Mi scusi

I just spent a week back in New York visiting my mom and the rest of the New York family. Mom is doing all right and it was great to get to spend some more time with her, thanks for asking. I thought I'd manage to post once or twice while I was there, but somehow that never happened. Now that I'm back in Fidenza, however, I feel moved to start blogging again.

Something that struck me as curious while I was in New York is why the daily trivia of life in Italy fascinates me so, when events and scenes in the Big Apple or back in El Cerrito don't inspire any desire to record them. I was staying on West 81st Street in Manhattan, which, with its trees and elegant brownstones and parade of pedigreed dogs, is at least as charming, objectively speaking, as Fidenza's main drag, even if my very pedestrian photo fails to capture that fact.

Of course New York also has dramatic vistas that a hill-less, low-slung town like Fidenza can't match.

I took this while drinking Italian wine on my friends' 29th-story balcony

They have outdoor movies in New York, too, including an opera series in the plaza at Lincoln Center. With an Italian opera, no less, Bellini's Norma, on the evening I happened to stop by.

New York even has a piazza dedicated to Giuseppe Verdi, which I don't think Fidenza can boast, even though Verdi was born in a town very nearby.

There is also plenty of great food in New York (though great Northern Italian food, it must be said, is surprisingly scarce, and I don't think anyone serves donkey). Moreover, the city is home to some of my favorite people, and I always enjoy being there, whatever the circumstances. Yet a desire to record my impressions and my experiences is strangely lacking.

Though I make no claim to know the city all that well, I lived there for ten years or so and I've been visiting it regularly for most of the rest of my life. So perhaps for me, jaded as I am, it lacks that inspiring element of strangeness that greets me in Fidenza at every turn.

Like for instance when I went to buy a magazine at the local supermarket to read on my flight to New York and encountered this book for children...

If "bimbo" means "baby" in Italian, what does "pimpa" mean?

...and just above it, a whole rack devoted to MSM--mainstream Mariolatry.

Jet lag is summoning me to bed, so I will wait until another post to describe the gossip magazine I actually bought for my trip. For now I will only say that it seemed as odd to me, as awful in some ways and nevertheless as delightful in others, as Italy itself. 

Lazy, hazy days

Fidenza hasn't entirely shut down for the month of August, but things have gotten very quiet here. Small businesses in Italy, the mom-and-pop places that close every midday in honor of lunchtime, often also pull down their shutters for a couple of weeks in August so that all concerned can enjoy some of their mandated four weeks of paid time off. So "Closed for vacation" signs have popped up all over our street.

I took these in ten minutes within a couple blocks of our apartment

The closed shops and the departure of so many Fidenzans to the seaside or the mountains add up to noticeably emptier streets. The piazza near us, with several of its bars on holiday, was a ghost town this afternoon. 

Everyone from the normally busy bar on the left is off vacationing.

Even La Strega, the cafe across the street that's usually hopping all day and all evening, has packed it in for a few days of vacanze.

Being here when things are so quiet makes me feel like a real insider, whereas most of the time I am a clueless foreigner. And things are far from totally dead. Several other bars and cafes have stayed open to meet the population's need for coffee and Aperol spritzes, and so have a sufficiency of restaurants, including two of our favorites, Best Fidenza Kebap House and Ristorante-Pizzeria Ugolini. We hope they get some time off, but we're grateful they're not getting it right now.   

The pool remains open, except when thunderstorms come through, and classes are ongoing. I went to a "trek" class yesterday, which involved stumping along on underwater treadmills. Today I went back for another round of aqua biking. The treadmill experience, though strenuous, is less so than the bike class. Yet most of the women in the trek class (only women take these classes--the men wiggle into their Speedos and swim laps) wore sensible one-piece suits, as though they'd come to the pool to work out. Meanwhile, the bike class today was again full of bikinis, several of them strapless, even though the exercise was so grueling I was afraid I might topple over and sink to the bottom, too exhausted to haul myself the four feet to the surface. Are the other bike class ladies solar-powered, thanks to that extra exposed avoirdupois? Or is it that my old-lady suit is weighing me down?

Another feature of August in Fidenza is the outdoor movie theater. The town shows movies in the courtyard of the Fidenza library three or four times a week, starting at 9:15 p.m., when it gets good and dark. Last night I strolled over and watched Doppio Amore, a psychological horror movie that lived up to its billing as "cinema organico et genitale."

Waiting for the show to start.

As usual I understood only about 15 percent of the dialogue (it was dubbed into Italian), but that little was enough to convince me that the filmmakers were perhaps a little too intent on conflating female psychology with high-fashion rape fantasies. But no matter. The historic courtyard and its trees were lovely, the soft night air was a perfect temperature, and mosquitoes were kept at bay by the bats that occasionally fluttered across the screen. No one is giving them four weeks off, thank goodness.

Tastes like ass

Tonight Pam and Romano whisked us off to the nearby village of Costamezzana for the last day of their annual Festa dell'Asinina. Many towns, including our own Fidenza, throw a communal party for a few evenings each summer where they serve local specialties. In Fidenza the dinner centers on prosciutto and other regional salumi and the fried bread called torta frita. In Costamezzana, as the name of the festa indicates, the main dish is stewed donkey.

The menu: good and cheap.

The festa was held in a large sports field near the town church, looking out over a bucolic vista of hills and fields. We went early, around 7:30, while a band specializing in liscio (music maybe your grandparents would have liked) set up for later in the evening. A large crowd was already chowing down on the festa offerings: crispy fried polenta, big slabs of gorgonzola, plates of prosciutto, french fries, and bowls of donkey stew and creamy polenta. 

Danny and I opted for the main event, the donkey stew. You always worry a meat you haven't tried before is going to have a strong taste of whatever animal it comes from, and although I am not sure exactly what a donkey smells like, I was braced for a flavor somewhere between horse sweat and barn. But no, asinina cooked in tomatoes and wine tastes a lot like a very delicious braise of beef. 

Romano, Pam, and Danny at the festa. Pam opted for fried polenta and gorgonzola, but she's had donkey before.

When my kids were young and didn't like some unpleasantly grown-up food we'd made them take a bite of (that is, anything that didn't come out of a package with a cartoon character on the front), they would sometimes wrinkle up their sweet little faces in a spasm of disgust and cry, "Eccch! That tastes like ass!" Which is a disturbing thing to hear your child say, on many levels.

Now that I've tasted ass I can take it as a compliment.

The joys of aqua biking

The whole two months I was in Fidenza this past spring I intended to find and visit the local pool. I never got around to it, but this summer, thanks mainly to the heat, I managed to get there within a few days of arriving.

This photo was stolen from the pool's web site. I don't have a drone.

This is Fidenza's open-air pool (there's a covered one I haven't located yet) and it's very lavish. It includes both a huge lap pool with a towering high dive and an expansive kiddie pools with a recently added water slide in the shape of a giant, rather poisonous-looking mushroom.

There's also a bar, of course, because there's always a bar, and the pools are surrounded by picnic areas where you can rent a lounge chair and work on your tan or eat your picnic under an umbrella to the sounds of very loud, very bouncy pop music.

Baked Italians.

The original facility, the lap pool, dates from the Mussolini era, and maybe this sort of thing is one reason some Italians still have a soft spot for fascism. The town apparently sought to dampen that kind of nostalgia by naming the pool after Renato Guatelli, a local Resistance fighter who was killed by the  "nazifascisti" in 1944.

What drew me to Piscina R. Guatelli was the prospect of aqua exercise. Back in California I'm a big fan of aqua aerobics, which consists of a variety of exercise movements--jogging, jumping jacks, crunches, and the like--done while standing in shoulder-high water or suspended in a deeper part of the pool. I attend classes two and sometimes three times a week with a group of women so amiable and entertaining that we often get together on dry land as well as in the pool.

Land-locked since early July, I was eager to get back in the water and thrilled to see that Fidenza's outdoor pool offers a range of  "fitness" (pronounced "feetness") classes, most of them things I'd never heard of before. "Power Gym," the class I watched a bit of on my first visit to the pool, is the most like my California aqua class, but much more boot-camp-ish and with much louder music. There are also "Trek" classes that use underwater treadmills, of all things; "Aqua Jumping Bar," which means god knows what, and "Bike" sessions that are spin classes held underwater. Although the pool calendar lists all these in English, the internet tells me that aqua biking, at least, was originally an Italian invention. I haven't yet found an explanation for why.

Undaunted, I paid 87 euros (about $100) for a ten-lesson subscription, plus a 15 euro membership. Like almost every other organized physical activity in Italy, lessons at Piscina R. Guatelli require a "certificate of eligibility for sports," signed by a medical doctor. I'd encountered this phenomenon during my last stay here, so I had a letter all ready, signed by my doctor in California.

But when the young man signing me up heard that the letter was in English, he demurred; he was pretty sure a certificato had to be in Italian. Thankfully Pam was there to act as my translator and fixer, and she told him she'd get one of her friends who's a doctor to countersign an Italian translation of my doctor's letter. He smiled--yes, that would work--and went ahead with signing me up. I've been back to the pool several times since then and no one has asked for my certificate. Which is a good thing, since Pam hasn't caught up with her friend the doctor yet either.

In my California pool you pay your money and join the class whether you're the only student who showed up that night or one of twenty. In Fidenza, on the other hand, advance reservations are required, since spaces are limited to 16. The first spot I managed to get into was a "bike" class, so despite misgivings--I'm not much interested in bike-riding on dry land, let alone in the water--I hurried out and bought a pair of water shoes (required for these classes) and some sunblock (the class was at one in the afternoon) and presented myself the recommended 15 minutes before the beginning of the lesson.

There were already about a dozen women in the water with their bikes. I and a couple of other newbies had to fetch bikes from near the locker room and roll them over to the pool, where the instructor--a bronze, blonde Amazon with thighs like an Olympic skater's--adjusted the seat and handle heights to our dimensions and then tossed the bikes into the water. She turned on the music, which blasted out of a nearby speaker the size of a large suitcase, and class began.

In California, aqua aerobics seems to be an activity favored by older women, but aqua biking in Fidenza clearly appeals to a much younger crowd, and no wonder. It was nonstop action and very demanding, since pedaling a bike at speed while alternately sitting, standing, or hunching over the handlebars isn't any easier when you're doing it underwater. Adding all kinds of arm movements (breast stroke, punching underwater, scooping forward and back) makes the 50-minute class even more strenuous.

Obviously I stole this photo from the internet, too. 

Worse, there's no visible clock to tell you how much longer you have to keep doing this. The fear that there might still be 40 minutes left to go pushed my heart rate up even higher.

I had to cheat some of the time, resting my legs and hoping the water was concealing the fact that I'd quit pedaling. But I consoled myself with the observation that I was older than everyone else in the class except for one woman who looked like she must, must be a few years beyond me.

Now maybe it's because we're mostly older ladies, but my California water classmates tend to go heavy on the sunblock, sunglasses, sunhats, and rashguards or jackets. And all of us wear sensible one-piece bathing suits. So I showed up to the Fidenza pool slathered in 50 sunblock and wearing dark glasses, a visor, and my serviceable tanksuit. As I headed out into the blazing sun, I was just sorry I hadn't brought a swim shirt to Italy with me.

Once I got out on the pool deck I was glad I hadn't, though, since I would have looked like even more of a freak than I already did. 

For my Italian classmates all faced the sun without any visible protection, aside from the fashionable sunglasses a few wore. No hats, no visors, and certainly no shirts. I was the only person wearing a one-piece; almost everyone else wore flirty bikinis with ruffles, glitter, and netting, several of them strapless. Even my apparent age peer was in a two-piece, with typical European disregard for American notions of what a displayable beach body looks like. 

Despite looking like they were ready for nothing more vigorous than lounging on a towel, these women were there to work, and our instructor made sure we did, barking out counts of eight and yelling "Dai, dai!" Although that common Italian exclamation sounds like "Die, die!" which I thought I might actually do as the class proceeded, in fact it's Italian for "Come on!" It literally means "Give!" which, like a lot of things in Italy, seems much sexier than the American equivalent.

Finally the class was over. My legs were rubbery as I walked back to the locker room, but I felt that rush of endorphins or dopamine or whatever is released in the aftermath of strenuous physical effort. As soon as I'd showered and dressed I went out and reserved a spot in two more classes: "Power Gym" and another round of aqua biking.

For now I'm too American to give up my one-piece, however.   

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Progress can feel like perfection

The heat hasn't exactly broken, but temperatures have dropped from the mid-90s to the mid-80s. Even more important, we finally figured out a more effective arrangement of our various fans. So now instead of blowing in warm air from the rather stuffy little courtyard below our bedroom, the fan that sings us to sleep each night is pulling in cool air from the front of the house and making our room noticeably more comfy.

Today was temperate enough for me to throw open the windows even though the sun was shining and take a few photos of our kitchen, which is now complete in all its major parts.

New since my last report: butcher-block counter and green backsplash, finally installed.

The backsplash was chosen to match our dining-room table, which is topped with green...linoleum, I think. I suspect it might have been a lab table earlier in its career.

The oregano on the windowsill is clinging to life, just barely.

The kitchen remains far from complete. We need to get the electrician in to install all the under-cabinet lighting. Danny needs to install the various rails and hooks on which I want to display our various kitchen tools. None of the problems that bothered us when the kitchen first went in have been solved.

Nonetheless, I'm pleased every time I go in there, because it's all so new and functional and unspoiled, and so beautifully spare. You know how you look at the pictures in an Ikea catalog and say, "No one has so few things in their house and all of them so ridiculously tasteful"? Well, guess that? That's what at least some of my cabinets and drawers look like.

Glasses from Ikea, dishes from Pam. I get a thrill every time I open the door.

All Ikea except for the knives, which we brought from California last time.

How luxurious is all that simplicity and just plain emptiness? Soon, inevitably, we will crap this up by adding all the additional things we need, or think we need. But right now we are living the dream, people!

Out and about

We've had a busy couple of days. It turns out that Fidenza, small town though it is (pop. 27,000), and the surrounding area are crammed with activity.

On Monday night I accompanied Pam and Romano to a gathering in a park in Parma for a ceremony commemorating the victims of the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, put on by the city of Parma and its small Japanese community. Pam, through her qi gong practice, knows a lot of the people in the area's Zen community, including some of the locals who do taiko drumming. Their performance was the highlight of the evening.

As you can see, at least two Italian-born Buddhist monks were in attendance, in full costume despite the heat, as well as several women in full kimono. By the end of the performance I was covered in sweat, just from watching.

Yesterday, Tuesday, I walked over to the Fidenza pool to check out their aqua aerobics program. It seems astonishingly vigorous compared to the rather sedate exercise regime offered at the pool I attend in California.

I snuck this picture while checking out the "Acqua Fitness" class

Various classes during the week use underwater bikes or underwater treadmills as well as plain old jumping around, all to the beat of really LOUD Italian EDM. It looks like heaven. I bought a 10-lesson subscription.

That night I was planning to go to the open-air movie that the town puts on most weeknights. Shades of Cinema Paradiso, right? But Danny was feeling poorly and looking awful, pale and shaky  So Pam, Romano, and I ended up taking him to the emergency room, the Pronto Soccorso, at the local hospital. Since he wasn't judged to be in too bad shape, we got to spend a lot of time waiting around.

I took this in the waiting room but failed to capture the studliness of these two carabinieri, who looked like bachelorette-party entertainers, the kind with velcro pants

The hospital is only 14 years old and very spiffy. Best of all, it is nicely air-conditioned, which made the wait slightly less onerous, since outside it was still in the high 80s and soggily humid.

A lot of people who were worse off got in ahead of us, as was only proper. One amiable old gentleman was sitting in a wheelchair with a bloody head wound. Eventually they took him into the treatment area in back. After a while he emerged, walking under his own steam, with the blood cleaned up and a bandage on the back of his head. "I'm still alive," he told us cheerily, in Italian. "I did something stupid."

"Very stupid," agreed his companion as he led him out into the night.

"Keep the door closed," an unheeded sign in the Radiology Department

Things went along efficiently but slowly. Eventually Danny was seen, tested, prodded, and evaluated, with Pam and Romano taking turns as translators while I sat uselessly by. Danny felt worse about keeping them both up so late than about his own condition. In the end they decided he was dehydrated and gave him an IV of water and minerals. He felt better and they sent us home.

When we left, around 2 a.m., we were presented with the bill. Even though I'm a citizen, I'm not enrolled in Italy's state health-care system because my primary residence is abroad (that is, California). And of course Danny has even less claim to Italian largesse, so he was there as a private-pay patient.

For various blood tests, a CAT scan, the IV, and a follow-up visit with a neurologist, the bill came to slightly less than $230. To say I'm happy to pay it is an understatement.

It's times like this when you have to wonder what the hell is wrong with the United States.

Following yesterday's excitement, today's activity was going to a concert this evening at a small outdoor auditorium in one of Fidenza's parks, where our friend Romano and two young singers offered a bouquet of songs, arias, and duets to a small and, according to Pam, very socially select audience.

Romano's stage presence was, as always, magical--I could happily watch him even with the sound turned off, although the sound is reliably gorgeous. You would never have guessed he'd been up till all hours the night before working as a medical translator.

The young tenor, Pietro Brunetto, a student of Romano's, effortlessly hit all kinds of dazzling high notes. The soprano from Iceland, who was introduced only as Berta (the announcer refused to attempt her last name), had plenty of high notes, too, and all three of them received rapturous applause, especially when they concluded with a trio from La Traviata. 

The second encore: Bravi tutti!

What's new and what isn't

❣ Our new kitchen looks fabulous, but it's so hot we don't want to cook anything. Photos when it cools down enough to open the blinds.

❣ Even in this heat it's pleasant to sit out on the piazza at eight o'clock drinking aperitivi. There's a nice breeze and lots of people of all ages strolling and riding bikes. Last night I celebrated our arrival with an Aperol spritz (two, actually) with Pam and Romano. Danny had already gone to bed.

❣ The bar around the corner, formerly Bar della Piazza, just rechristened itself (in English) Beef Corner. I wonder if the new name sounds more appetizing to Italians than it does to me. It's still a bar but they serve "meat specialties" in the evening. We went there tonight for some prosecco. 

I made Pam take this so I could be in it. Note remains of generous snacks.

 ❣ After drinks at Beef Corner we went to Pizzeria Baia Azzurra ("Blue Bay") for some deep dish. The eatery is nowhere near any water but at least the name is in Italian. As we were strolling home we noticed that the scaffolding that for years covered the back of the 11th-century Duomo is finally gone. Now the cathedral looks beautiful from all sides.

❣ There's a new tailor on our street, a new real-estate office, and a new clothing store, and a couple of empty storefronts where stores we can't remember used to be. Happily the gelateria across from us is still there, still doing a thriving business.

Before going up to our apartment tonight we stopped for some gelato: sour cherry for me and very rummy zuppa inglese for Danny. This was the one place we went tonight that was aptly named:  Gelateria Borgo di Golosi, "Village of Gluttons."  

Italy's very warm embrace

We are back in Fidenza, and discovering another extreme of Po Valley weather.

Some of our biggest fans. The cactus has survived, unlike most of our other plants.

Danny and I arrived in Italy yesterday from New York, where I'd been for almost four weeks. Dot, my mom, found herself in the hospital with double pneumonia on July 4, and she was so sick that I flew in from California to help out and just be there. A week or so later Dot was back home and in the hands of a team of wonderful caregivers, but I stuck around to make sure things were going smoothly and to feel useful and because once you start worrying about an aged parent it's very hard to stop.

Danny and I had originally planned to fly to Italy from San Francisco on July 21. When it became clear that I wasn't going to get home in time to make that flight, we canceled the tickets. Then Danny heroically agreed to pack up not only his own things, but all of the clothes and other necessities that I'd been planning to bring to Italy, guided by me yelling instructions over the phone. About two weeks ago he hauled all of it, in two big suitcases, to New York.

Not long after he arrived he had a terrible toothache and had to have the tooth pulled, then go on antibiotics for a week, which always makes him feel lousy. But he probably suffered more from the hot and humid New York summer weather. Back when we lived in the city, in the 1970s, he complained about the weather every single day. No surprise, he hates it just as much now as he did then.

At least there was plenty of air-conditioning. Danny and I stayed in my cousin Cathy's beautiful apartment, which was an oasis of civilization--not only cool air, but lots of conversation, great wine, excellent food, high-class shampoo, and a very effective washer and dryer. The hospital was meat-locker chilly, because evidently that impedes the spread of germs, and my mother's apartment, once she came home, was also kept comfortably cool. We experienced the heat only when going from one place to another.

After a few weeks Dot was doing so well that I couldn't think of any reason for staying and mooching off my hospitable cousin any longer. Meanwhile the heat and the extended exposure to his in-laws was making Danny increasingly crabby. We realized it was time to decamp to Italy, and on Thursday, Aug. 2, we did.

We discovered on arrival that Fidenza is in the midst of a heat wave. As we struggled to drag our 160 pounds of luggage from the railway station to our apartment, the steamy warmth enclosed us in a big welcoming hug, while cicadas serenaded us at top volume from the trees in the piazza.

The last time we arrived here, at the beginning of March, there was a freak snowfall, and even after the snow melted temperatures were in the low 30s for several weeks. We particularly noticed since our apartment had no heat for the first ten or twelve days we lived in it.

Now we're seeing the other extreme, and we're very aware of it because our apartment, though it now has heat, has never had air conditioning. So we are doing what the Italians do: keeping the blinds closed, running fans, and thinking cool thoughts.

Pam and Romano very kindly prepared our place before we arrived by cracking the windows and giving us a couple of their extra fans.  As soon as we'd had a restorative nap, they took us to our favorite appliance store, where we bought three more fans. We looked at air conditioners, too, but they were all indoor units with tubes that you have to hang out an open window, which would seem to defeat the purpose. And they cost ten times more than a fan. So we are going to see if we can get by with 1950s technology. As we stumble around the dimly lit rooms an aria from The Messiah comes insistently to mind, "The people that walkéd in darkness..."

I feel very much as I did the last time we visited Cambodia: flattened by the heat and loath to do anything that requires more effort than sitting upright. Pam says that this kind of hot spell happens here every year, usually in June or July--a few days of very high heat and humidity before the weather subsides to more normal summer conditions, which I guess means a bit less oppressively hot and damp. I hope we notice the difference.