MILAN — I was talking to an Italian couple whose daughter had gone to live for a while in the United States before returning to run a restaurant on Lake Garda. They have a modest apartment in Santa Margherita on the coast of Liguria. The garden is bigger than the living quarters, filled with lemon trees (their fruit as big as baseballs), orange trees and orchids. The couple, now retired, has time to linger in the fragrant air of the dusk.
In the kitchen, it seemed to me, they have all they need: a machine to slice wafer-thin prosciutto, a toaster capacious enough for glistening focaccia, a scale to weigh out 200 grams of pasta. They prepared a rabbit simmered in an unctuous sauce of olives, pine nuts, sausage and rabbit liver, accompanied by perfect little cubes of sautéed potatoes that are time-consuming to prepare but worth every patient flip and stir.
Rabbit is underrated, a culinary victim of prejudice or misplaced affection, but not by Italians, who consume it often and with gusto.
In any event, my host, Sergio, was recalling visits to the United States to see their daughter. There were memorable renderings of “O Sole Mio” on gondolas in Las Vegas (beneath the Rialto Bridge on the “Grand Canal”), and then there was the time they were in New Mexico and “drove for 85 miles in a dead straight line.”
He looked me: “Not one curve. Can you believe it?”
I could — made me think of Highway 101 in California. He couldn’t. Life in Italy is a series of curves to which you adapt. There is zero scope for autopilot.
Adaptation and adjustment are the name of the game. This can be trying. On the other hand you can enjoy lemon zest from your own lemons, perhaps with salmon and those 200 grams of penne.
It was May 1, International Workers’ Day, a holiday. Yet, most people were working, a lot of stores open. I heard the following exchange:
“It’s the workers’ holiday and everyone is working!”
“Yes, I know, but of course they don’t work the rest of the time!”
“That’s true.”
There’s still a continuous banter in the streets of Italy, as when I lived here 30 years ago. Italy has cherry-picked modernity, taking only so much. Something in it has resisted the reduction of human interaction to the transactional minimum. Something in it has resisted the squeezing of the last cent of profit from every exchange. Something in it recognizes the human need for community and what a couple of sentences to a stranger can do. There are still innocent smiles in Italy, something you can only call humility. They don’t teach you that at marketing school. They don’t tell you how monotonous self-promotion can become, how tiresome, and finally inhuman. People return to Italy for its beauty, of course, but also for a refuge from relentlessness. Conversations veer here and there in the elasticity of Italian time, loosened from the constraints of time as a metric of productivity.
At the pharmacy, where it’s better to have a prescription but rules can be bent, I heard this:
“We don’t live in Italy.”
“Better that way!”
“Why?”
“Everything is difficult here.”
It is. Efficiency was not one of the cherry-picked items. Arriving at Milan Linate airport for the first time in decades, I found the same cumbersome buses from aircraft to terminal. The ATM machine was broken, the Information Desk unmanned. Strange, the Milan world’s fair, Expo 2015, has just opened — a time, if any, to spruce things up. The themes of the fair are guaranteeing food security; combating waste (Italy has much to do); improving nutrition (I can’t see that rabbit being beaten); and preserving the environment.
On opening day, May 1, a bunch of hooded anti-capitalist thugs calling themselves “Black bloc” smashed up the center of Milan in a mindless protest against Expo-as-capitalist-enterprise. Policemen were beaten, cars set on fire. Over the following weekend the people of Milan took to the streets armed with sponges, cloths, solvents and soap, determined to clean up their city. They did, in short order.
The state is still weak in Italy. But community — family, friends, city, region — is often powerful. Assessments of Italy’s condition tend to underestimate the effectiveness of these hardship-cushioning ties.
Matteo Renzi, the young prime minister, has just pushed through an important electoral reform law aimed at ending semi-chronic government instability. Broadly, it gives the winning party, provided it has 40 percent of the vote, a bonus that guarantees it 340 seats in the 630-seat chamber. (If no party has 40 percent, there is a runoff between the two largest parties).
Perhaps this will, as Renzi hopes, produce more straight lines — full five-year terms for governments. Italy could benefit from that. But there will still be plenty of curves.
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