Let's start in the cafe. Everything worth talking about happens in cafes. The trip we booked to London was something of an accident. Some phantom red-boxed message kept poppping up, telling us we had entered incorrect card information. And then it would disappear. Ok, I thought to myself, maybe this would give us an extra couple of hours - a whole day, even - to remedy the complete lack of planning we had done. No such luck. We were going to London at the end of the week.
I'm trying to figure out what I'm here to learn. I know it's something, probably a lot of things. And I want to be sure I'm learning them. I'm privileged in my ability to study abroad, I know that, so my learning becomes a necessity, rather than a luxury. I am obligated to unpack my privilege in some form or another. Or at least that's what my cyclical anxieties about being in another country seem to be telling me. Booking tickets to London on a whim conjured particularly uncomfortable feelings about what my purpose here really is.
There has been a vast amount of surface level learning that I've done already. For starters, I've learned that one's tendency to generalize swells enormously when confronted with this level of sensory input. As a result, a lot of my processing has necessarily happened in the form of "Italians do this" or "Italians do that."
For example:
Italians never seem to be in a particular rush to get anywhere. Being in a city, of course, the pace is faster than that of surrounding towns. But the "stroll,"as I've taken to calling it, is alive and well. Food really is as important as you would imagine it to be. Food is love. A significant amount of thought goes into finding, preparing, eating, and enjoying food, every single day. Dieting is not a "cool thing to try" because "why not?" Dieting happens when your health is at risk. Otherwise, proscuitto is not worth giving up. However, high-quality olive oil is one of the best things you can do for your body. And it's everywhere here. Take our usage of ketchup or ranch and times that by a couple hundred and you arrive at the role of olive oil.
When out on the street, no one wants to hear your conversations or how funny you thought that joke was. That level of interaction is almost intimate and for that reason, is reserved for the home.
No one here seems to be a sub-par driver. If you operate a motor vehicle, you are a professional motorist. Side streets are meant for speeding down, sidewalks are made for parking on, and stopping on a dime for pedestrians - bolder, even, than the drivers - is a hard and fast requirement. There is almost no emphasis on being "obedient" when it comes to rules of the road. Italians are generally hardheaded and self-righteous.
Which sort of echoes the whole prevailing principle of tough, removed, but generous love. I've found that most Italians forego the whole performance of amicable politeness, because it's a waste of time and feels just as fake as it is. But you entirely get the sense that if you were in trouble, the average person on the street would drop everything to help you. Possibly a romanticized view but I stick to my guns about the "no time for nonsense." It's definitely endemic.
There are hundreds of other little idiosyncracies that, when taken together, create a palpable sense of culture. But there are bigger things too. There's the dangerously high youth unemployment rate, country-wide, the general dissatisfaction with government and the paultry measures taken to ameliorate glaring economic issues, the various ethnic groups that are in the country illegally, and a sense, depending on who you talk to, that Italians lack the drive to pull the country out of such a state.
I don't necessarily think I'm here to perform a scathing socio-economic critique, or to run workshops on how to pull a country out of a political quagmire. But I'm definitely here to learn.
I want to embody my experience in ways that make sense to me and in ways that could possibly make sense to the world. I need to have a lens of understanding: art, writing, poetry, music...something. Some way of making sense of all of it. I just haven't figured out what that medium is. In the meantime, I'll be putting as much effort as possible into being aware, present, and treading lightly as I go.
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