menu, and there aren’t any pictures. When the waiter comes you do succeed in ordering some sort of pasta, you think, and with this small victory you relax in the comfort that you shall shortly receive something tasty.
Then the waiter returns with food for the folks at the next table over: his trolley bears a steak three inches thick and two feet in circumference, dark at the edges but red inside like the sun setting off an attic window. A father and two sons watch as the waiter produces hunks of meat for each of them. This, you realize, is the bistecca fiorentina, famed for its size and substance, and you didn’t order it. What do you do? If you are Larry Bradley, you pick up your chair and join the other table. … (continued here)
13.01.10. Toughing it out in Tuscany (and Tpavia).
Tuesday night, 12:15 am. I’m sipping the coffee and nibbling the cookies I should have been sipping and nibbling in the ER. A week ago I injured my ankle in an ill-fated leap into melting snow, and tonight the reckoning came.
I had never planned on going to the hospital. Ankles, in my experience, do not break but twist and sprain. In one particularly severe instance I witnessed an ankle completely detach, when Pittsburgh Pirates catcher Jason Kendall stepped rather poorly on first base. But that was Major League Baseball. Normal people stick with twists.
As twists go, mine was a dandy. You see, it was snowing that day in Tuscany. People (such as Frances Mayes and Michael Ondaatje) tell you that Tuscany is beautiful—and it is, but so is the Marche—and “we” take that to mean that it is beautiful while under the Tuscan sun, when the earthy colors of summer pull you to the land and transform the region’s fields into one large tilled hammock. But it snows there, too, on occasion, and then it becomes Narnia. Thin indistrict roads wind through hectares of white-capped grapevines and trees bowing in snow. As the snow builds around you, you think if you could just burrow to the bottom you might find something truly special. … (continued here)
21.12.09. Coffee and hospitality, or, ‘Happy Birthday Dad!’
I thought I had left behind such confusion in Italy. “Just a regular coffee to go,” I said. “A latte, cappuccino, mocha?” the barista pressed. “No,” I said. “The house blend.” I saw the coffee in the pot; I pointed to help the man. He turned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t serve you that to go.”
It was Monday, my first afternoon in Dublin, and after months of sipping thimbles of Italian espresso I had found my beloved pot of coffee. At the Bewley’s Cafe, no less, the locale that my English friends and guidebooks of choice raved about. And this man refused to pour me a cup. … (continued here)
30.11.09. Winter in Pavia, or, 'No, I'm not cold. Well, maybe a little.'
I just don’t want to have to dig my fingers in. On those long shoe-days when you’re out from morning till night, your socks meld to your feet with the hours’ building sweat. At day’s end you come home and want nothing more than to shed your shoes and slip on your slippers, but you must first pry away the cotton that has bonded with your skin. You do this on one foot, and sometimes you lose your balance and reach for support. If your eyes are too focused on your new cotton-skin compound you grasp at the skinny lamp with the charcoal damask shade, and it and you crash in a heap in the foyer.
You’ll forgive me if I choose sandals. My toes wiggle freely like a butterfly freed of its cocoon, a refreshing wind strokes my foot bottoms between flip and flop, and at the park in grass joy my sandals are off in a trice. Yet when I wear sandals in Pavia when the leaves are turning and falling, it’s like a cry for help. People stare at me, friends and strangers alike, and want dearly to offer me their shoes. … (continued here)
15.11.09. 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 formulate 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. … (continued here)
29.10.09. Fashion, or, Have you 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. Back home my vibrant dress turned heads and my neon tested people’s retinal cones. I was a circus clown, juggling outfits and donning such socially offensive combinations as socks with sandals. I enjoyed myself and made others chuckle and groan. But I am now discovering what happens when the American clown leaves his big top and goes gallivanting abroad. … (continued here)
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 supporters—and I, too—believe this award is undeserved or at least premature. Obama has experienced 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 bellicose 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. It is an ambitious prize as Obama’s is an ambitious presidency. … (continued here)
09.10.09. 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 Italian 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 because of their linearity and linguistic purity. One doesn’t encounter the slang or crowd dynamic that can make the dorms such a confusing and disorienting place. … (continued here)
02.10.09. Collegio 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 ornate 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? … (continued here)
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 potential 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 provide one to fill out their collection (Mom and Dad, now would be the proper time to pay a visit to the Duck Store). … (continued here)
23.09.09. Primo giorno 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. … (continued here)