Dreaming In Italian

After the usual long, trying, transatlantic trip scrunched into a seat made for a legless midget (but aided by a sleeping pil)l I spent four less than delightful hours in the Heathrow airport. At least I had plenty of time to change planes. On the flight back I have one hour between planes and the airport seems like the size of some cities. But why worry about the future. When I landed I was greeted by Paolo. The room that I’d arranged wasn’t available until Sunday but I stayed with Paolo for two nights. The first was at his little apartment in Bologna just outside the walls. It was just at the end of summer and was still hot in Bologna, probably above 90 degrees during the day so at night the windows needed to be open and there was a lot of street noise. I didn’t sleep well.

The next day I bought a SIM for my iPhone. It couldn’t have been simpler. After the SIM card was inserted into the phone the guy at the Vodafone store was telling me that I’d have to wait for 2 hours for it to take effect. While we were just finishing things up I showed him the Vodafone symbol on the phone which indicated it was already active. He was a bit astonished and said with enthusiasm “Vodafone e’ il migliore!” Vodafone is the best!

Paolo needed to work that morning so he drove me on his scooter (as distinct from a motorino) to the center of the city. An aside here. What we call a scooter comes in two flavors. The familiar vespa type they call a “motorino”. There’s a larger more powerful and luxurious one that they call a “scooter”. Paolo has the latter and it’s something of a death defying experience to ride with him. Anyway I walked around the city center and did some window shopping. I was really looking for a moka – a stove top expresso maker. I buy one on almost each trip to Italy. I use it while I’m here and then add it to my collection at home. I went to the Bialetti store where I bought last year’s moka but didn’t find anything that inspired me so I’ll keep looking. So I just walked around and window shopped until Paolo was ready to go. Then we went back to his place and traded in the scooter for his little VW SUV and headed to his house in the country near Imola – not too far from Bologna. The agenda was for a little “festa”, a party. I was “stanco morto” (dead tired) so I managed to take a nap. When I woke up it was almost 7:00 when the party was scheduled to start. I heard some music. At first I thought it was coming from the house that is next door and separated by little more than a tall hedge. The music sounded live. A woman was a rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun”. It was a pretty good. After I went downstairs I found that it was indeed live music and that some of the guests were the band. In all there were about 8 or 9 couples in addition to me, Paolo and Cinzia (his partner). All of the men and one of the women (the singer in fact) were amateur pilot friends of Paolo’s. So everyone else ate and drank while the band, consisting of lead electric guitar, electric bass, harmonica player and singer entertained. Cinzia had declared war on the “zanzare”, mosquitos, with chemical weapons prior to the party as well as burning some little coil thingies that give off smoke that heavily discourages those evil little insects. They abound throughout Italy and it was a relief that nobody became dinner for them. The instrumentalists were all quite good and it was a truly fine evening.

Isn’t it nice to have friends in another country?

At least it was not another planet. In fact it was a friend from Italy. Paolo is the first person that I met in Bologna. Actually I had met him on-line before I went to Bologna the first time. I had stumbled across a Facebook page called “The Tandem language learning BOLOGNA ”. I just noticed a very strange thing. There is an almost identical Facebook page with both “language” and “learning” capitalized. But that is not the right one. You too can go there and find people posting for partners to trade expertise in Italian, French, Spanish, German… probably just about everything else. So that’s where I found Paolo. They also have a weekly meeting in Bologna to meet face-to-face. In any case Paolo and I corresponded for while until he seemed to lose interest. However when I wrote and told him that I was coming to Bologna he offered to meet me at the airport and from there we did a bunch of things together on both of my previous trips there.

So now it was my turn to play host. He came to the U.S. with his son Stefano. Stefano has lived all but the first 5 years of his life in Germany with his mother so he speaks German, Italian and English. It was interesting that he speaks Italian with a German accent. In any case they stayed with me for 3 nights. The first full day I played the “Cicerone”. An interesting derivation of that word which translates as tour guide. It seems that in ancient Rome, the man Cicero, a philosopher, linguist, politician and was especially famous for his oratory, especially liked to give tours of the city to visitors. The name became the thing, like Kleenex or Xerox. But, as is often the case, I digress. Stefano in particular wanted to see San Francisco. So we drove over the Bay Bridge, proceeded through the financial district and then through China Town. Next was the North Beach neighborhood, famous for it’s Italian flavor, then through the Marina area and finally crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. On the other side we made a couple of stops for photo opportunities and finally wended our way through Sausalito and back into the city with a stop for lunch in Cow Hollow (Union Street shopping area). After a stop for some ice cream (so sad in comparison to Bologna gelato) we wound our way up to Twin Peaks for the magnificent view of San Francisco while being frozen by the winds there.

The next day was less frenetic. We went to an Italian Meetup, had lunch in Oakland and went to a local sort of street fair called “Art and Soul” in Oakland. I was disappointed in the event. Why pay a bunch of money to enter a street fair where most of the offerings are overpriced and under-quality food? There was some good music but that’s true at a lot of street fairs where no money is required. I did get a priceless photo of Paolo with one of the local singers.

So now it’s back to Bologna for me. I leave for a lengthy visit. I’ll study for at least a month in Bologna and spend some time traveling. A lot of adventures ahead.

You’d probably either need to be Italian or be a serious Italophile to know anything about this person. He is one of the most famous comic Italian actors ever, at least from the previous generation of actors. Now take a deep breath because here comes his formal name: Prince Antonio Focas Flavio Angelo Ducas Comneno De Curtis di Bisanzio Gagliardi. Some with perhaps compromised lung capacity (or memory) also knew him as Antonio De Curtis – a name that can be said in one breath and that he used for himself. He was born in a poor section of Naples as an illegitimate child. The story of this early life is quite amazing and if interested you can find the Wikipedia page about him if you click here.

He was considered a comic genius, sometimes compared to our Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. Not only that but he was a singer, composed songs and wrote acclaimed poetry. He was acting by the time he was 15 and eventually starred in about 100 movies – probably many of them forgettable other than his presence. There are 3 movies on Netflix (DVD only) and I have watched two of them. The first, Toto’ nella Luna, made in 1958 was just silliness that kind of reminded me of a Marx brothers movie. I liked it enough to watch a second one Dov’e’ la Liberta’ (Where is Freedom). I really liked this movie. While it certainly took advantage of Toto’s comic talents it at the same time has serious parts to it. I highly recommend it. There is another one that I now plan to watch “Uccellacci e uccellini” which translates literally as “Bad birds and little birds” but which Netflix lists as “Hawks and Sparrows.”

As with anyone with such a vast body of work there’s a lot of stuff on Youtube although mostly it is without subtitles and is often hard for me to follow. I did find this one short clip which has subtitles but also, unfortunately, poor video quality. Here is Toto’ selling the Trevi Fountain.

Let me know what you think.

Perhaps you’ve always followed the long and twisted tale of Amanda Knox. I’ve now written two blog posts about her. I was unaware of the trial in Umbria when it was actually happening but became intrigued enough to do a substantial amount of research. In the second blog post I went into considerable detail. You can revisit that post by clicking here. Part of the justice system in Italy as well as other countries outside of the U.S. allows appeals by the PROSECUTOR rather than the defense. This was the case when, on appeal and after 4 years of imprisonment, the initial guilty verdict was overturned. So now a new trial has been ordered. Given our domestic sense of justice this seems very strange but those are the rules in Italy so the show must go on. What has repeatedly struck me is the range of feelings provoked by the case. Even in that bastion of seeming sophistication, the New York Times, the comments posted after an article on this Italian judicial ruling were quite something. A number of people feel like I do that she is innocent that the charges were trumped up and the investigatory process was terribly flawed. However others have very strong feelings the other way. I recall one comment in particular which referred to her a a money grubbing whatever because she has an advance on a book soon to be published of , I don’t recall exactly, but 3 or 4 million dollars. What they don’t seem to acknowledge is that her parents used all of their savings and indeed lost a home to pay for her lawyers through the long (and believe me the judicial processes in Italy are LONG) trial and especially the appeal. Add to that that she was imprisoned for 4 years and why would anyone feel that it was unwarranted to recoup something through a book. Also I don’t really understand why the parents of the victim of the murder have been so single minded in their pursuit of Amanda and her Italian boyfriend who was the codefendent. They have someone who is clearly the murderer in jail and perhaps rightly believe that there was someone else involved. Still the evidence in the case really doesn’t support the argument that Amanda and lover were involved. I would be surprised that anything came of the retrial other than to make more clear to the world the glaring flaws in the Italian judicial system. Of course Berlusconi has been able to avoid prosecution through a lot of legal tactics which delay trials until the statute of limitations runs out. I suppose ours is not much better for those those with more money than morals but one would hope for something better.