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.