The Diary Archive

Capodanno - January 2009

There are two occasions when fireworks light the skies of Florence: the feast-day of St John the Baptist, 24 June, and New Year’s Eve.

Pyrotechnics are age-old and were popular for theatre entertainment in Renaissance times, the Medici princes employing engineers to stage the displays. The church employed them for the many important feast days; that of John the Baptist being the only one left; it is totally civilized and beautifully coordinated by the council. Crowds gather along the banks of the Arno river after dark to gaze at the continuous shooting stars of sparks that shower over San Miniato al Monte.

New Year’s Eve, on the other hand, is about as uncivilised as a hooligan raid on a football pitch. No amount of newsreels of lost limbs, exploding factories or burning apartment blocks have stamped out the fun. Sparklers? Never heard of them. A big bang? Acceptable if it is above 200 decibels and therefore capable of splitting the timpani. The run in begins days before, so when a hand grenade is thrown into the road, dash for cover.

On the night itself, on facing a barrage of molotovs and a smoke-screen thick enough to rival the old London pea-soup fog, Spot, our dog, hid behind a tree and refused to budge: ‘I’ve reached the age of fifteen and if it’s mercy-killing you’re after, I’d prefer the injection’. Two hours of friendly persuasion and he made the 200 yards home.

On reflection though, things have got better over the forty odd years I’ve been living here. Years ago, in Rome, New Year’s Eve was an opportunity to rid yourself of the year’s clutter. At the stroke of midnight, anything you could stagger to the window with was chucked into the street to the accompaniment of popping spumante corks, hearty cries of good wishes, and the odd echo of gunshot: armchairs, TV sets, flower pots, the lot.
There was a 50% risk of a puncture if you returned home by car. One uncle resolved this by taking his sons along as skivvies - they walked ahead with brooms, sweeping glass out of his path.

But, I mean, where would you find teenagers who would do that nowadays?

Jean Grundy Fanelli

Santa - December 2008

Both the Christmas tree and Santa Claus are alien to Mediterranean culture. Yet here they are again this December, the first towering above the jacarandas in Palermo’s Politeama square, the second sweating profusely inside his furs as he clangs his bell outside the Pinguino ice cream parlour.

On my way to our local hospital for a routine test I wish it weren’t quite so warm, not only for Santa but for myself too. The Italian National Health Service staggers under the weight of an overload of out-patients and I envisage endless hours of waiting. Sure enough, I find I am the 104th in the scrum to pay the mandatory consultation charge after which, with my fistful of rubber-stamped receipts and authorized referrals, I join the mass of out patients lining the walls of an airless corridor waiting for the specialist.

Glancing out of the window into the midday glare I can see the hospital chapel across the forecourt. Inside will be the traditional presepe or crib. Forget Santa Claus, this is the authentic Sicilian expression of the Nativity, set up every year in homes and peopled by miniature Magi, Holy Family and cattle. Today these are made of plastic in the PRC but enter the sumptuous interiors of Palermo’s great Baroque churches, the gloom heavy with incense and slow-burning candles, and you’ll see the real thing. Here, the shepherds down on one knee at the manger wear expressions of wonder, each of three richly-robed kings carries a different gift, and the folds of Mary’s blue cloak fall gracefully about her. Carved in wood and of great antiquity these marvellous figures are lovingly brought out every Christmastide and placed in their starlit landscape of hills and coursing rivers. Although the crib in the hospital chapel will be nowhere near as beautiful as this it will still bring comfort to many. Which is what matters.

My name is called and I follow the nurse into the surgery where the examination is painlessly and efficiently carried out.

‘Everything fine’ the doctor pronounces, handing me his report.

We wish each other a happy Christmas and I step out into the searing Palermo heat. Santa Claus isn’t on the street any more but on a high stool inside the Pinguino, beard well-pushed up onto his forehead, gorging on a large ice cream.

Gay Marks

Life Sentence - November 2008

You will reach a point in your stay in Italy when you are comfortable with the language. You can chatter away at the market, read Italian detective novels and skim the daily paper. At this point some well meaning friend will ask you to translate something for a friend of a friend who works in advertising or who has set his sights on selling his company’s wares in an English-speaking market. High on self-confidence you will agree. How hard can it be with a nice fat copy of Zingarelli’s Vocabulario della Lingua Italiana (12th edizione) at your side?

I remember well my first translating experience. I dived into the neatly typed sheet of Italian text. I was half way down the page and the first sentence had yet to come to an end. Semi-colons and commas were sprinkled liberally. Their placement seemed to serve as stage directions informing the reader/speaker when to pause for breath and where to shake his fist or stamp his foot indignantly. I had never read anything quite like it. I assumed that it was just the bizarre style of the particular writer. So I broke the long ramble into seven nice English sentences and toned down the indignation. It was, after all, an introduction for a brochure.

Alas this maniacal verbosity was not an isolated case. My husband, the translator, often calls me in to marvel at some mile-long sentence. The last such occasion left me dazed.

“Did you notice? Did you notice,” he crowed, after I had fought my way through the dense thicket of verbiage on the page.

“What?” I asked, still blurry from the prose.

“There was no verb,” he cried.

Indeed the writer of this twelve-line long sentence had neglected to give it that little motor we fondly call a verb.

Patricia Guy

The Darker Side - October 2008

They were the first to express their condolences minutes after my Mother died -- two spivs in sharp suits and lizard-skin shoes, one of them carrying the lugubrious tools of the Italian mortician in an aluminium attaché case, the other a dab hand with a pocket calculator. Instantly alerted to a potential customer by their informant in the Roman hospital, they began their mock sympathetic sales pitch as I sat by Mum's bedside, trying to make sense of the end to her last days of suffering from Alzheimer's.

"Want to transport Mamma back to England, do you?," Maurizio, the salesman, asked. "That's nice. Would you like her to travel by road or by plane? If she goes by road that's 2000 kms, it'll cost you €2000. No, you're right, better by plane, that'll be €1000."

Recalling the grasping British undertakers who buried my father 20 years before, I declined to enter into that kind of discussion. The becchini promised to do everything necessary to prepare Mum for the laying out in the hospital Chapel after dawn. When I arrived in the morgue hours later, however, they had not kept their word. Mum's body was there all right, crumpled under a sheet like a rag doll. But nothing had been done to give her appearance the dignity in death that would make the scene bearable for her young grandchildren or my wife.

A call to Maurizio brought the shifty mortician who dressed Mum, placing a rosary in her hands. The delay, I realised, was a not so subtle suggestion that I should sign on the dotted line to give his boss the commission to arrange the funeral, choice of coffin and its transport to the airport by hearse. As Maurizio began his day's business with a series of calls on his mobile in the chapel, I vowed to get Mum out of his clutches.

On a hot spring week-end in Rome, finding an alternative becchino proved no easy matter. The friendly Irish Father at the Basilica of San Silvestro kindly agreed to arrange a family funeral at short notice but admitted he was more used to celebrating marriages in the beautiful church. Maurizio, meanwhile, told me he was pressing on with obtaining a death certificate from the ASL, the local health authority.

At the Venerable English College, the Rector directed me gently toward the British Consulate. Maurizio called again, a little distraught this time. There had been a deadline for applying for the death certificate that we had missed by a few hours, he explained. In the normal run of things this would have made no odds but an officious bureaucrat at the ASL had alerted the mortuary police that the delay might indicate a suspicious death. The police had raced to the hospital in a van, shoved Mum's body onto a stretcher and sped off with her to the municipal morgue in front of the Verano cemetery where she would undergo a post mortem. I told Maurizio I would hold him accountable for any more surprises with my bare hands.

At last the Consulate gave me the name of an undertaker, Cristina, specialised in working with the UK. She spoke English. Maurizio, now apparently terrified, happily turned over the job to his colleague, who proved to be respectful, efficient and sympathetic. But also expensive. As an underemployed and broke foreign journalist locked in a legal battle with my daily newspaper, the €2,800 bill appeared insuperable. After hours of anxiety and a fruitless appeal to the Consulate for a loan, I remembered I still had one cheque left from my old Italian bank before they foreclosed on me. This was clearly the only option to get Mum home.

Would Cristina take a cheque? God bless her, she would. And Mum would be in the UK when it reached the bank. And so would I. To hell with the people in the bank if they couldn't take a joke.

At Verano, the mortuary police finally released Mum for repatriation. Everything at the funeral was beautiful, especially the haunting psalms sung by Brother Steven. Cristina's driver headed for Leonardo da Vinci Airport. Mum was finally going home.

John Phillips

Sposati spossati - September 2008

After eleven years together, Dan and I decided to get married.

‘Why?’ everybody asked at some point. Stumped if I know.

It took some doing. To start with we needed to unearth every document pertinent to a complicated life, and to take them to our comune at Citta della Pieve on a Tuesday morning between 10 and 11. After a moderately abrasive correspondence with our respective ex-sposi, the papers were gathered, stamped and put in a file by a smiling pit bull terrier, who turned out to be more of a dachshund re the leg element. Standing she was no taller than seated, but she grasped us firmly, clutching a surprising pink Barbie handbag, and led us off to inspect possible wedding venues:

1. Small broom cupboard stacked with grey filing cabinets.

2. A huge frescoed chamber in the Duke of Corgna’s Palace which would set us back €180.

‘Broom cupboard,’ said Dan.

‘Wedding’s off,’ said I.

Next came banns in the British Consulate in Florence. Many documents. We had been warned that another couple had been arbitrarily assigned complete strangers as marital partners without so much as an acknowledgement of error.

‘Do you mind swearing on the bible?’ asked Mrs Head Prefect behind the plate glass screen.

‘If we did? What then?’

‘You’d just swear anyway,’ passing a doll sized bible beneath the glass.

The likelihood of any interested party happening to drop into the British Consulate and spot our announcement was pretty slim, so we passed the next three weeks undramatically making lists.

Sadly, Pit Bull Terrier was on holiday and her replacement forgot to book the Palace for the event. For a perilous moment it looked like forty of us would be filed in the broom cupboard. But with one of those miracles that occur with spooky regularity at highly charged moments, we collided with an interested, efficient, effective fairy godmother on the day before the wedding – who with consummate diplomacy gained us the Palace, an impromptu cocktail party in the Palace courtyard, and a Polish opera singer to serenade us.

Citta della Pieve was decked with the flags of the Terzieri on the day, the sun shone on the handsome rusticated entrance of the palace and beamed into the frescoed room where the mayor was adjusting his red, white and green sash. I wept throughout – wrong mascara – even when the fairy godmother caused general hilarity by translating the stern command to educate our children properly. Aged 25 and upwards we felt we’d done our bit.

The singer sang, the Pit Bull replacement handed me a bouquet of peach roses haloed with baby’s breath, and the mayor shook Dan’s hand, regaling him with an Italian flag in drip dry polyester and a copy of the constitution.

Miranda Innes

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Beach People - August 2008

Every year from June to September the fine sands of the lovely bay of Mondello just outside Palermo disappears under rows of wooden bathing huts. Set back-to-back and as close together as soldiers, they run at right angles down to the water’s edge, leaving just a series of enclosed spaces or cortili exclusively for the use of Beach People. But this is all about to change; the authorities have decided the huts must go, they’re politically incorrect, hogging the beach and obscuring an open view of the sea for everyone else. Mondello is to lose its exclusive and unfair status and become like every other seaside resort.

The trouble is, it’s not like everywhere else, Mondello is a way of life, light years from the regimented Italian Riviera or Britain’s own agonizing shingle beaches and freezing waters. For the Sicilian summer which goes on for ever, you need all the necessary paraphernalia at your fingertips - chairs, tables, beach umbrellas and a lot more besides. Huts are the perfect answer. In Mondello these are rented year after year by the same families; their children have grown up together, marriages have blossomed, grandchildren added to the clan. Beach People love to socialize even more than the enjoy going into the water and above all, they love their huts, personalising them with wallpaper and perhaps an airy curtain or two blowing in the breeze. They adore gossiping and playing cards; you see them in the cool of evening still on the sands around their trestle tables, sleepy babies beside them, teenage boys and beautiful girls whispering together in the dusk. And then when it’s finally time to go home everything is packed away into the hut and it’s just a short drive back to Palermo. A slice of Mondello’s history will disappear with the huts. I’ll be sorry to see them go.

Gay Marks

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Taking the Waters in Venice - July 2008

Here’s a pleasant, harmless entertainment: fill a glass of water at your kitchen tap, swig it down nonchalantly – then watch your American guests contort with anxiety.

‘You drink the tap water in Venice?’

It’s as if you’re making a suicide bid in front of them.

As George Carlin observed, ‘Try spelling Evian backwards.’

Insiders in Venice have long refused to pay extortionate prices for ‘pure’ bottled water with a carbon footprint the size of a dirty yeti’s. At restaurants, you can put a complicit smile on a surly waiter’s face by requesting ‘l’acqua del sindaco’ – ‘the Mayor’s water’: the clean, safe liquid that flows freely and for free out of Venetian taps.

Now it’s official. Our charismatic Mayor Massimo Cacciari has launched a campaign. The Bearded One with the fathomless eyes has posed for posters with the caption ‘Anch’io bevo l’acqua del sindaco’: ‘I drink the Mayor’s water too.’

June also saw the launch of 100% pubblica, a campaign to raise public awareness about the commercialization of water: empty bottles distributed for free with a map showing all the water fountains in the city where these bottles can be filled – and re-filled – with good drinking water at no cost either to the consumer or the environment.

Bottled water has many unsightly manifestations in Venice. You can instantly tell the tourists by the way they nurse on their supersized baby-bottles of expensive water. Then there are the obscenely large lorries that clog the Ponte della Libertà, shuffling water into a waterborne city with its own excellent piped supply, without any apparent sense of irony.

But by far the most dispiriting manifestation is the morning tide of plastic bubbles floating down the canals like blooms of mutant jellyfish. Here’s something that perplexes me daily: exactly what is it in the soul of a tourist that responds to our beautiful city – by throwing his or her ugly plastic bottle into our Grand Canal?

Michelle Lovric

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Some Need It Hot - June 2008

This is just a ramble, a spring ramble through the Tuscan landscape. A soaked and vibrantly verdant Tuscan landscape, exceptionally so for the beginning of June. For it has rained and rained. Then rained again – hard – for good measure. We Tuscan inhabitants live in fear of drought halfway through June, of baked earth and sun withered crops, of wells running dry and barely dribbling hosepipes. No fear this year.

Two weeks ago the town was ‘flooded’ with tourists, for the most part sun-hungry, Northern species drawn south, yearning for natural warmth. Dutch and German number plates abounded in car parks, the English harder to spot since many fly in and rent cars. People dodged puddles, rainstorms and sad, deserted outdoor café tables. Undaunted at first, they sported shorts and brightly coloured, minimum fabric T-shirts in an act of defiance against the seriously chilly heights of our steep, narrow, rain soaked streets, which cleverly slope so that the centrally caught water hurtles down, river-like, to escape in great jets through opportunely placed holes in the massive Etruscan walls, showering down onto traffic below. Noisy and impressive. The Etruscans were formidable engineers, but even they couldn’t make the sun shine.

In shop display baskets, umbrellas replaced sunhats and lovely Italian leather handbags. Tempting, but empty, swimming pools glittered a cruel blue enticement in country residence gardens as the rain slashed down and the wind bent trees. The visitors desperately invented alternatives to the bliss of poolside relaxing under the touch of warm rays on sun-starved Northern skin: Another wine-tasting? How about a museum visit? The kids are fractious and we’ve driven all this way, worked all winter, to PAY for this!

Meanwhile, sadistically, the weather forecast informed us that elsewhere in Northern Europe there was unusually warm, sunny weather: notably in Holland and England. And then, suddenly, sporadically, the sun would come out; lighting up the colours of the magnificent landscape, turning on the old Tuscan charm like a diva’s smile. Just to tease. And as always, at the warmth of that smile, clothing was shed to bare tender pale skin, glowing red come nightfall. The Italians try not to stare or think of basting it with extra virgin olive oil. Not that they don’t sunbathe too, but they are more patient, they are residents, they have a congenital certainty that the sun will return, will always return in good time to slow roast all true Italian sun-worshippers into the bronzed statues of their magazine dreams. And so far, it always has.

Patti Garvin

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