Category Archives: Italy

Italy travel

The Historic Villas of Bergamo

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Italy, like England, has its share of stately homes, and of owners who can’t afford to maintain them. So some clever person came up with the idea to open to the public some of the historic villas of Bergamo, for a limited time. None of these places is so amazing as to entice a regular flow of visitors, but the three (out of a possible five) that we saw were interesting enough to merit a Sunday afternoon visit.

The noble families who built, decorated, and redecorated these places were not among Italy’s most famous (and famously wealthy) families; their funds often ran short of their ambitions. At Palazzo Terzi, we were invited to admire the imposing fireplace in the main reception room. About four meters high, it featured huge stone lions supporting a massive mantel, surmounted by a shield flanked by female figures. The guide helpfully pointed out that the bottom section was marble, but the top was of molded and carved plaster: “You’d never notice the difference, except that the plaster is cracked in places.”

All three villas were richly decorated with paintings on the walls and ceilings, often with clever tromp l’oeil effects, to make ceilings look higher and walls more intricate than they really are. Palazzo Moroni’s decoration includes a series of allegorical paintings illustrating the virtues a noble family should have, as dictated by a local bishop: antiquity, riches, dignity, valor, knowledge, nobility of blood and heart, sanctity, courage, and luck. The Moroni family crest features the mulberry tree, because the family had made its money (and consequently been raised to nobility) growing silkworms for the Italian silk industry.

Palazzo Moroni also houses a well-known painting, The Knight in Pink, by Giovan Battista Moroni. The guide pointed out that the painting includes a Latin tag which translates as: “Better the second than the first.” No one is sure whether this refers to the knight’s wives, or life experiences in general.

A tomb in Casa Palma Camozzi Vertova gave pause for reflection. “This tomb contains a certain de Augustis, buried in the 15th century” explained the guide (as we could also see from the inscription). “No one knows who he was.” So much for carving your name in marble for posterity.

photo at top: courtyard of Palazzo Terzi

gallery of all the photos I took in Bergamo that day

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Italian culture, Italian education

School “Mortality” in Italy

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Today is the last day of school (in Lombardia). Making the local headlines yesterday was a 14-year-old girl who threw herself off a bridge, because she knew she would fail her first year of high school. Her reaction is both extreme and unusual, because failing one or more years of high school – any high school – is common in Italy, and doesn’t carry much stigma. Ross estimates that 8 or 9 of her class of 28 (including herself) are likely to flunk.

Some likely reasons for this high failure rate (or mortalita’ scolastica – “school mortality,” as it’s called) include:

Between a heavy curriculum and often-incompetent teachers, students are left to make their own way through reams of material covered badly, if at all, in class. Sometimes they are even expected to study and understand a new topic on their own, before any mention is made of it in class. The lucky ones have parents who can help them, and/or can afford to pay outside tutors for help in one or more subjects. These tutors are usually teachers themselves, either just starting out (and lacking, as yet, a permanent position), or retired, or teaching at other schools. I am tempted to wonder whether the problems outlined above are wilfully ignored because they provide extra income (tax-free, under the table) for otherwise underemployed and underpaid teachers.

Even for the kids bright enough to get through it all on their own, 34 hours a week in the classroom, plus homework, is a lot of studying. And it’s exhausting for parents to come home from their own jobs and then have to spend an hour or two getting their heads around academic subjects they haven’t touched in years, in order to help their children with homework.

No wonder we’re all completely burned out. Today’s the last day of school. All the kids will be doing something to celebrate the end of a gruelling year, whether they passed or not. We parents deserve a pat on the back as well, for all OUR hard work. In fact, we deserve a party. But I’m too tired to organize one right now.

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Jul 5, 2004

Ross did manage to pass her first year of high school, with three “academic debits.” This means that she has lots of homework to do over the summer, and by early September must be ready to prove to her teachers that she has done it. She’s very busy at theatre camp in the US for six weeks now, so August is going to be a hell of homework and nagging for all of us…

next: private school

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Italian culture, Italian food

The Family That Eats Together

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The other night I attended a party of Americans, with their Italian significant others and families. One American remarked that the kids present were amazingly polite, well-spoken, and self-possessed, compared with American kids of the same ages. He was right, but I hadn’t particularly noticed, because it’s what I’ve grown to expect.

I have written before about the brattiness of many young Italian kids, but I have also long observed that, by the time they reach puberty, most Italian kids are very civilized in adult company and can hold their own in adult conversations. This seems to be achieved without much discipline when the kids are younger, a noticeable difference from the US, where I have seen parents literally beating young kids into submission, and yet those same kids are not much fun to have dinner with when they’re teenagers.

It seems that Italian families work more by example than overt discipline. Most families have at least one meal together a day, usually a leisurely one. With so much exposure to adult company, the kids naturally absorb good table manners, conversation skills, and healthy eating habits (assuming that those things are present in the family, as they usually are).

Kids also learn at home to drink like responsible adults. It’s very normal to begin sampling wine with meals from an early age, and even to be offered it in restaurants (if the parents are drinking any) from age 13 or so. By law, kids can drink in bars or buy alcohol from age 16; it’s not unusual for high school kids to spend a Saturday evening hanging out in a bar drinking beer, just like college kids do in the States.

In spite of the easy availability, most Italian young people don’t binge drink the way Americans do – partly, I suspect, because it doesn’t carry the thrill of illicit behavior. So you rarely see anyone, young or old, drunk in public – that’s not considered cool in Italy, even among teenagers.

related article: The Family That Eats (and Drinks, and Talks) Together

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Italian culture

Macho Animals …with Artificial Testicles

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My friend Sara runs the Prevent a Litter Coalition, an American charity promoting spaying and neutering of pets, to prevent unwanted litters of puppies and kittens being born and (often) abandoned, abused, or euthanized because shelters cannot find good homes for them.

From Sara I learned about Neuticles, fake testicles for neutered pets – so that your gelded male pet can look as macho as ever, even if he acts like a pussy(cat). I find the whole idea ludicrous, but apparently the prospect of a ball-less pet is a psychological barrier to neutering for many pet owners, especially men.

This is probably a factor in the low incidence of neutering of Italian pets. Some parts of Italy, especially Rome, have famously large populations of feral cats. These are fed by “cat ladies,” some of whom are reputed to lure cats with food, capture them, and whisk them off to be neutered (though I doubt that many of these retired ladies could actually afford the cost). This supposed practice is viewed with horror by Italian men, who feel an all-too-keen vicarious sympathy with the ex-tom cats. (These are the same men who superstitiously touch their own testicles when they see a nun, to ward off bad luck; I suppose a woman who can do without men is a symbolic threat to all manhood.)

A few years ago, one of the biggest celebrities in Italy was Varenne, a champion trotting horse. His exploits on the track endeared him to many Italians who knew little about horses or racing. They were sorry to see him retire to the stud farm at age seven, but contented themselves with imagining their idol happily ensconced in a harem of mares.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works for champion studs. The fans were dismayed to learn that Varenne would not have any actual contact with mares; like many stud stallions, he mounts a dummy, from which his sperm is collected and divided up, each dose thus being stretched to inseminate up to ten mares (if I remember correctly), at a cost of 60,000 euros each.

There was a popular uproar about Varenne’s dismal fate. After all those years of thrilling the public, surely he deserved a few real thrills himself? Varenne’s owner conceded that the stallion could have a companion mare, with whom he would actually be allowed to have sex from time to time. But the owner soon backpedaled, claiming that it would be dangerous for a stallion accustomed to the dummy to mate with a real mare: either or both of the parties might get hurt. The more likely pain would have been to the owner’s bankroll: each of Varenne’s authentic sexual experiences would have cost 600,000 euros – no horse’s sex life is worth that much, even in Italy.

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Italian culture, Italian language

Italian Law and Naming Your Baby

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above: “What were they thinking?” department: This monument to those fallen in WWI in the Lake Como town of Gravedona shows someone whose parents named him “Troppotardi” – “too late”.

An article in Il Corriere della Sera points out that Italian law aims to prevent children being given “ridiculous, shameful, or embarrassing” names by their parents.

The official whose job it is to decide these things (the Public Prosecutor of the Commune where the birth is registered) sometimes has to sort out perplexing problems, such as whether to allow an Italian child to be given an American name taken from a soap opera. Good question. The other day I heard a mother in Lecco calling her small daughter Karen. She pronounced it CAHR-en – not ugly, but strange-sounding to both English and Italian speakers.

The article also mentions that it is illegal to give masculine names to females and vice-versa, which has stymied some parents who wanted to name their daughters Andrea. Pronounced an-DRAY-uh in Italian, it’s a masculine name, the equivalent of Andrew. In English it’s pronounced ANN-dree-uh, and is feminine.

An Italian colleague who moved to California discovered just how much trouble this can cause. He made a health insurance claim for a decidedly male complaint. When the check didn’t arrive, he called the insurance company to inquire. “This is obviously a fraudulent claim,” they told him nastily. “How can someone named ANN-drea have a prostate problem?”

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