Category Archives: Italy

bio, living in Italy, technology, women in technology

Girl Geek Dinner Italia

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Some years ago Silvia, who had been one of our tech support team (of two) at Incat, paid me the enormous compliment of saying that she considered me a role model. This from a woman with a laurea in physics who holds a managerial position in a team supporting HP servers, and certainly never needed any advice from me on how to do her job!

I was extremely flattered, of course, but startled: I had never thought of myself as a role model for anybody. But it now seems that I am, and the job comes with responsibilities. Such as, um, eating free dinners and giving speeches.

Amanda Lorenzani (whom I’d enjoyed meeting at barCamp Roma), organized Italy’s first Girl Geeks Dinner, which took place in Milan last Friday. And she pulled it off magnificently: sponsorship from Excite, Dada.net, and San Lorenzo (who contributed the bubbly) ensured a very good dinner, complete with wine (though my request for a gin & tonic was turned down on the grounds that “then we’d have to give the strong stuff to everybody”).

At least 60 people were present, most of them, indeed, women. By the rules of Girl Geeks Dinners, women couldn’t be fewer than 50% of the guests: each woman attending can, if she wishes, invite one and only one man. (My date, by his own request, was Luca Conti.) After years of attending tech conferences at which women are always a minority and often silent, I was thrilled to meet and talk with so many smart, capable women. They had plenty to say for themselves, all of it interesting. Conversation flowed easily for most; I did what I could to involve those who seemed to be shy, though I was constantly distracted by new/old friends, and my feet hurt (I’m not used to wearing heels, but Ross had insisted I should).

We didn’t have a main speaker (as Girl Geeks Dinners often do although, surprisingly, they often seem to be men), but Amanda had asked four of us to each say a few words:

My two-minute speech was neither as off-the-cuff nor as nervous as it probably sounded. I had been trying all day to decide how to translate that immortal line from Thelma & Louise: “You get what you settle for.” I finally settled on (which is different from settling for): Nella vita, ottieni quello di cui ti accontenti. And added, as my own closing line: Vi auguro di non accontentarvi mai – “I hope you never settle.”

Then I could relax and eat dinner and talk with people rather than at them. It was great fun to see in person someone I’d been following on Twitter, Svaroschi, who is heading off to grand new adventures in the Big Apple.

Almost everyone in the room had a blog, several specifically food blogs, which I will now go and read although it’s dangerous for me to do so, especially now when I have no time to cook.

Apparently I terrified at least one person in the room. Sorry about that – totally not my intention. I was a little weirded out – though extremely flattered – by people coming up to tell me they admire me, and/or like my site. Okay, it wasn’t that many, but it’s a strange experience nonetheless. Am I really somewhat famous, or just a legend in my own mind?

I was therefore a little manic, and very tired – had woken up at 4 am from jet lag, still wasn’t well (and destined to get much worse the next day), and had to get home to Lecco, with Luca in tow (as our house guest) at a not-too-unreasonable hour because we had to get up for rItaliaCamp. I hope for the next dinner I will be more relaxed and awake. There were so many topics in the air that I would have liked to hear more about.

Just one example: Beatrice came to represent TechneDonne, a project to study gender (in)equality in the world of IT. Among other things, they are asking themselves: “Is software different when women write it?” Interesting question. These are the folks who have asked me to speak at FemCamp in Bologna on May 26th; by then I hope to have had some opportunity to explore the roles of women at Sun Microsystems – in one week, I saw more women there than in any other tech company I’ve ever worked for or visited!

Another nice ego-stroke for me was that Tara (of Passpack) told me she’s loving my unfinished fantasy novel, Ivaldi. And she hadn’t even got to the good part yet! <grin>

It was altogether a fun and stimulating evening, and I would/will be delighted to see all of these people again, and hope to have time to talk with the ones I missed this time around. In fact, I’d like to do it more often – maybe we can do regional lunches or aperitivi in between dinners?

Update

April 2, 2007 – My pleasure in reminiscing on the joys of the dinner was somewhat soured by this:

(photo by fullo via Pandemia)

This group represents a new (and very laudable) initiative by Alberto D’Ottavi, Stefano Vitta, Lorenzo Viscanti, Luca Mascaro, Chiaroscuro and Emanuele Quintarelli to encourage the development of Web 2.0 in Italy. But, boys, what’s missing from this picture? That’s right… girls!

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Italian songs

Learn Italian in Song: Centro di Gravita’ Permanente

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by Franco Battiato – This song seems to be largely nonsense, but when I first heard it, it occurred to me that the chorus expresses something many people feel – unfortunately. Though the song is by Battiato, who is shown in the video here, musically I much prefer the Neri per Caso cover.

Centro di Gravita’  Permanente

Permanent Center of Gravity
Una vecchia bretone con un cappello e un ombrello An old Breton [woman] with a hat and an umbrella
di carta di riso e canna di bambu` of rice paper and bamboo cane
capitani coraggiosi Captains courageous
furbi contrabbandieri macedoni Clever Macedonian smugglers
gesuiti euclidei Euclidean Jesuits
vestiti come dei bonzi per entrare a corte Dressed like Buddhist monks to go to the court
degli imperatori della dinastia dei Ming. of the Emperors of the Ming dynasty.
ritornello: refrain:
Cerco un centro di gravita` permanente I’m seeking a permanent center of gravity
che non mi faccia mai cambiare idea That won’t make me ever change my mind
sulle cose sulla gente About things, about people
avrei bisogno di… I would need…
Over and over again. [surely you don’t need me to translate this line!]
Per le strade di Pechino erano giorni di maggio On the streets of Peking there were days of May
tra noi si scherzava a raccogliere ortiche We joked among ourselves gathering nettles
non sopporto i cori russi la musica finto rock I can’t stand Russian choruses, fake rock music,
la new wave italiana il free jazz punk inglese the Italian New Wave, free jazz, English punk
neanche la nera africana. nor even the black African.
(ritornello) (refrain)
if you find this useful and want more, let me know!

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bio, working in Italy

Light at the End of the Tunnel

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They say it’s always darkest before the dawn. I’ve just been through a dark period, but… here comes the sun! (In more ways than one, as will shortly become clear.)

I’ve been stressed and depressed since well before Christmas. Money (lack of) was becoming a problem. is a privately-financed start-up, and my salary there is low – working for so little has been my investment in the company, at my personal risk: there are no guarantees that what we’re doing will fly and, if it doesn’t, I will have practically thrown away all these years (financially – experience, of course, is always valuable).

I don’t care about being wealthy by anyone else’s standards. Thanks to my husband and his family, I have a very nice roof over my head. But I don’t like feeling that I’m not pulling my financial weight in the family (though we have the basics covered, my salary is needed). Worse, feeling that I’m losing my financial independence eats away at me.

Furthermore, my daughter wants to go away to school next year, to Woodstock, my alma mater – which has become a great deal more expensive since I attended it: $16,000 for tuition and boarding, plus airfares, a new laptop, and other sundries that a teenager abroad will need. This adds up to approximately my annual salary at TVBLOB. <wince>

So, I have to somehow at least double my current salary. I’m not in a hurry to leave TVBLOB: although, after four years, start-up mode is getting very old, the project is still absolutely fascinating and potentially world-changing. That, plus colleagues whom I like and respect very much, is hard to walk away from.

But, financially, I wasn’t sure I had any other option. I started looking around for other full-time jobs in high tech in Italy (Google? hmm), but – am I actually employable by any “normal” Italian company? I have no personal experience to go on, but I have heard that most Italian companies are more gerontocracies than meritocracies (and chauvinist, to boot).

Job ads in the Italian papers specify that they want someone young (yes, this is legal in Italy), so they can pay them miserably and keep them low on the totem pole. Many entry-level jobs across all industries are being done by low- or un-paid interns with the excuse: “you can afford to work for us just for the experience – you live at home with your parents anyway.”

I fear that a middle-aged foreign woman who’s inclined to speak her mind and wants to be paid what she’s worth is not likely to do well in such a context. The crowd I saw at Cisco Expo the other day confirmed my (possibly mistaken) prejudice that even high-tech companies in Italy tend to favor hierarchy and conformity – I would love to be wrong about this, but am I? I don’t want to find out the hard way.

Where else to look for work, and what kind of work? There’s always the small stuff, like translation, but globalization has depressed prices in that arena as well – most companies are not willing to pay fairly for a really good translation by someone who actually knows how to write in English. I put in a bid here and there, with no immediate result.

Because I have a director title at TVBLOB, I felt uncomfortable at the idea of explicitly advertising that I was seeking additional work. So I brushed up my resumé, trolled LinkedIn for connections and recommendations, and quietly told a few friends that I was in the market.

This has brought results far greater and faster than I ever hoped for. Next Tuesday I’m flying to Colorado to start part-time, freelance work (one quarter budgeted so far) with Sun Microsystems, as a web producer for one section of their vast online empire, among other tasks. After this initial visit, I’ll be able to work from home (though I won’t mind travel as needed – I’m generally happy to go places and see people).

I’m slightly terrified. I know all about building and sustaining online communities, and writing, managing and editing web content – in fact, I was one of the pioneers in corporate online communication. But the subject matter of the Sun storage site I’ll be supervising is hardly an area of expertise for me.

On the other hand, I didn’t know anything about CD-ROMs when I set out to write a book on them: I am very good at learning what I need to know (and enjoying doing so), when I need to know it. And there’s more than one former colleague in the group I’ll be working with – a bonus to the whole situation. It won’t be easy but, if it was, I’d get bored!

I’ll keep my TVBLOB job, four days a week instead of five (in lieu of the raise that they can’t afford to give me right now, the lack of which started all this), so I have the remaining hours in the week to work for Sun, maintain my site, and, oh, yes, have a personal life from time to time. I’m heading into a very busy period now, but I’m happier than I have been in months. Turns out there was Sunlight at the end of the tunnel.

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bio, living in Italy

Italian Garden 2007: March

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They tell us that this past winter has been the warmest in Europe for 200 years. Certainly our plants are confused. Some of the bulbs I planted in October were sprouting by December. The mimosas bloomed before la Festa della Donna, which I’ve never seen happen before. Crocuses in Italian are called bucanevi – “make holes in the snow” – but they could only make pretty white spots in the grass. And now the irises are blooming, on unusually short stalks.

I’m as confused as the plants are, but I guess there’s nothing for it but to start the orto (vegetable garden). In spite of pollen allergies (also early this year) and a lingering sinus infection, I’ve been out toiling the soil. (Actually, the sun helped to dry out my respiratory system.)

Two weekends ago I cleared part of the orto (vegetable garden) of its winter weeds, and planted basil, parsley, one kind of lettuce, and spring onions. I weeded the flowerbed by the garage wall and planted coriander, dill, and arugula there. (Now if I can only get the neighbor’s cats to quit using that area as a litter box…) And I planted various flower seeds in some of the dozens of cinder block “planters” that form our retaining wall.

(This is what the wall looked like two years ago. I’ll take a more up to date picture when we have a prettier day for it. This picture was taken in May, when the poppies usually bloom at this altitude. It will be interesting to see how early they appear this year.)

This past Saturday I worked on the compost heap that occupies a corner of the bottom level of our terraced backyard. There’s too much wood in there – I need to break that into smaller pieces, and start mixing in more leafy stuff. But at the bottom, when I reached it, I found several buckets of decent compost.

I transplanted a mountain pine seedling that we had taken from the wild during a walk last year and planted in a pot. It lost all its needles over the winter and I thought I’d killed it, but now it’s sprouting new greenery. I planted it at the bottom of the retaining wall where it can, well, help retain.

We went to the azienda agricola (“agricultural company”) near home. I was hoping to get a jump on planting the vegetables, but they don’t have much yet – I guess the greenhouses weren’t expecting winter to be over so soon. But they did have, strangely, cranberries – not at all native to this region! 18 euros for six little pots of cranberry plants; we bought them on a whim. Checking my organic gardening book back home, I find that cranberries want to be in a boggy area with lots of sun. No such thing in our yard. Lots of sun, yes, but no bog – our soil is very clayey and dries out quickly. I enriched the soil in one corner of the garden with compost and planted them anyway; we’ll just have to water them a lot and hope for the best. It would be nice to have fresh cranberries for Thanksgiving.

We had a fairly successful orto last year, but I learned a few lessons to apply this year:

  • Plant zucchine where they will have room to spread. This year I’m going to try putting them at the top of a little slope at the bottom of the large retainin wall. This slope is usually covered in weeds – the zucchine plants can smother out the weeds for me, rather than growing down the lower retaining wall and covering plants I’d rather keep healthy.
  • Plant more eggplant. We didn’t get very many last year, and the fruit never got big, but they were very tasty – I want more of that!
  • Plant more of the tomato variety called costolute (“ribbed”) – of the various tomato varieties we have tried, these seem to do best in our environment.
  • Keep cutting back the lettuce and replanting it throughout the season. I let most of it bolt last year.
  • Can I do something to cover the strawberries so that we get to eat them, rather than the birds? Must see what I can rig up.

Enrico mutters that the roses aren’t performing as well as he had hoped when we bought them. I keep explaining that a grand garden takes time. Someday we, too, will have a wall of roses like this house in Milan:

top photo by Rossella

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bio, Italian food

Why Italians Drink Bottled Water

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From time to time in the travel forums, I run across people complaining about the added expense of bottled water at restaurants in Italy. It is possible to drink tap water at any restaurant in Italy, and in some areas it’s the norm, but in many places the request is considered unusual.

Although the water that comes out of our taps is perfectly potable, urban Italians drink almost exclusively bottled water. Not because it’s bottled, but because it comes from real mountain springs (like the one pictured above), and simply tastes better.

City tap water in most parts of Italy that I’ve experienced has a heavily chemical taste – lord knows where they get it from, or what they do to it in purifying. It is also very “hard” – full of calcium. When you see how quickly the inside of your teakettle furs up from boiling tap water, you have second thoughts about trying to process that stuff through your kidneys every day. (Although the technology is available here, very few households have installed the water softening systems that are so common in the US.)

The further you get out into the country, and particularly into the mountains, the better the tap water is: it’s often piped, unprocessed, directly from mountain springs into homes. Many town squares still feature the municipal fountains where people used to get their water before indoor plumbing became common. (In some places, water is so abundant that these can’t be turned off: they simply run, all the time, a waste which always disturbs me.) In communities that have particularly good water, restaurants will put a carafe of the local water on the table before offering you the bottled.

For home consumption, most city households buy bottled water in six packs of 1.5 liter bottles. There are dozens of brands, some local, some national. San Pellegrino is a national brand in Italy – in fact, the town and springs of San Pellegrino are not far from where we live. Most Italian bottled waters actually come from mountain springs in specific locations, and are bottled near the sources for which they’re named. Most come in fizzy and non-fizzy varieties, with the fizzy ones being artificially carbonated, but a few, such as Ferrarelle, are naturally fizzy. Some have recognizable flavors, and after a while you develop preferences (I, for example, can’t stand Ferrarelle).

There is lots of competition between brands, with ads touting their supposed health-giving properties (especially for the house brands at the terme – traditional health spas), low sodium, etc. I don’t take these claims seriously, but it is indisputable that water (bottled or not) is the healthiest thing you can drink – no calories, for starters, and one of the few health statements that most experts seem to agree on is that everyone should drink lots of it. In Italy, this is no problem: not many households keep soft drinks or beer ready in the fridge, but everyone’s always got water. The only two beverages that you see on most Italian tables are water and wine.

You don’t always have to pay for good water in Italy. Enrico and I routinely recycle plastic bottles by taking them to the mountains and refilling them with good spring water:

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