I love Italy, but the more I learn about it, the more I find that, like any country, it’s beset by problems. While the food is of course delicious, the weather incredible and the language beautiful, it’s still a mess of infuriating red tape, corruption, nepotism, racism and blood-boiling inefficiency.
I still totally love the place, but while I’d love to visit, I doubt I could live there for very long before getting unsociably stabby. So let’s discuss Italy, warts and all. What do you love about it? What do you hate? What do you find bemusing and what do you just plain not understand?
The only thing that I never could wrap my head around was the Italian phobia about cold air - this of course leads to most Sicilian homes being unequipped with air conditioning in the middle of blazing hot summers.
Oh, yeah. Every time I’ve visited my relatives in the summer, I end up with a million mosquito bites because not only do they not believe in air conditioning, they apparently don’t believe in putting screens in their windows either. Pazzi!
It’s not the cold air itself, though – I think they think that the body cannot handle the sharp temperature change between being melting hot outside and walking into a cool building, and that you will get sick that way.
Having lived in Nigeria where coming and going out of freezing homes to scorching temperatures outside happens many times a day, I can assure you this is a very good way to get sick, actually. BTW, air conditioning isnt common in all of Europe, it’s just not Italy. Even Andalucia in August fights the heat with appropriately timed siestas rather than air conditioning.
Northern Vs Southern Italy. Huge difference. I have no opinions but watching YouTube clips of Lega Nord makes me laugh. These politicians are so over the top!
I’m so in love with Italy! I hope to move there one day.
The hardest thing to get used to? The language, given that I didn’t speak it when I got there. I picked up Italian quickly enough, I guess, but it was a nerve-wracking process.
I’m a Brit with a holiday home in Puglia, Southern Italy.
Thinks I love
The way they beep the horn to say hello when driving past your house, even if they don’t know you
The fact that gangs of teenage boys are more likely to be found in a seafood restaurant eating raw sea urchins than in MacDonalds
That everything can wait til tomorrow
That lunch lasts from 1-6pm
That you can order a washing machine and they’ll not only deliver it the same day, but they’ll be happy to meet you at the nearest gas station because I can’t describe my address in italian
The fact that my house has no address but people can still find me, because everyone knows everyone
The fact that the man in the gas shop will happily maintain a one-sided conversation with me about football, even though the only word I have understand is ‘calcio’.
That ‘parking the car’ means just stopping the car in the middle of the road and leaving it.
That the traffic wardens are all 23 year old women with flowing locks and white gloves, grrrrr. Talk about stopping traffic.
That no one can sit still and read a book on the beach - everyone must be constantly talking, eating or frollicking in the serf in speedos like a Jean Paul Gaultier ad.
That the men are all groomed and gorgeous and have NO idea how camp they look.
That the fishmonger insists on chatting me up in French, even though I have told him repeatedly in Italian that I am English.
Things I hate
They literally NEVER shut up and wouldn’t dream of walking across a room to ask someone a question when they can bellow at the top of their lungs.
That they seem to be stuck in the 70s when it comes to throwing litter, or paying the taxes it would take to get someone to pick the litter up.
That driving is like going on the dodgems.
That even the most enormous supermarkets only sell pasta, cheese, salami and tomatoes (I exaggerate obviously, but it wouldn’t kill them to stock some ethnic spices, there’s just so much pasta a girl can eat)
That paying an electricity bill seems to involve three trips to the bank, several photocopies of my passport, several forms of many pages long that each require my signature, a phone call, an internet log-in and a carrier pigeon to seal the deal.
That lunch at the very few restaurants that are open (because why wouldn’t you be having lunch at mama’s?) is precisely 12-2pm, after which you must starve til 8pm
A family friend, a native of Germany, who has traveled extensively through the US and Europe for decades, told me the Italians are his favorite people. Not necessarily country, but people.
I lived in Italy for a few years, but it was 20 years ago, so I’m sure there have been a lot of changes.
Where I lived, the Po valley, the weather kind of sucked. Gray and broiling in the summer and gray and freezing in the winter. I saw blue sky a half a dozen times in three years, invariably after huge thunderstorms. You’d see an amazing blue sky and mountains on the horizon that you didn’t even know were there, and six hours later, the gray closed in again. The fog in the winter was pretty cool, as long as you weren’t driving in it.
The food is amazing. 20 years ago there wasn’t much variety though. A Chinese restaurant was a treat.
The cold air thing is something they share with most of Europe. We’ve had an extensive thread on European fears of cross breezes here before.
I first visited in '96. I last visited this March. The first time, foreign food outside of burgers was RARE. I recall a Mexican place in Venice (wow was it bad!). This time around, I was seeing more foreigners and their food. Udine, for example, had a gyro place.
One thing I find amusing: Il Gazetta dello Sport. It’s printed on pink paper. I can’t, for the life of me, see this happening in the states.
I don’t know a lot about Italy but I’ve been on vacation there about five times, my girlfriend ‘Venus’ is Italian, and I’ve just come back from visiting her in Rome. Before I make any comments I should mention that I adore Italy and the people I have met there. It’s stunning, breathtakingly rooted in an unparalleled history, the food is out of this world, the lifestyle is pretty damn awesome, and the Italian version of loyalty in friendship and family cohesion is admirable.
See a group of tourists in the street, you can tell they’re Italian because they’re all wearing scarves. All my Italian friends wear scarves, pretty much all the time. It’s weird, they’re all intelligent, well-educated people, but their adherence to old wives’ tales about health is frustrating. Similarly their health service seems geared around “throw pills at the problem” rather than discover a cure.
Then there’s food chauvinism. The idea of fusion or experimentation seems to elude most Italians I know. There is ONE way to make a dish, subject to a few regional variations, and that’s it. Any alteration to that and you’re interfering with nature. The thought of trying a different national cuisine - to eat or cook - not only doesn’t interest many Italians, it often grosses them out. Venus had only had Chinese food twice, and had never even seen curry or sushi before living in the UK. We did see one sushi restaurant in Rome this weekend, but it was a new thing, and entirely empty even though it was lunchtime.
Finally, from my observation of the insitutional employment and academia that Venus works in, is that there is a lot of emphasis on by-rote study and adherence to strongly established values. Creativity and critical thinking don’t seem to be that highly valued.
I agree completely… I just imagine the uproar it would cause here if Sports Illustrated was on pink paper. Uber sports fans here can be rather closed minded about such things, IMO.
If you come from a country with a northern European sense of time Italy can be infuriating if you are there for anything but vacation.
My experience is limited to the Calabria/Messina area, but I remember an Italian saying to me something along the lines of if only they could figure out how to make the planes and trains run on time.
I wanted to scream - we did, decades ago! For god’s sake the country borders Switzerland and Germany, they figured it out. It shouldn’t be some exotic mystery.