On the eve of the Eve of the...

We're coming up on the eve of the Eve, and while I am visiting family in the States right now, I am wishing that I was not missing what I think is the best time to be in Italy.  The tourist crowds die down. Locals come out and have big family gatherings at their favorite restaurants.  They shop a little more seriously than other times of the year. The weather - short daylight hours, sometimes gray and overcast, sometimes rainy - appeals to my Celtic/Viking nature.  So many streets are glowing with holiday decorations.

People really DO seem to be a bit happier.

And that is what I'd like to be, too.  

The last four months have been a rough span of time for me.  I don't want to be vague, but I'll nonetheless have to be. They weren't without some successes, but they were still quite challenging.  I'm too cynical to say that I have ever found myself deeply in a Christmas spirit, necessarily, but I am cognizant of how I've struggled more with tapping into much of any of it, this season. 

Maybe some of you can also (equally vaguely or really specifically) attest to the same problem.  

These images are here for the members of this weird club, in hopes of distracting you from the holiday blahs.  

How about a little jaunt for a short weekend in Florence? 

Color me biased, but I might like that city's holiday street lighting better than Rome's.

When we arrived at almost 9pm after our 90 minute Friday evening train ride from Rome, we checked in to our hotel, and while the desk person was explaining all the usual things about the place, she held this up and I saw that word.  I didn't book or request an upgrade, I said, thinking that I may have inadvertently made a mistake. 

Oh I know, she said.  We just upgraded you anyway.

(this never happens to me)

We got the suite???? Sweet! 

In my limited experience, only one room in a Sorrento hotel in 2012 rivals this one in size.  But nothing rivals the view from our window:

JACKPOT.

But back to the other features of our visit. 

Those two folks on the left are our best travel buddies.  And we are in my absolute favorite restaurant in all of Florence. 

So yeah, happy can happen.

Florence does some classy decorating.

And SHOCKER:  they have a fantastic Christmas market.  I'm slow to the holiday market party, clearly, as my first one was last year.  But it was in Germany, so I'd say that I did a pretty authentic first go at holiday markets.

So what are these things, my American friends might ask. 

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, temporary stalls are erected in town squares.  You can shop for schlocky tacky trinkets.  You can stop and sip mulled wine.  You can eat lots of indulgent foods and desserts while standing up in the cold, in the company of hordes of people.

Piazza Navona, which was traditionally known for its Christmas market, was not such a great market experience in the last two seasons.  A carousel. Some carnival-type games booths. Maybe a stall selling artisanal soaps or candles.  

Kinda lame.

But this year, the vendors of creche figures have returned! THIS is what the Piazza Navona market was known for:

And there they are. 

Babbo Natale - maybe hanging out for photo ops? 

But back to this market in particular.  

I have it on good authority that the real point of these markets is to eat a lot of good food and get your drink on. The shopping could be serious, or not. 

Florence's market gave us all of our requirements and then some: international foods (a person could get churros and sangria, German stollen, an Italian porchetta sandwich, a potato cake with melted cheese on top, a bratwurst on a bun, skewered chicken, doughnuts the size of my head, mulled wine, hot cider and, wait for it: mulled beer with whiskey added.  Sound a bit gross to you?  Sure, said the two guys I was traveling with. And then they tried it. And then they made plans for a second round) were plentiful and pretty authentic.

I could (and did) buy to take home: shearling gloves, any and all manner of licorice, British cheddars and bacon-wrapped wurst. There were, in fact, artisanal soaps, toys and good jewelry vendors too.

I'm sure that you're going to tell me that your favorite market is in some tiny Austrian town, and I'll say: what are the directions, because I'll go there AFTER revisiting Florence's market.  

So holiday shopping is not complete without visiting the 1930s-era candy store on my street in Rome, where many old style sweets can be found. 

Next year, my plan is to make my own panettone, as I still have Maria (my sourdough starter/'mother leavener') and stupid amounts of ambition. And see? I'm also blessed to have this candy store nearby, as they carry all the necessary candied fruits to go into the panettone (but there shall be no raisins, as raisins are sad evocations of perfectly good grapes, and disgusting in texture when heated). 

Dear America: you've been listening to Nat King Cole singing about chestnuts roasting on an open fire for years...even though this kind of holiday sight is impossible for you to actually have with American chestnuts. So come to Italy and visit one of the many roasted chestnut vendors on the streets (and get a bottle of water, because while those nuts are wonderful, they will absorb every bit of moisture in your mouth). And then go back home, take a hike in the Appalachians, find an American chestnut sprout, and help revive this mighty tree. This way, Nat King Cole will sound more authentic.

Yeah, we're back in Florence here.  That beautiful church you saw backgrounding the Christmas market is Santa Croce, which for several years was closed for restoration. 

But it's finally reopened. And it's glorious.

Adjoining the church is the Pazzi chapel, designed by Brunelleschi. You enter it from one of the cloisters of Santa Croce. 

The floorplan, elevations and interior are all based on mathematically contrived harmonies. A perfectly ideal Renaissance space.

Inside St. Croce proper.  I've never seen the place without scaffolding somewhere in it.  How nice to have an unfettered view....of famous Italians' tombs and memorials!

Michelangelo is buried here.

Galileo is buried here.

Dante is memorialized here (he is actually buried in Bologna).

And finally, Machiavelli.

This tree is far better than last year's Roman Christmas tree.  For one thing, it's alive, so that's an improvement. And for another thing, Netflix ponied up the 275,000 euros it cost to bring, install and decorate the tree.  My only issue is how Netflix perpetually wrecks the otherwise nice vision with a large box faced in big video screens directly below the tree. 

You already know about this church from an earlier blog post.  Recall that it's never open, unless it's Sunday from 9am to noon (and from 10ish onward, they're holding mass, so you can't exactly walk around with a camera while that's going on).

But for some crazy reason, it was open on this weekday. So I stood just outside the front door and shot some surreptitious photos of the interior. 

That wacky Borromini, denying the full flourish, if not outright excess, of Baroque church decoration in polychrome marbles and gilding anything that sat still...and instead going for classy and pure white on white.

It was a gift.

As is this, to you. 

May you have (yes, I'm really hoping we all do) happy holidays. 

Pace, friends.

What do you miss?

At the time that I moved from the United States to Italy, I had been living in the same community for 20 years.  Prior to that, I'd lived either one hour or 7 hours south of that community.  I'd lived in the same state for 25 years.  And before that, I'd lived in my parent's house in Virginia - for 22 years.

It's safe to say that compared to other people, I don't move much.

When I moved from the mountains of Southwest Virginia to the flat coastal stretch of southeast Georgia, I missed my horizon line.

When I moved from Athens, Georgia to a lakeside - popular among retirees - community in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, I missed the much more youthful vibe of a college town.

Don't ask me....I just saw this street art in Sicily, and it cracked me up.

Someone asked me yesterday:  what about the United States do you miss?

I found that question to be more difficult to answer than you might expect. Upon reflection, I do have answers, but at the time I was hit with the question, I couldn't think of almost any of them.

I think that's kind of strange.  Maybe it suggests that I am fairly deeply ensconced in this place, now.  I can confess that I sometimes struggle to determine what I should call 'home.'

But even if this place is home, for however long it is such, there are things I definitely miss.  I miss the United States when:

-I need a haircut. I can walk into an art supply store and stumble through my rough Italian and still successfully leave with what I came for.  But the level of language finesse needed for talking with a stylist is a whole other can of worms for me.

-I want to drive somewhere so that I have total control over when I arrive, when I leave, and when I will arrive home. I just don't drive anymore, and Roman mass transit is a distinct challenge. You can have two apps on your phone AND Google maps running at the same time, make up your mind that the bus you need to catch isn't coming for 45 minutes or more, start the long walk home, and be just far enough away from the bus stop to make it impossible to catch the phantom bus (with a dysfunctional or simply non-functioning transponder) that will bolt past you, as you sweat and curse.

-Something abrupt has happened to my utility supply, my means of mass transit or some other thing for which I depend upon others to maintain on a regular basis, and they have not bothered to warn/inform/acknowledge the inconvenience of the interruption.  I don't know why, but this particular level of courtesy is completely lacking here.  There is this rather infuriating degree of resignation among Italians (who will still bitterly complain about the situation, but do nothing to improve it) that is either a result of this kind of conditioning or it simply allows the lack of courtesy to persist...I think.  And when I approach my stove with raw foodstuff I intend to turn into dinner and I have no gas, no explanation and no knowledge of when it will be restored, I get testy.

-I want to shop in a store for an unspecified length of time - in real air conditioning.  The rampant phobia here regarding cold air on your neck or any other part of your body can wear a little thin, particularly since science doesn't corroborate the notion that it can kill you...or at least make you sick.  These people, with their Mediterranean blood and passion for the blazing sun must find all of the red-faced, schvitzing foreigners in their midst to not only be hopelessly impaired but also disgusting.  And when I've already been sweating outdoors and I walk indoors to maybe get a little relief.....and the indoor temperature is only weakly influenced by tepid air blowing out of a wall ac unit that is yellowed from years of indoor tobacco usage (prevented now by law) and general age...I know I feel pretty disgusting.  If you saw my Google search history over the last six months, you'd think I was a hypochondriac, with terms like 'hyperhydrosis' and 'prickly heat' and questions like 'what are the symptoms of dehydration?' This white alien is still struggling, even after two years of being here.

-I want to shop online. I can order things from certain retailers and have them shipped, but if they exceed the size of my overseas post office box (which is not really a box, the size limitations have to do with the size of a mailing pouch), forget it.  And some goods - like printed business cards, for crying out loud - while well within the size limits, simply are not shipped by vendors to post office boxes, so I'm out of luck there. The new data protection laws here in Europe have put an additional damper on being an online consumer, as a number of American businesses' websites are now no longer visible to me.

-I want to eat fish without bones. Or shrimp without attached heads and shells.  Those two sentences alone should tell you how spoiled rotten Americans are.  It's a rarity to encounter a pin bone or two in a piece of salmon at home.  It's so commonplace here that I sometimes must rationalize whether I feel rested enough to tackle a plated fish, even when I didn't cook it.  And when you pay by weight for whole (i.e., heads and shells ON) shrimp, the amount of edible material once you're finished with the prep can be depressing. Oh sure, I hear you when you say that bone-in fish and shelled shrimp are better tasting, but sometimes, this lazy American doesn't feel like working that hard.

This also cracks me up AND sobers me up.  I want peace and authentic food, too, wherever I am.

-I see a physically disabled person struggle because they have to stand in a line just like the rest of the tourists or park far away from the business entrance...because there is no ADA here.  Now, people here aren't complete jerks about this kind of thing.  I have witnessed bus drivers assist people in wheelchairs with the on/off ramps.  There is an elevator in the Colosseum (and sometimes it even works).  But Americans expecting the kinds of provisions that the law provides at home are in for a rude awakening elsewhere. I don't think that they realize just how conditioned they are by that protection.  It's a gift.

-I hear a student talk about her European high school experiences that included the routine violation of his or her privacy.  In response to my reminder to her that her grades were something I declined to discuss in email (because it's not a private form of communication), one student said, "Really?  I guess that I'm still in high school mode, where teachers would regularly announce your grade to the rest of the room before handing your test back to you." Color me aghast. Again, folks, you don't necessarily know how protected you are until you hear about something like that.

-I want to have that good old job security mindset.  As a department chair in the U.S., I already knew what adjuncts' lives were/are like:  they're pretty crummy.  Base level pay for work you have to do out of your home because you have no on-campus office, no health benefits, no work guarantee from one term or one year to the next. The utter bottom of the totem pole is no place for a person who thrives when they feel just secure enough to take healthy chances in their daily work, positively growing, yielding successes and creating new opportunities...and 'a person' really means: most of us.  But I left that for a life here. I told myself that I was perfectly o.k. with not knowing what would happen next in my career, because initially, I had to be. And I believed myself, until I slipped into Ambition Mode. But I'm still in that adjunct saddle, wishing I'd never gotten a taste of a vision of something more secure. Ambition is good until it lives like a monkey on your back. 
(And yet, it bears mentioning that academic job cuts are happening left and right in the U.S. - in the arts and humanities, mostly.  And that's because while we're still wanted to teach the general education elective here and there, our majors are drying up thanks to a staggering combination of dwindling numbers of students <lower birthrate, 18-20 years ago> and a ridiculously overblown societal emphasis on directly vocationally oriented programs. College is now akin to job training, and nothing more. Since everybody got on the bandwagon of running a college like a corporation in America, if you aren't pulling in the dough in a directly measurable way, then you're expendable. So I'm not kidding myself when I consider that the notion of job security in my field may or may not be something I'll ever see again.)

 -I want buttered popcorn with my movie. Italians are totally pro-cinema.  After all, this is Fellini's country.  But the seriousness with which the cinema is treated means that you rarely have anything edible in your hands during the screening.  In my limited experience, perhaps half of the cinemas I've been to actually have a concession stand of any kind.  And the little box of dry popcorn is just not up to my standards.

-I want to go for a leisurely stroll on smooth sidewalks, and not worry about twisting my ankle on broken pavement or a pothole. 

-I want to wear sweaters. It's in the high 60s and low 70s here during this unusually warm Fall, and because it's two weeks 'til Thanksgiving, I want to wear a damned sweater.

Rosa

Only in the months of May and June can you visit this special place. 

Rome's famous rose garden. 

Founded in 1931, and installed over the original location of the city's Jewish cemetery, over 1100 varieties (and growing in number, I'm sure) of roses grow here. 

At some point later, to commemorate the history of the place, the footpaths were designed to resemble the shape of the menorah.

There are climbers.

Plenty of bushes.

Every color and combination and cluster pattern imaginable.

And in those lovely months of the height of spring, Rome gathers here.
For a respite from the work day, an al fresco lunch, a moment in the sun.   

The scents are heavenly, when the breezes pick them up.

Photographers - ranging from pros who tote big fancy cameras to rare snapshot takers with junky old phones - cannot resist.

There is at least a bloom or two they have never seen before.

You can imagine carrying creamy pastels in a bridal bouquet.

Or purples and fuchsias occupying the garden of your dreams.

The dainty, modestly sized.

The pie-plate sized.

You mean to go somewhere, but you struggle to tear yourself away. 

And among the porcelain-quality, velvety petals of this faintly peach-cheeked bunch...

...is industry.

You don't want to work that hard, but you want this worker's view:  to be ensconced within this hidden world, suffused with scent.

And oh, I almost forgot to include red.