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Shotgun Wedding 4: Justice of the Peace

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I took a charter flight to Rome, full of Italians who had been on safari vacations in Tanzania and Kenya. I loved flying over Africa, looking down on the Sahara, a vast expanse of sand with some mysterious geographical features that I couldn’t identify. Then we flew over the Mediterranean. The Kenyan crew spoke no Italian, most of the passengers spoke no English. A steward asked me to make an announcement, in Italian, when we entered Italian airspace over Reggio Calabria. I didn’t speak much Italian at the time, so he had picked the one person on the plane incompetent for the task! Someone else was found to make the announcement, and a cheer went up from all the passengers. We had to circle Rome for a while, which was fun, as Rome has so many monuments that are easily identified from the air.

Enrico was thrilled to have me home safe with him, and the whole family was happy that I was pregnant. I had been a bit worried about this, since Enrico and I were not yet married. I had asked him on the phone how his family reacted when he had called them with the news. “My father was silent for a moment, then said ‘Benissimo!’ My brother said: ‘You just told me a few weeks ago that you’re getting married, now you’re pregnant. What next? You’re getting divorced?’ ”

Enrico’s grandmother was also thrilled at the prospect of her first great-grandchild. At family meals she would insist that I drink a glass of red wine: “It fortifies the blood.”

We worried that the baby might have been affected by the various vaccinations and preventive medicines I had taken for travel in Africa. Enrico found a birth defects hotline in the US which registered statistics and tried to correlate defects with exposure to various substances. They had no data to show any problems with the medicines I’d taken. After Ross was born they called again to see how she was, and were happy to add good news to their database: no defects whatsoever. Long before birth, Ross had already proved that she was robust: if bouncing around in a Land Rover in the Ngorongoro Crater didn’t cause a miscarriage, NOTHING was going to dislodge that baby. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

We spent a pleasant Christmas vacation with Enrico’s family and friends in Rome and other parts of central Italy. As a mother-to-be, I was pampered and spoiled by everybody, a unique experience in my life to date, which I enjoyed very much. (Expectant mothers: Enjoy any pampering you can get, while it lasts: after the baby is born, for the rest of your life, YOU will be expected to take care of EVERYBODY. Time off will be given only for hospital stays.)

In January I went back to Virginia (near DC) and resumed work, assuming that we would stick to our original plan: I would give up my job and move to New Haven (where Enrico was in grad school at Yale) in time for our late-May wedding party.

However, I needed health insurance (like millions of Americans, I did not have any, and the startup company I worked for was too small to offer it). Enrico was on the Yale health plan, and I could be, too, as soon as we were married. So I took a long weekend in mid-January to go to New Haven and get hitched.

We went to City Hall and got the papers, including a form for a required blood test (for syphilis, I believe). We found someplace nearby to do that quickly, while we filled in the marriage license, which had to be witnessed and signed by a Justice of the Peace. We had asked at City Hall where we could find one, and they gave us an address nearby.

The place proved to be the parole office, headed by a little old Italian-American woman of third-generation Amalfitani descent. Her waiting room was filled with rough-looking parolees, and clearly our request to be married was unusual for her. Overcome by sentiment, and fraternal pride at this handsome young Italian man with his glowingly pregnant bride-to-be, she made us promise never to divorce. Her two secretaries were called in as witnesses, all three of them sniffling at the romance of it all.

  1. The Italian Proposal
  2. Tanzania Surprise
  3. Coca-Cola, and an Ostrich
  4. Justice of the Peace

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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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American culture

Freakin’ at The Freakers’ Ball

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San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair

A few years ago, a friend took me to San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair, “the world’s largest leather event.” No, they’re not selling purses. The Fair is the culmination of Leather Week, “a seven-day celebration of all things leather and kink! Each year, the week before Folsom Street Fair is filled with motorcycle rides, the Leather Walk, special events, sex parties and other fun activities.” (quote)

I knew what I was getting into, and I’m not easily shocked by anything consenting adults want to do or have done to them. Some other tourists, however, may have been misled by the mayor’s welcome letter, in a brochure handed out all over town, describing this as a “family event.” Uh, Addams Family event, maybe. I did see a few families of mild-mannered middle-American tourists, looking very lost and confused at the Fair.

For me, it was weird, wild, and fun. As you can see in photos at the above-linked sites, it’s a sort of S&M carnival and parade, with people wandering around in various states of undress, and the bits that are covered are generally covered with leather. As a straight woman, I can enjoy crowds of gay men – more often than not, they’ve got bodies well worth leering at, and I don’t have to worry about them leering back (not at me, anyway).

In the context, I could understand the profusion of leather chaps (like cowboys wear, except that real cowboys wear trousers under them), chains, etc. Given the “hellfire” theme of many of the S&M clubs represented, I could also understand the demon costumes: huge leather bat wings, horns, and tails. Some people wore elaborate leather masks like gargoyle heads, others more standard S&M face-covering masks with zippers and chains, and studded leather collars and leashes.

One costume left me completely puzzled. This person’s head was skillfully made up, wig and all, to look like one of the dancers from “Cats.” But his or her (I couldn’t tell) blubbery, barrel-shaped body was covered from neck to toe in a bright purple rubber jumpsuit. Sado-masocats?

There were participatory events, but I declined to be spanked, especially in public. I simply enjoyed watching the sea of leather-clad humanity flow by. Part of the amusement for me was running into people I knew who did not at all expect to seeme there. Nor I them. One colleague caught me completely by surprise. “Not wearing your usual buttoned-down look today,” was all I could think of to say.

*article title from a song by Shel Silverstein:

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Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia