The road we live on (in Lecco, Italy) is very narrow, especially when a bus and a truck are trying to use it at the same time!
Category Archives: Italy
Commuting – Daily Train Travel in Italy
A few people wrote to commiserate over my long commute from Lecco to Milan and back. Most of the time, I actually don’t mind it. In the mornings I’m able to get some thinking done, and can work on my new office laptop. The evening commute is a good time to decompress between the stresses of the office and those awaiting me at home.
I have an iPod now, Ross’ hand-me-down since she used her Easter money from her nonna to buy herself a bigger and fancier one – 15 GB of music wasn’t enough for her. Given the problems with the old iPod, I was very reluctant for her to buy a new one, but the new one so far is working fine, and even the old one works more reliably using the USB 2 cable that came with the new one.
I saw somewhere online that someone wrote a university paper bemoaning the notion that iPods cause people to use music only as a soundtrack to whatever else they’re doing, thus debasing the music: if you can’t pay full attention to it, you aren’t appreciating it properly.
That may be true for some people, but that’s not how I use the iPod. I don’t usually listen to music while doing intellectual tasks, as I find it too distracting, and I rarely have time to sit around and just listen to the stereo in the taverna (den), so about the only time I could listen to music was in the car (not an ideal environment, our noisy old Fiat). With the iPod, I can sit on the train and watch the scenery go by, and really listen for the first time in years.
Music purists also bemoan the low quality of the MP3 compression format, but it’s good enough that, with the iPod “earbuds” stuck right into my head, I’m hearing nuances that I never noticed in years of listening to these same songs.
The iPod is also useful for drowning out everyone else on the train. Italians talk endlessly, loudly, and not necessarily just to people they know. Sometimes I overhear amusing things, but sometimes it just gets on my nerves. And the loudest voices are often the most grating ones, and the least worth hearing…
Jul 5, 2005
Maybe I spoke too soon when I said that commuting into Milan daily isn’t so bad. It’s summer now, when commuting can be absolute hell.
The trains I take in the morning are usually air-conditioned – not even necessary at that time of day. However, for some unfathomable reason, no matter what train I take in the afternoon/evening, the A/C is intermittent at best, and a closed-up metal train car quickly becomes a sauna. Most of the time trains are moving, so the logical solution would be to open the windows. Ah, but then we have to contend with the dreaded colpo d’aria. Many Italians are convinced that sitting in a draft can be fatal. So when the train is finally rocking along and a nice breeze is blowing in, someone is bound to close the window. Next time this happens, I think I’ll tell them: “You are at far less risk of dying from the colpo d’aria than from me killing you right this minute.”
During one trip last week, I was moving along the train when I saw a woman sitting on one of the fold-down seats in the train’s entryway, with a thoroughly miserable-looking child. These areas are closed off from the train compartments by doors, so when the outer doors are shut, they become airless little boxes. And there she sat, sweating. As I opened the door to go through to the next compartment, someone called to the woman to come and sit with them. All the windows were open and the compartment was delightfully cool. “Oh, no,” she responded. “As long as those windows are open, I’m not coming in there. Michele [the little boy] will be sick tomorrow.” More likely Michele fainted ten minutes later from heat prostration.
- All about Italian Trains
In Loco Parentis: Supervising School Trips in Italy
I wrote earlier about the traditional gita scolastica (school trip) which Italian kids take every year throughout their school careers.
This year Ross’ class, along with another class, took a three-day trip to Arezzo (the town in Tuscany where Life is Beautiful was filmed), accompanied by their three favorite teachers. During the day they visited cultural and educational sites, such as a museum of diaries. The evenings, however, became a problem. They couldn’t stay in the hotel, because the hotel owners complained that they were noisy and disturbed other guests (what did they expect when they booked in 50 teenagers?!?). So the kids roamed the town until they found a bar they liked, where they settled in and had drinks. Yes, alcoholic ones.
This isn’t in the least surprising: 15-year-olds are routinely served alcohol in Italian bars, and most of them handle it maturely. But I was surprised when Ross told me that the teachers were with them, also drinking, and everyone got a bit tiddly. I was amused to contemplate the probable results had this happened in the US: arrests and lawsuits for the teachers, and a press siege of the town and the school, with interviews with outraged parents, church leaders, and (especially!) politicians, until some other tempest in a teacup came along to distract the media’s attention.
But it seems to me that the teachers did the right thing: they were with the kids every minute of the evening, on hand in case of trouble. Although most Italian teens aren’t interested in binge drinking, the presence of the teachers undoubtedly curbed anybody who might have been so inclined. Relaxing and enjoying together with the kids, however, their disciplinary presence was low-key, so none of the kids felt any need to sneak away and get into trouble elsewhere. Most of the kids’ parents would have done exactly the same, so the teachers were truly acting “in loco parentis.” It’s amazing how well society can work when you trust to common sense and civility instead of trying to legislate everything.
Meanwhile, America continues to go to the opposite extreme. Trying to drown out distracting noise at the office the other day, I thought I’d listen to some online radio, and chose KGSR, a cool station that John introduced me to in Austin. It was morning news time in Texas, no cure for my distraction problem, especially when the top news item was that the Texas state congress had just passed a law banning “sexually suggestive” cheerleading routines (is there any other kind?) in high schools, and authorizing the Texas Education Agency to “punish” schools that allow such. Many Texans are wondering why their legislature doesn’t concentrate on more urgent and important matters.
Texas does have a common-sense approach to kids and alcohol. Although the drinking age in Texas is 21, as in every other US state, kids can go anywhere and do anything WITH their parents. Ross was allowed to accompany me (and her uncle Ian) into a tapas bar in Austin, and was even given complimentary Valentine’s Day champagne, since I am obviously her mother, and I gave permission.
It. Figures: Dealing with Numbers in Another Language
I suspect that most people, no matter how well they speak a foreign language, find it difficult to deal with numbers in other than their native tongue. I’ve noticed many times that someone has asked me to give them numbers in their own language, “because it’s easier.” I’m no different: if I have to write down a phone number, I prefer to have it recited to me in English.
For starters, Italians have a completely different way of speaking numbers than Americans. Suppose you were reciting out loud the (fictitious) Washington phone number: (202) 123 4567. Most Americans would say: “two oh two, one two three, four five six seven.” Many Italians would say the Italian equivalent of: “Two hundred two, one hundred twenty-three, forty five, sixty seven.” Or, even more confusingly, they will break up the seven-digit number differently than Americans do and come out with: “Two hundred two, twelve, thirty four, five hundred sixty seven.”
Americans do use hundreds and thousands in phone numbers where they are round numbers, e.g. a toll-free number might be given as “one eight hundred four five five three thousand.”
Saying hundreds (never thousands) is more efficient in Italian than English, because the Italian for hundred is “cento”, and you don’t need to say “one” when there’s only one hundred. So “cento ventisette” (127) is quicker to say than “one hundred and twenty seven.” (Yes, we were all taught in grammar school that saying “one hundred AND…” is wrong, but many of us still do it.)
On the other hand, if someone starts saying “cento…” my instinct is to immediately write 100, before I hear that the tens and units columns are also occupied.
What about other kinds of numbers? Take years: the year 1956 is read by English-speakers as “nineteen fifty six” or, if you’re old-fashioned, “nineteen hundred and fifty six.” An Italian would say “mille novecento cinquantasei” (one thousand nine hundred fifty six) – twice as many syllables.
And then there’s the matter of dates. Americans write and say “April 25th, 2005,” or 4/25/05. Italians write and say “25 Aprile 2005” (venticinque aprile, due mila cinque – note that there’s no ordinal: it’s twenty-five, not 25th) or 25/4/05. Most of the rest of the world also abbreviates dates in the day/month/year format. Having lived all over the world, I can never remember which style is used where, so I’m always messing up forms that require me to fill in a date.
The Papal Funeral Bash
I’m not going to say much about this; I wasn’t there, and ignored it as far as possible. The only footage I actually watched was on the Daily Show. But I do have a few items:
Early last week, I was riding the bus down to Lecco, at my usual time when it’s full of schoolkids. One girl was on her cellphone. “She only goes to mass ogni morte di papa!” she exclaimed, completely without irony, –nd now she wants to go to the funeral!”
Indeed, many of the Italians who traveled to Rome for the funeral probably don’t go regularly to Mass. I won’t presume to comment on why they went to the Pope’s funeral, except that Ross told me that some of her peers came back with cellphone photos of themselves drinking Limoncello (a strong lemon liqueur) in Piazza San Pietro.
I do know a number of serious Catholics – those who truly believe and practice Christianity, e.g., doing volunteer work. Interestingly, none of them went to Rome, and all were nonplussed by the outpouring of whatever this was, and disconcerted by the yells of “Santo subito!” (“Make him a saint immediately!”) As far as I know, it’s not in the church canons to saint somebody just because he was popular.
Rome rose magnificently to the occasion, managing to keep things in order and take care of the crush of people. Every cellphone in Italy received messages from the Protezione Civile (“Civil Protection” – the government emergency-response organization). The first read: “If you go to Rome to pay homage to the Pope, use mass transit and be prepared for organized but very long lines. Hot by day and cool at night. For information, listen to Isoradio [public information radio, mostly used for traffic warnings] 103.3.”
The second message said: “Due to enormous turnout, from Wednesday at 10 pm access is closed to the lines to salute the Pope. Friday for the funeral traffic will be stopped in Rome. The area of San Pietro is full. Large screens will be in the piazzas and at Torvergata” (an area outside Rome where the final rush of pilgrims was told to stop when the city couldn’t take any more).
My friend Alice Twain then sent her own message: “Protezione Civile: Before leaving for Rome, remember to turn off the gas, close the shutters, and water the plants.”
photo above: April 1, 2005 – the Papal Deathwatch. A TV transmission truck (belonging to RAI, Italian state television) parked outside the headquarters of Avvenire, Italy’s Catholic daily newspaper. The vultures are circling…
