Category Archives: Italy

Italian culture

To Flush or Not to Flush

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The local newspapers last week reported with glee that Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, never flushes the toilet after peeing – he stated this publicly, hoping to increase awareness of the global need for water conservation.

The immediate reaction of a reader of Metro (the freebie paper that I read on the train) was to extrapolate that Livingstone never flushes at all, and express horror at the probable state of his bathroom. Another reader took the argument further, excoriating all environmentalists as stupid. In today’s round of letters, an Italian environmentalist says that Livingstone’s initiative is “exaggerated and unrealistic,” but that we shouldn’t therefore condemn all environmentalist ideas.

Evidently the concept of the no-flush urinal has not reached Italy.

I wrote to Metro myself (it went unpublished) to point out that in many countries there aren’t even toilets, let alone water to flush them with. During my years at Woodstock we had water shortages, sometimes so severe that water had to be carried in buckets from a rainwater storage tank for toilet flushing and everything else. In that situation, you don’t bother to flush every time, nor should you use up scarce water to do so.

David Pollock’s book on third-culture kids recounts the story of a child raised by missionary parents in a water-poor country in Africa, who grew up with the rule: “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down” – a habit which horrified his grandmother when he stayed with her in the US!

Italy is rich in water – for now. But when the Alpine glaciers melt away entirely, as they seem likely to do in a few decades, Italians will need to learn to be less fastidious in their bathrooms.

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KidSpace: Public Places Where Kids Can Be Kids

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If I believe what I read in the media (and some bloggers), American parents are getting hysterical about MySpace. For those not in the know (if you’re over 25 but don’t have a teenage child, that likely includes you), MySpace is an online community with tens of millions of members, most of them adolescents and (very) young adults. MySpace allows every member to maintain a personal blog, post photographs and videos, “share” music (only music already on the MySpace system – it works very well as marketing for little-known bands), and be “friends” with anybody who will agree to be listed as your friend.

Young people seem to use MySpace primarily to communicate by leaving photos and comments on each other’s blogs. Bands and, increasingly, filmmakers, use it to promote themselves to the lucrative youth audience.

As is true with almost every Internet community, anyone can join anonymously or under a pseudonym, or even pretend to be someone else. In other words, it’s easy for a 50-year-old pervert to pretend to be a cute teenager (complete with fake photos) in order to pick up innocent young girls or boys. It’s also easy for a 13-year-old to pretend to be 16 (even with real photographs – the way kids are growing these days, who could tell?) and get herself in over her head with an older guy in a way that neither of them intended.

All this is possible, and no doubt happens; with so many members, you’re statistically bound to have a few really bad apples. Does this mean that MySpace is inherently evil and parents should forbid their kids to use it?

danah boyd, a PhD student at Berkeley and social media researcher at Yahoo, studies online phenomena and writes about her observations with wit and wisdom. She vigorously defends MySpace as one of the few public spaces in which American teenagers can hang out (at least virtually) without overt adult supervision.

I didn’t spend my adolescence in the US and am not raising an adolescent there now, so it had not occurred to me that American kids lacked such spaces in the real world. I figured that the Chock’lit Shoppe of the Archie comics had been replaced by fastfood joints, and/or that kids hang out at malls (and spend money – don’t mall merchants love this demographic?).

Apparently I was wrong. Some convenience stores are experimenting with a sonic device which emits a piercing whine that can be heard by adolescent ears but not by duller adult hearing – so it deters the kids from hanging around in front of the store, without disturbing adult customers. Some malls are also apparently breaking up and moving on idle gangs of teens caught just hanging out.

The kids have nowhere to go after school except home, where they remain alone, in contact with other human beings only via the Internet. Hence their need and desire for MySpace.

What a terribly sad picture of adolescent life. Kids need time to get to know each other and themselves in unsupervised contexts. They need to learn how to evaluate situations and people, without the constant presence of a parent telling them what’s good or bad. They need and deserve privacy.

Perhaps part of the reason Italian teenagers seem more mature than American ones is that Italy leaves real public space for them. An advantage of living in a smallish town in Italy is that it’s completely normal for kids 14 and up to hang out downtown, even into the wee hours of the morning (on weekends), and nobody worries about it. In Lecco, the main teen hangout is a pedestrians-only piazza in the heart of downtown, which is also the site of the bar/café favored by many teens.

This piazza is also usually crowded with people of every other age – adults, seniors, tourists, small kids in strollers or on tricycles. There are restaurants and shops and several bars (NB: Italian bars mostly serve coffee). So there’s always someone around to keep an eye on things, including adults who work there or whose homes overlook the piazza. The kids hanging out are not observed by their own parents (eww – that would be gross!), but are loosely in contact with and supervised by older people; the situation is safe for all concerned.

Given the difficulty of duplicating this in an American suburb, I agree with danah – let the kids have their MySpace! It’s sad that that’s all they have, but it’s better than nothing.

Update

May 21, 2006

I was premature in assuming that “the Mosquito” had already been installed in the US – though it soon may be, since the device first came to public attention last November.

I first heard about it from Boing Boing, and here’s an accessible copy of the article they referred to.

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Cambio di Stagione – Changing Seasons in Italy

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For several days last week, the spare bed in my studio was covered in piles of winter clothing. Mimma, the wonderful woman who cleans our house, would normally be unable to tolerate such a state of disorder, but she merely looked at it and observed: “Cambio di stagione.”

“Change of season” isn’t a precise period on the calendar – the weather varies from year to year, and this year has been unusually cold – but it’s a biannual ritual and, to some extent, a frame of mind.

Few Italian homes have American-style built-in or walk-in closets (though we all wish they did!). Some have old-fashioned wooden wardrobes, but more often you see enormous units that cover an entire wall and go all the way up to the (high) ceiling, custom made to fit the room, and installed by professionals. These are split into two vertical sections, with bars for hangers on both levels and shelves all the way to the top, which can only be reached if you’re standing on a ladder.

Hence the cambio di stagione, when you move your winter clothes up to long-term storage and your summer clothes down within easy reach (and, in fall, the reverse). It’s also a good time to review your wardrobe and realize just how many things you never wore the entire season – maybe it’s time for those to go to charity. So my bed was covered in piles to be stored and piles to be un-stored, while a good part of floor is still occupied by large bags of clothing to give away.

Cambio di stagione also refers to the period of unstable weather that occurs as winter turns to spring to summer to fall and back to winter, when you may suddenly find yourself over- or underdressed because the weather did something you weren’t expecting. It’s considered hazardous to your health: every little sniffle you get at these times is attributed to cambio di stagione, when your defenses are down as your body adjusts to the new season.

I used to scoff at this, but it makes sense when you consider that Italians live closer to the seasons than Americans do. American homes, offices, and public spaces tend to overcompensate for the weather, being overheated in winter and overcooled in summer. The net result is that you can (indeed, must) wear much the same clothing all year round, just throwing a coat over it in winter. You get from place to place in a climate-controlled car, and the only time that most Americans face the elements is when they choose to do so, for recreational purposes.

In Europe, people more often travel by public transport and on foot, so nature is a force to be reckoned with. Trains are usually heated, but the platform you stand on to wait for them is exposed and windy. Milan’s Central Station is made up of huge volumes of space, impossible to heat and bitingly cold in winter (though pleasantly cool in summer). Even the underground metro stations, with a wind howling down the tunnels, can be miserable in cold weather – and the trains surprisingly hot when packed with sweaty bodies at any time of year.

Hence our seasonal vulnerabilities. This year, the cambio di stagione got me with a vengeance: no mere sniffle, but full-on bronchitis. I must be becoming Italian.

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Trainwriting

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Visit the new gallery here.

One that got away: I didn’t get a picture of it, but a few months ago, coming into Milan’s Central Station, I saw a train engine on which someone had scrawled: “Sex is boring” (in English). Poor dear. Must be doing something wrong.

Graffiti-ers in Italy are called “writers” (using the English word). They often decorate the commuter trains. Which look better this way, really.

One artist added this motto: “Colora et labora” – paint and work).

The lower-quality photos were taken with my cellphone, during the time that my digital camera wasn’t working.

Too much window coverage on these (above and below).

Italian train graffiti

my full collection of train graffiti

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Reflections on Travelling in Italy

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One impression I had of both France and Spain, at least the parts we were in, is that many commercial districts look somewhat seedier than similar areas in Italy. I can’t quite put my finger on why. Shop signs seem more garish, and sometimes worse maintained (fading paint, etc.), and shop windows often look cluttered and dusty. Somehow, even the smallest Italian shop usually presents a more pleasing face to the world, and even the cheap shops don’t look cheap.

In Italy window-dressing is an art, with the more expensive shops hiring specifically-trained people to do it. How do even the smallest shops manage to look so good? My guess is that there is some innate Italian sense of design, nurtured by the stylish and elegant environment in which most shops find themselves – if your competition looks good, you’d better look good, too.

Italy also spoils you for being a tourist anywhere else. There is very little tourist crap in 99% of Italy, the glaring exceptions being Florence, Venice, and some parts of Rome. Everywhere else in the world you can expect to see stall after stall of statuettes, t-shirts, ash trays, etc. with depictions of local famous monuments – probably all of it manufactured in China.

There are also few tourist trap restaurants in Italy (with the exceptions noted above). And, even in those, the food is usually decent – I suspect because no self-respecting Italian could bear to serve really bad food, no matter how ignorant the clientele.

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