January 10, 2000

Here are a few thoughts from my sojourn in Italy and trip to Paris

Many people think a state of anarchy would be an uncivilized, an every man for himself blood fest. Not true. Italy is an anarchy and they get along just fine. Oh, they do have a government but it’s has been exiled in Rome. As Lord Byron said, “There is, in fact, no law or government at all; and it is wonderful how well things go on without them.” You see Italy is really three countries: the North - which is very industrial and efficient, by Italian standards; the South which is agrarian, apathetic and unorganized and Rome (Roma) which doesn’t want to have anything to do with either.

(Things I miss about the United States: Britan has fish and chips, France has cheese and baguettes, Italy has cappuccino and cornetto - croissant - but only in America have I found penut butter and jelly. The day after arriving in Cary I had my legendary PnJ with chocolate-chip cookies for breakfast, lunch and dinner and then breakfast the next morn. I have since cut back to only two meals of PnJ a day.)

In America we have a two and a half party system - Republicans, Democrats and everyone else. In Italy they have fifty-plus parties and none of them have anything near a majority. Since WWII they have had 57 changes in leadership - the most in Europe. At present they don’t even have a real leader. (It is too complicated to explain and I don’t think even the politicians understand what is going on though that seems to be the case with politicians world wide.) [Pre-press note: Italy elected a new president a few days ago. He promised reform in the election process and to strengthen the economy. Translation: Nothing is going to change except that the economy will continue to head south.]

“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” -Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), French general, president. Quoted in: Newsweek (New York, 1 Oct. 1962).

[Things I’ll miss about Europe: public transportation is fast, convenient and affordable.]

Italians are nuts about steps. I have never seen such elaborate steps leading up to so many overwhelmingly ordinary buildings. I think the reason they have such elaborate steps is this: they start out with grand plans for a stupendous building, they get about as far as the steps and realize it was a lot harder than they planned and finish up with some generic design. Either that or they run out of money and have to skimp on the rest of the building, probably a combination of the two. In fact Italy probably has more incomplete buildings than any other country in the West. Come to think of it I have not seen a new building since I’ve been here. New means that the crubling walls have been reinforced and painted. Here in America I think there is a law that you have to finish what you start or is that just a way of life. Whatever it is we should try to bottle it and export it to the rest of the world. The only thing America doesn’t finish is wars. If we did finish our wars then there would be more than double the current number of states and the countries of Western Europe would be called Ameropa.

“As a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and . . . Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards.” -Mark Twain

(I miss speed and space. In America everything happens much faster and on a much grander scale.)

In Rome (Roma) there is a square - it’s really a rectangle as are all the other “squares” - called “Campo De’ Fiori” or in English “Field of Flowers”. What this square is known for, other than flowers, is a statue of Giordano Bruno. Gio, as his friends called him, was a freethinker. More specifically, he was a freethinker during the late 16th century, long before freethinking had come into fashion. In fact he was so far ahead of his time that a group of men collectively know as “The Inquisition” decided to put him out of his. (Read it again and it will make since.) In keeping with the sentiment that “Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers” there is a statue of him on the very spot where he was burned to death all those years ago. Considering the nature of Gio’s demise and the Italian infatuation with fountians perhaps a more apposite monument could have been built.

[Walking. European cities are designed so that you can walk to just about everything you need. In l’Aquila I could by groceries, shoes, clothes, a cell phone and catch a movie all within a five minute walk from my apartment.]

One of the most heavenly sounds I have ever heard is that of the pipe organ being played in a cathedral. It is majestic, sublime . . . dare I say? yes I will, rapturous. Last year, during my cathedral tour in France, I was fortunate enough to be in Chartres when they played the organ. Words are insufficient to capture the moment. While I was in Rome one of the many cathedrals I visited was “St. Maria degli Angeli”. Inside is a pipe organ that is roughly three stories tall, very big as organs go. I noticed two men going inside it and thought, “Oh, glorious. I’ll get to hear it played.” As it turned out they were not organists, they were tuners. To be in a cathedral with granite floors, granite walls and a granite ceiling while the organ is being tuned is . . . well, enough to make one more appreciative of the melodious sounds of a catfight. It is the kind of sound that would be the perfect accompaniment to Roseanne Barr’s rendention of the American national anthem.

Hell hath no cacophony like an organ tuned.

What could be more simple than a traffic light - green means go, red means stop and yellow means decision time. The Italians interpretation of traffic signals is just slightly different than ours: green means go slowely and stop in the middle of the intersection; red is a suggestion to stop unless you are in a big hurry and yellow is just a different shade of green. Crosswalks also have a different meaning. The translation of the Italian word for crosswalk is “runway”, as in run-way-fast if your going to cross - “pedestrian” translates as “target”. If you want to get run over a crosswalk is the place to go. Much safer is a major intersection where the traffic is moving much slower.

(Communications. I lived in a house with no Internet, not even a phone and you have to pay for every minute your one the phone. No fixed price for local calls.)

In the U.S. “parking space” means “a place to park” in Italy it means “the place where you are parking”. They just make up parking spaces as the need arises - cathedral steps, sidewalks (where they exist), intersections (see above), crosswalks, ect.

The Roman Forum: you know those landscaping shops that have fountains, benches and statues for sell? Image one on a Sams Club scale. Now set off a real big bomb in the middle, maybe a few of them. That is what the Roman Forum looks like.

[Coffee breaks. In Italy everything is an excuse to take a break and have a coffee and pastry. All of the shops close from about 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. so that they can have a long lunch and a coffee, maybe even a nap.]

I believe this nation should commit itself to the goal of sending a soccer team to Europe and beating the shit out of them before this decade is out. There is no point in letting our children play such an inferior sport to the more traditional - football, basketball, hockey . . . and baseball (that hurt to say) if we aren’t going to beat the rest of the world at it.

(More than anything else I miss “The Big Show”. I can’t wait for them to go international so that they will have “Sports Center” in Britain and finally learn how to spell words that end with “er”.)

“Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers- and in people’s minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.” -Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. America, “Utopia Achieved” (1986; tr. 1988).

For you American males: do you realize that when you catch the gaze of another male you tacitly acknowledge him by noding your head? I don’t know why or even what this acknowledgement represents but it is ubiquitous, in America anyway. Europeans don’t do it, not that I ever noticed. It first occured to me during my stay in Swansea, Wales. That habitual yet subconscious act became a conscious avoidance because the European male would have no idea what I was doing.

While at the Louvre Franca and I saw the “Mona Lisa”. Franca looked at it for a second and then asked me what I thought of it. “Nice floor”, I replied. I know enough about art to know what I like and don’t like. What I don’t like most is portrait paintings followed closely by landscapes. That takes care of a large portion of the Louvre. It took us about 30 seconds to cover the Rembrandt exhibition - walked in looked at the room and walked right back out. Fortunately the Louvre has lots of sculptures - Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, et al. - to occupy an afternoons perusing.

One last thing. For those of you who have not been to Cary, North Carolina let me describe the city this way: it is like a golf course with roads, malls and subdivisions. Every city street is lined with flowers and trees; the grass is cut; bushes pruned. If you can imagine a “pristine” city you can imagine Cary. To move from an average American city to Cary takes some getting used to; to move from a city that has streets that would be considered narrow allies, with almost no grass anywhere and where most of the buildings are more than 200 years old is a culture shock, big time.

Ciao . . . some habbits die hard, dan

Most every American who has not been to Europe thinks the United States is the greatest nation on earth. Those who have been to Europe know that the United States is the greatest. -Dan Osborn