Thoughts on La Vita Italiana
I thought to give a little bit of space to explore what I loved about living in Italy, and what I’d enjoy about going back there. It’s easy when you live in a certain place to become overwhelmed by the challenges and negative aspects about living there, and Italy has recently come in for some really bad press. So here are some of the things I particularly remember about living la vita italiana. 
1. L’aperitivo. Saturday evenings, at around six o’clock, we often made our way to the passiagata (seaside promenade) in Viareggio to partake of this unique and useful Italian meal. Dinner proper isn’t until 8pm (9pm in the summertime) and so, as a Brit, by late afternoon my stomach was beginning to growl. L’aperitivo can be as simple as a few nibbles and a glass of wine in a local bar, but I enjoyed going to a restaurant which laid out an extensive hot buffet, where for €8 one could buy a glass of decent wine and munch happily on hot couscous, pasta salad, bread, various dips and cheese and other miniature culinary creations. Workers in London gather at the pub after work for a pint, and conversation about the football; workers in Italy gather at the bar for an aperitivo and conversation about the football.
2. Il motorino. In England, mopeds are characteristically driven by the elderly. In Italy, mopeds are driven by absurdly cool, ridiculously well-dressed teenagers with heavily made-up girls sitting behind them, and preferably without a helmet. Although Marco and I did once try to drive a motorino up the side of a mountain to his grandparents’ house: Needless to say, I got off and walked, considerably faster than the motorino was going. Marco’s Vespa is still in the mail.
3. Lo stile. Fashion is not an optional pastime for the average Italian. When I first met Marco, he was wearing a long, forest-green trenchcoat, a silk scarf, sunglasses and very nice shoes. He looked, in a word, Italian. Right now he varies his wardrobe; he has an Alexander McQueen sweater (which he loves), but loafs around in a Nike tracksuit and striped socks. Italians aren’t just fashionable; they are ardent style individualists who will even slob around in style. When I first moved from London to Italy, I found that Marco’s family and friends started to give me clothes, large binbags of them. At first I was offended and embarressed – did they really think I couldn’t dress myself? And then I realised that fashion is one of the pre-eminent Italian love languages, and, besides which, I was getting free clothes.
4. Andare al ristorante. Something we did a lot, the first time I came over to visit Marco in his homeland. Food is also a preoccupation for Italians, to the extent that life really is the interlude between meals, which are large, and taken with as many people as possible. Going out to a restaurant is, therefore, not just a special occasion incidence but a part of weekly life. We often went out to our “family” pizzeria (44′ Parallelo); not that they own it, but family members have been working there for years, and it becomes the default restaurant when no one has any other ideas; the pizzas are sublime, thin and crispy and stretchy and delicious. Marco’s favourite is prosciutto crudo and marscapone, which is sweet and smoky and rich, like a pizza and a dessert all in one. Nom, nom nom.
5. Speaking of which, I have to mention prosciutto crudo and real focaccia bread, two of the best reasons to go to Italy. You may have these products on your supermarket shelves, but I can guarantee they are nothing like the extremely thin, delicate prosciutto ham one finds in a local macellaio, or the delightfully olivey, salty taste of warm focaccia. So unhealthy, it makes me wonder about the virtues of the “mediterranean diet.”
6. La famiglia. My experience of Italian life is that, while a tourist in a hotel might sometimes find Italians surprisingly standoffish, once you’ve been accepted as a family guest, nothing is too much trouble. If you’re staying with a family (as opposed to a family guesthouse), any suggestion of payment is usually quite offensive; they have an extremely high value for hospitality and will open their table to you without so much as blinking. It can be a little stifling at times, but family really, really matters, and if you’re staying in my house you’re part of the family, and that’s that. Oh, and I’ll feed you until you can’t move.
7. La campagna. Not to do with camping, although my family did visit us in Italy a couple of summers ago, and spent the week in a tent in Viareggio, experiencing the variety of summer weather available in Versilia (brilliant sunshine, violent rainstorms, nothing in between). We lived in a small town nestled at the foot of some very green mountains, a few miles inland. It’s a landscape that inspired the resident composer Puccini while he was writing his most famous operas. Within walking distance was the beautiful Lake Massaciuccoli (we had our wedding reception at a restaurant on the shore), undulating Tuscan fields broken by picturesque, russet-coloured houses and Italian cypress trees, yes, like you see in every $5 print of Tuscany. It was like living inside a picture postcard.
8. L’assurdità. Italians know that various parts of their culture and ridiculous bureaucracy are frustratingly difficult, and that bloody-mindedness is pretty much a national trait. But they are open about their own foibles, just as they were about Berlusconi’s, but they still kept voting him in, until Merkel and Sarkozy voted him out. So they seem to gently mock themselves, as one of the oldest, most venerable, most extravagant and stubborn cultures in Europe, and if you’re not prepared to put up with it, well, you can go and live in Germany and drink German wine. It’s endearing, in some ways, and certainly makes an otherwise oppressively difficult civic system almost bearable.
That’s it for now, and although in many ways I’m glad to be somewhere as beautiful and creatively inspiring as California, we do miss Italy. Marco has his menu planned out for the next time he’s in Italy. I saw Disney’s Cars 2 the other day, and found it delightful when one character, on entering an Italian piazza (in a world where everyone is a car), announcing, “It’s amazing, they have all the same ingredients we do at home… but everything tastes so good!”
