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.
This is what happens when the Bradleys spend Christmas in Italy. My parents came to visit for ten days instead of me going home, and our tour included stops at Pavia, Florence, Turin, Genoa, and Milan. We are outgoing folk, and the general idea when we go anywhere is to make the largest impact possible. This approach applies foremost to my father. In Hawaii that meant teaching the elevator attendant how to say grazie and prego, in Mexico it meant singing “Guantanamera” with a guitar troupe, and in Italy it meant eating off the locals’ plates. I believe this kind of behavior aligns with one of the current “silly American” stereotypes floating around, a concept I find perilous, because the “silly” American can degenerate very quickly to the “annoying” American. But my dad plays this role with such immense cheer and panache that he creates a category all his own. In Mexico, this is the realm of Loco Lorenzo.
My father crossed the Atlantic this time and the Mediterranean got to know Lorenzo il Matto, the Italian incarnation of Larry at large. I would say he was received well. At this restaurant in Florence, the father at the next table matched my dad’s chair-scooch with a serving of bistecca fiorentina. At the father’s request, the waiter cut another piece of sunset steak so we, too, could experience its richness. We then returned the flavor with a plate of risotto, and during the course of the meal we continued to interact (at this point I became a central figure, my dad’s gestures only going so far). Our tables were only inches apart, so our conversation could take place at fairly normal volumes. The father and his two boys, aged about ten and twelve, were on vacation from Northern Italy, Milan I believe. The older boy took a fancy to Lorenzo il Matto, and as I mediated our English-Italian conversation, he directed sentences of English toward my dad. I remember him asking if it is cold in Oregon. The younger boy didn’t speak much, and neither did my mom, although I know she was scrutinizing every part of the exchange. She has been with my dad too long to be scandalized by his restaurant behavior, but often takes on the role of observer in situations like this. She misses nothing, however, and afterward was full of questions and theories about the family’s lack of a mother. None of us broached the subject during dinner, though, and perhaps for this reason we departed fast friends.
My dad’s one regret after the meal was that we did not exchange information with the other family. Fate or chance had placed us within chatting and eating distance of them, and by the end of dinner the restaurant’s other patrons might have thought we were one group of six rather than two groups of three. Besides, the talkative kid, after hearing about Oregon and how it’s not too cold, just a bit wet, might some day want to come visit. Maybe he’s watched The Goonies and wants to see Astoria. I could give him English lessons while still here in Italy, then accompany him on a triumphal return to the Pacific Coast, where we would dine at the region’s best fish houses, scooching our chairs close to anyone who had a plate that looked good. At bottom, to dip into the well of Seinfeld and paraphrase a boyfriend of Elaine’s who strove to please Jerry’s parents: we could have done more. More, despite that we’d already gone beyond what most people would consider normal or even polite. But the Bradleys are certifiably nice.
The proof of our oversight came two days later as we completed a farewell tour of Florence by horse-drawn carriage: along one of the the countless side streets that compose the city center, we spotted our new friends coming out of their hotel to load their car. We shouted final hurried goodbyes and best wishes for the new year before we clopped away around the corner and they drove back home, where perhaps a mother awaited. They remain our new friends, but it is not up to us when we will see them again.
Whatever our doubts about how we handled the Florence situation, Fate gave us do-overs as we headed to Turin on Boxing Day. Parentheses: In my experience Italians tend to discount Turin as a destination city, but I am in its thrall. The town runs along the Po River—or vice versa—and in addition to the marvelous Egyptian Museum (rivaled only by that in Alexandria) and the fantastic Cinema Museum (in that squat building with the enviable spire, the Mole Antonelliana), Turin is itself a burly chapter of history. It was home to the House of Savoy, Italy’s preeminent royal family, and held the honor of being the first capital city of unified Italy. We would have nearly four days to spend there.
Much of the city I had seen before, so I could serve as guide (this was certainly the most active role I’d ever had in a family vacation). But Turin held a few surprises for me as well. One such was Superga, a hill twelve kilometers from downtown and home to the best photo-ops around. Our second day in Turin, on the gray day between two days of blue sky, we rode bus number fifteen nearly to its end to catch a ride to the top of the world on an ancient funicular (“a railroad operating by cable with ascending and descending cars counterbalanced”). The line’s two cars, around in some form or another since the station’s opening on April 26, 1884, operate on a tramvia a dentiera—a track with false teeth—and carry their passengers along three kilometers to a height of 650 meters. The prize at the top is an ochre basilica—possibily unique—and a panorama of Turin and the base of the Alps beyond.
Along for the ride as well on bus number fifteen was a married couple of about sixty years of age. Both were well bundled against the crisp Turin cold, and the husband was laden with an upscale SLR camera—according to my dad, the best amateur camera on the market. As the stops came and went and the passengers diminished it became clear that this couple, too, was heading up Superga. When we reached our stop at the base of the hill this couple did in fact descend with us, and I decided to strike up a conversation. This was partially out of instinct, and partially out of jealousy that my father who could not speak Italian was making more friends on this trip than me.
“It’s too bad it’s so gray today,” I said to the man with the camera.
“Yes, but shoot, what can you do,” he might have said.
There was no funicular in the station. Inside at the ticket booth the lady informed us that a) the funicular had just departed; b) it would be an hour before the next funicular; and c) there was a café across the street.
The five of us—me, Mom, Dad, and our new best friends—trooped over to the café. We seated ourselves at the same table, which kept my dad from resorting to drastic measures. Instead, the affable Paolo and Mariella were there at arms’ length to converse with at ease. My parents and I ordered hot chocolates, the extra-thick Italian style, and my dad ordered an espresso as well to pour into his chocolate. This was a well-diagrammed move by Lorenzo il Matto. The locale’s traditionalist Neopolitan baristas were thrown into confusion by this mysterious fourth drink that seemed to pertain to no one. (As I have since discovered, my dad’s jury-rigged mocha was unnecessary. Turin already has just the thing: bicerin, a local specialty composed precisely of chocolate and coffee, with a touch of cream. But my dad was happy, and on this day that was enough.)
Paolo and Mariella would be, in the most sincere and respectful sense, the fish that didn’t get away. Perhaps my parents and I realized our opportunity to atone for our previous lapse, because we fairly clung to these nice folks for the next three hours, to Superga and beyond. Our interest in them (and theirs in us) was genuine: Paolo, though reticent, formed a bond with my dad based on the cameras looped about one another’s necks, and my mom joined the club as well with her own new SLR. We were not so much tourists as a flock of Steve McCurrys descended upon this café. Further, Mariella (called “Little Mary” because there are too many Marys in her family) was until recently a middle school teacher, and in the absence of anything else this would have been enough to cement her friendship with my mother, who teaches middle school health and P.E. It seems there is no bond such as that forged in the fires of middle school. Mariella began taking English lessons ten years ago, so she enjoyed being able to talk shop with my mom. On top of all this, Paolo and Mariella will be coming to the United States this summer for a tour of our national parks.
It appears to me now as if someone had set all this up. Making friends while traveling is common enough, but this encounter was so ideal as to seem orchestrated. By the end of the afternoon—we did make our way up heavenly Superga, and then back down on a bus as old and scary as the funicular but without any redeeming chic—we really had no choice but to exchange our information. We went together to lunch, which my dad paid for with certifiable Bradley hospitality, and afterward I received Paolo and Mariella’s phone numbers and email addresses. They invited me to visit them in Trento whenever I liked, and my parents extended their own offer of hospitality should the Italians’ park tour take them through the Willamette Valley.
Both offers were sincere. I find it more likely, however, that I will go to Trento than that they will go to Eugene. But that’s how it goes for us. It’s hard to get people from Europe to come to Oregon, however sincere the offer, when New York City is their point of entry and when California is hanging ten just south of our border. It takes a bold European to step up and say yes to Oregon. Someone like that talkative little boy, who will be wandering the coastline years from now searching for that strange family that took his family’s steak that night in Florence.◊