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.