Italian newspapers are beautiful

What I learn from Italy and Italians isn't confined to the language of that country or the customs of that country.

I learn about everything that fascinates them.

And Italians love art -- all art. What's more, they are fascinated with other cultures.

Here's a gorgeous newspaper spread from Sunday's La Repubblica showing off Japanese-inspired comic art drawn by an Italian artist.

He's made a career out of drawing Manga-style comics that the Japanese swoon over.

Me, too! Che bello.

#ThisisAtlanta -- Kudzu covering street signs

Street signs at an abandoned intersection in southeast Atlanta, covered with kudzu.

This is Atlanta.

What Jeanne will find in Paradiso

It's almost obscene how much joy I derive from reading Italian.

Maybe that's how they can convince high school students and others to study foreign languages.

The foreign words knocking about your head and leaping off your tongue feel so good, it's obscene, dude!

Mommy says (no, not me)

During my recent visit to New Jersey, Mommy says to me: 

“She sent him a mass card and everything.” 

Where 'everything' consists of nothing but appears to be the best possible gift. Whoever my mother is talking about has sent a mass card (to my father, following his hip surgery) and nothing more.

But the one small gesture, the one good deed of sending the card looms large in her head, hence a sentence that to a foreigner might not make any sense. All the woman sent was a mass card. But that now constitutes everything.

What a wonderful way to see the world! Delighting in small things. 

I think that might be my true religion. Hers, too.

What I Can't Resist (Italian book version)

Books about Florence or Florentine sayings, written typically for Italians. Yep, that's something I simply cannot resist buying.

This one combines history, pithy sayings, explanations about Florentine traditions and an extensive glossary.

It also has a word I love on the cover: curiosita'. 'Curiosities,' though we don't really use that word in English. In Italian, there's even the verb 'incuriosire,' which you use when you want to say something has intrigued you (or made you curious, obviously). Yay! I love curiosities, especially of a Florentine nature.

So this is something I'm reading right now, when I have a moment (ahem!). In fact, I've stashed it in the car. So if you see me around Atlanta hunched over a book while stopped at a traffic light, I might just be reading this book.

Let's look at the Food Section...

...Says you-know-who, last Wednesday while we were looking at The New York Times over breakfast, per our usual.

And while listening to NPR on the radio, he says, "She said President Obama, Mommy!"

And, "Mommy do you have power?"

(I think he meant superpowers. No.)

He also said, just once, but still, it was dazzling, "Mommy I want to hear what you have to say."

And, "Which one are you going to have?"

And sometimes when we look at magazines, he'll say, "That's art. And that's art," pointing to pictures of art.

"Look, Mommy, it's the Mona Lisa!"

Down here in Atlanta, there's a saying you'll hear sometimes.

"It ain't braggin' if you done it."

Well, okay, I didn't do anything but I'll brag a little that when Leo and I went to the Atlanta airport last week, he spotted the advertisement in this photo and yelled out, "Look, Mommy, it's the Mona Lisa!"

Unprompted, and while riding the airport train.

Of course, his name is Leonardo.

And while he, in fact, is Leonardo da Atlanta, he is aware of that other Leonardo.

Whose most famous painting, he'll tell you, is in Paris.

Pushy commands you grow to love

Here's one:

"Read it, Mommy," as my son Leo pushes a book in my hand.

Sometimes it's even a book in Italian.

Puglia in Tavola, prose poem in mind

Earlier this week, I took down from the book shelf in the kitchen where we keep the cook books a small volume we bought in Puglia: Puglia in Tavola.

And I opened it up this morning, flipping away from the recipe I had bookmarked to see what else is hidden inside there, and I find names of recipes that read like the seeds of prose poems in Italian.

Words so foreign to me, that they beggar the imagination that they could be Italian (and yet I see they are).

Words like: quagghjariedde and ghiemeridde.

I don't cook. But a recipe book in Italian? A little piece of heaven. Almost as good as a ciambellina.

Lost entry from my Italian trip diary

Back against the wall, eyes staring across the street, staring at the #54 , as if I were trying to memorize the address or the pattern of the iron work above the green door.

No need. My old apartment was at Via dei Serragli, 54.

Really I’m waiting for someone to pass. A short young American girl, in pensiero, looking slightly troubled, walking quickly, all business, coming out of the door.

Or a man with long hair tied into a ponytail at the nape of his neck and with a long stride, making his way down the street.

But those people are gone. They’re now approaching middle age and living in Atlanta. Besides, one of them is the person with her back against the wall, trying to retrace her steps, to figure out how she got there or here (and which is which? Am I here or there?).

I look up the bedroom window, which now has a lovely lace curtain. The door is adorned with a fancier campanile, filled with the names of tenants I don't know. But it’s all more the same than different – thank God.

I Good Mommy, I Good? (Poesia per Leonardo)

A poem for Leo, in honor of his third birthday, and the way his words have thoroughly entered my head and changed the way I hear speech -- forever.

*

“I good, Mommy? I good?”

Another little scrap of remembered conversation with you-know-who

“I good, Mommy? I good?”

The words follow me, from my house in Atlanta to the airport

To the airplane, to Bennington

To my notebook, and ultimately here,

To this poem

“I good, Mommy? I good?”

There’s a desperation in his voice

And I notice: his voice is a weapon, a weapon to break every bit of hardness in me,

Incisive and plaintive and capable of dispelling any notion of motherhood I might have invented

His voice, his plaintive, little words, his insistence on knowing if he’s a good boy or not
The abrupt change in tone, the turning of the head when I suggested, not so gently, that
He needed to be a good boy to gain this or that privilege

All of it, all of it, is conspiring to dismantle every intention of being tough with him.

I’m forced to say without any equivocation, “Yes, Leo. Leo’s a good boy.”

Oh how I want to equivocate, my own penchant for pettiness leaning ever so decisively toward quibbling

But the person asking the question isn’t the boy who climbs out of his crib during a nap or the boy who says no,I don't want to, or the boy who insists on walking where his mother fears he will fall

No, no the boy who asks is another

The boy who asks “I good, Mommy? I good?” is all of human kindness in one little body.

The boy who asks “I good, Mommy? I good?” is all of human yearning in one little body.

The boy who asks “I good, Mommy? I good?” is a far better person than I am or ever will be

The boy who asks “I good, Mommy? I good?” would have had his heart broken if I said anything other than yes.

Wait, did I really just go to Italy?

As I go about my days back in Atlanta, I’m seized every now and again by a sudden realization: I went to Italy last month.

Italy!

I really was there. It was truly amazing, as always. And it’s there waiting for me, whenever I’m ready to go back.

Favorite Italian Spots? Here's One

L'edicola. The newsstand. Still quite central to Italian life. If for no other reason than where, oh where, would you find so many puzzle magazines?

Reason #502 I Love Rome

THIS view. A window into heaven, as it were.

Reason #501 I Love Rome

This view.

And Then We Said Arrivederci

I'll continue to post photos from my Italy trip to the blog but I'll wrap up the story of my trip here.

So here are the numbers.

I spent a mere five days in Italy, including 24 hours in Rome.

My travels came eight years after my last visit to Italy (a thorough and thoroughly enjoyable trip to Puglia), and 10 years after my last visit to Florence.

I walked I would guess a dozen miles or more around the two cities, and spent hundreds of dollars, but not too much shame there since I spent them on the best things in life, and the things I like best – books, gifts for Leo and Mike and meals with friends.

When will I be back? Who can say? My job, as far as I was concerned, was to make the absolute most of my time in Italy. And I did that. As I wrote in my notebook that first afternoon in Rome, while walking through a minor piazza where a man was selling used books from a cart, “It’s already enough.”

I’m glad I was able to stay a few more days. I’d like to go back – tomorrow. Next month. Next year. And sure, I’d like to stay a week, two weeks, two months, maybe five years.

But if anyone out there wants to send me to Florence or Rome or anywhere in Italy for 24 hours, hey, you know where to find me. I’m always ready to hear a flight attendant say, “Benvenuti in Italia,” followed, of course, by a round of applause.

Where To Eat in Florence (the Update)

OK, a long, long time ago I wrote a post about where to eat in Florence. And I'm more than happy to update it now.

Full disclosure, before we go any further: I'm talking about Florence, Italy. Not Florence, S.C. OK, OK, here we go.

I wasn't there very long so I only have a few places to recommend. But I think you will like them. And in an unusual move, they are all places I'd never been before.

Trattoria Cammillo

Don't trust me with recommendations? Va bene. Trust The New York Times, which has reviewed this spot on Borgo San Iacopo very favorably several times. Not enough? OK, Beyonce and Jay Z were there last week. Ci siamo?

It's really your classic old-school trattoria. White table cloths, a touch of fancy, the thought that an important Italian dignitary might be in a corner table. Walls covered with art, the industrial coffee maker in a corner, just inside the door. Waiters in classic service garb. And the food is lovely.

I ate one of the best pasta dishes I've had in a while: paccheri sul coniglio. Paccheri pasta in a stewed rabbit sauce.

Plus a lovely glass of Vino Nobile, which was the "degustazione" of the evening. That was a new one for me.

Alex, my very lovely dining companion, had bistecca alla fiorentina (which you can see above).

Cento Poveri

This is a good, tried and true Florentine trattoria not far from Piazza Santa Maria Novella. Feeling a bit gluttonous (which in Italian sounds much less sinful: golosa), I ordered a plate of pasta: pici al granchio (in photo above). Pici, a type of thick, long pasta with a large piece of crab settled on top and quite delicious, once I'd managed to extricate its essential goodness from its hard shell (like so many other things that come in hard shells).

I also had a really lovely cheese plate.

And I found the prices to be giusti, and despite the location (on Via Palazzuolo) -- really a stone's throw from Tourist Central.

Alle Murate

In some ways you could say this is an odd ball. A former prison that's now really a cultural space as much as it is a restaurant and bar.

I had a plate of prosciutto crudo (which, in Italy, can almost never fail) followed by a lovely salad, plus the company of an even lovelier former roommate, Irene.

Besides what I ate, what's more important is that this place be on your radar as a punto di referimento. There are gallery openings, concerts, lectures, all sorts of cultural activities going on here that merit your attention or really anyone's attention. This week alone, there will be dance performances by Italian, Korean and Japanese artists.

Also: Near my favorite part of Florence: Piazza Sant'Ambrogio.

So, buon appetito!

Rome Notebook (An Italian Walks Into a Bar)

3:30 p.m. May 13, 2015.

I'll call this post: The difference between Rome and Florence: Take One

In a nondescript bar across from the Campidoglio/Monumento Alla Patria, I find a mix of tourists and Romans but the bar remains quintessentially Italian. It should be totally overrun by tourists, it should have no Italian identity left. If it were in Florence in the same kind of location, it would be the worst place to stop for a snack.

An Italian walks in, carrying a motorcycle helmet and wearing a tan fishing-style vest that’s popular among men in Italy. He exchanges one look with the barista, and tutto e’ inteso. Everything is clear.

The look from the barista says, “Oh finally you’re here!” and “What a day we’re having!” The look from the regular – because it’s clear from the first second, the way he walked in, the way he surveyed the bar and looked at the bartender that he’s a regular – says, “Do you see what I’m saying?” and “Can you believe that?” Where both parties know exactly what “that” refers to.

All without uttering a word. A few helpful Italian hand gestures, the jutting out of the chin, an “O!” or two, and everything is clear between these two.

This is the kind of drama that draws me in. It’s the everyday drama of Italy. I eat my schiacchiata with prosciutto crudo and I stare at the two expectantly. Go on. It’s getting interesting.

5 p.m., the same day

I’m on the fifth floor of my tiny, nothing-special hotel, gasping and gaping at a tiny rooftop deck whose view takes in a large, stately cupola and a dozen or more private rooftop decks, some with flowers, some with laundry. All with the majestic silence of Rome from the air, broken only by the neighborhood church bells, chiming out 5 o’ clock.

It’s exactly how I thought it would be. The trip, I mean. If I arrived safe and sound, and at my hotel in fairly decent shape (i.e., slept a few hours on the plane), I’d be quickly satiated, which is to say happy. And I’m not fussy. I don’t need a parade. I only need Rome to be Rome.

That said, I think Rome forgets sometimes it’s Rome (if a city can be said 'to think'. Which it can't. But suspend disbelief for a moment). One tiny, two-second glimpse of the rooftop deck – I'm still climbing the stairs, still tentatively opening the door – and then suddenly an enormous cupola is filling my vision field. I'm on top of the world. Absolutely stunning.

Rome thinks this is normal! Because it is – for Rome.

The Eternal City? Check.

Rome, afternoon, 14 May 2015

Jeanne Shops In Italy (My Top Picks)

OK, here are my favorite purchases from Italy earlier this month:

The coffee cup with the Palazzo Vecchio design. A must-have! Notice the green moka in the background. I couldn't resist. You can never have too many moka coffee pots. And besides as Leo says, "Green is our favorite color, Mommy!"

Placemats. OK, we use a lot of placemats at our house. And it's an everyday way to keep a little bit of Italy in my life.

For the little, future Mario Andretti in your life.

PLUS:
The most incredible tote bag I have ever seen! A tote bag with pithy little sayings about all the wonderful things one should do in one's life and they're all in Italian? Ding ding ding that's a gift for Ciambellina.

And as I mentioned in a previous post, I stocked up on my Elena Ferrante titles. What a twisted book cover this is, no? Well, I suppose, ci mancherebbe. Some of what she writes is a bit twisted.