Banking follies

Even though I'm now an Italian citizen, I'm not a resident of Italy. That's partly for tax reasons and mostly because we aren't here more than six months a year. But being a non-resident complicates some aspects of our lives.

For example, this week we finally sat down with a member of the Unicredit bank staff who spoke a little English and was willing to take the 45 minutes required to figure out and then explain to us how our checking account worked. We already knew there were a lot of fees. It turns out that, since we're required to have a non-resident account, and since such accounts are restricted in various ways (to discourage money-laundering and other "dangerous" activities, I gather), we were paying close to $300 annually for the privilege of letting Unicredit hold our money.

The fellow who explained this to us seemed surprised himself that the bank was charging us so much and sincerely regretted that there wasn't any way to reduce the fees. Not only was he as nice as pie, but his name is Fiore, "flower," which apparently is not an unusual name for Italian males. How cute is that?

Almost $300 was enough to overcome my usual inertia, and I went online to see what other banks charged. As usual, this took a ridiculously long time and very heavy use of Google Translate as I tried to make sense of various bank web sites. Considering how many expats-in-Italy sites there are, I was disheartened when I couldn't find any that gave specifics on this issue. Nor were the bank sites very forthcoming. I ended up visiting a couple of them in person, since that seemed to be the only way to get the information I wanted.

One of them was Carisbo, a bank that Pam had heard was somewhat less rapacious. It turned out a woman who works there speaks excellent English and was happy to give me all the information I asked for. Even better, the fees for a non-resident account are something like a third of what we've been paying. So the next day Danny and I came in to sign up for a new account.

Like Unicredit, this bank makes you come in through a kind of airlock that makes sure people can only enter and exit one at a time. It's a bit like an upright MRI. I presume this is to deter robbers, but in the case of Carisbo this seems a bit ridiculous, since a large sign in front announces that there is no cash in the bank itself. If you want actual money, you go to the ATM at the front entrance. But if you want to talk to bank staff, you have to go through the security door.

I don't think they irradiate you when you go through. That seems like an oversight.

It appears that what this security system is protecting is vast amounts of paper. Setting up our new account required not only photocopies of our passports and tax ID documents, but also something like 25 signatures each on reams of documents covered wtih fine print. When the paperwork was finally all done, Debora, our lovely and helpful banker, proudly posed with our set of copies.

It's more than an inch thick, and I have no idea what any of it says. But whatever we've agreed to, Debora assures us that it's going to cost us a lot less.

Open eyes

For some of us, every trip to an Italian supermarket is a revelation.

"Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we're confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world. ... If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch."

This is from Michael Pollan's book about psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, which I cannot get enough of.

In our next post, the adventure of opening a new bank account--something I doubt I'd be moved to write about were I back in California.

Varieties of religious experience

Friends from California, Mark and Barbara, recently visited us in Fidenza for a few days, bearing a ridiculous amount of gifts, most of them edible or drinkable, and providing a pretext for quite a few excellent meals. Their visit also spurred us to stop by a few notable sights in the area, 

The first was the weekly Saturday street market, where I mostly managed to restrain them from buying still more things to feed us. However, Mark did discover a vendor who makes delicious bread, a commodity in short supply around here, as well as some very nice goat cheese. He has the hunting instincts of a bloodhound when it comes to good things to eat. 

On our way home from the market we encountered a large crowd in front of Fidenza's historic theater in Piazza Giuseppe Verdi, cheering and sending geysers of rice and confetti into the air. There'd been a wedding in the theater, and the bride and groom had just emerged into the piazza. 

Barbara claims the rice was carnaroli.

I tried to unobtrusively get some pictures of the men in the party, many of whom were extremely elegant in the Italian style, but I have neither the eye nor the courage to be a good street photographer. 

I thought these guys were interesting, though I imagine that the little pink handbag is not a man-purse (an item that many, many Italian men carry) but an accessory belonging to the little girl on the left. Apologies to my reader who is hankering for pix of Italian manhood; this seems to be the best I can do.

The theater is usually locked up when there isn't a performance, but it was still open so Mark, Barbara, and I were able to go in and have a look. Built in the mid-19th century, it's a 425-seat jewel box whose interior decor was the handiwork of a contemporary of Verdi's who designed sets for many of the maestro's operas. 

They were already taking down the Italian and EU flags that shared the stage with the happy couple. I wonder if those are standard fixtures at every wedding here, or if it was a political statement.

The theater ceiling is particularly spectacular. 

We were less fortunate later that day when we tried to take our friends to the Fidenza Duomo, to see the bones of the town's patron saint, San Donnino. (You can read more about him here.) Some kind of religious event was going on inside and the place was jammed. We never found out what drew such a big crowd.

So no visit to San Donnino's relics that day.

Subsequent adventures included a visit to one of our favorite sites of devotion, the Parma branch of Ikea, where we were able to pick up a new living-room chair and bring it home in our friends' rental car. Mark even put the chair together, a truly amazing act of friendship. 

We also toured the historic Jewish synagogue in the nearby town of Soragna. The Jewish community of Parma, the nearest big city, maintains the pretty little Soragna synagogue as a museum, a reminder of the relatively large Jewish community that once lived in this area in the 18th and 19th centuries, unburdened by many of the restrictions that kept Jews out of other parts of Europe. But Soragna's last Jewish resident died in 1971, and today the synagogue rarely can get enough people together to form a minyan. 

In order to enter, the men in our party had to put on yarmulkes. Despite how aggressively secular both these fellows are, they were good sports about it.

As was standard practice, women and children had to sit in the upstairs balcony, behind a screen. In the women's section was a display of Jewish marriage contracts, including one dating from the time of Italy's unification. 

Whoever commissioned the contract was apparently very excited about the new Italian state, because it's decorated with portraits of the leaders of the movement for Italian unification: at the top, Victor Emmanuel, named king of the new country; at right the revolutionary leader Garibaldi, whose military prowess and wide popularity made unification possible; and, at left, Count Cavour, the statesmen whose wheeling-and-dealing diplomacy also played a crucial role. (Our guide speculated that another revolutionary leader, Mazzini, was depicted on the bottom part of the contract that's now missing.)

In just about every Italian town the Risorgimento, as it's known, is memorialized with piazzas, streets, and parks named after these four worthies. In our own Fidenza, the main piazza is named after Garibaldi (the first Piazza Garibaldi in Italy, I've heard) and the main street cutting through the downtown, the one we live on, is named in honor of Count Cavour. Here's a close-up of him:

From what I've read, he was clever but not particularly admirable--and not as nice-looking as he's depicted here, either.

When we emerged from the synagogue, we saw a group of nuns in full habit who had been selling jam and liqueurs in front of a church a few doors down and were starting to close up shop. Unlike most habit-wearing nuns I've seen in Italy, these were young and Western. Mark broke the ice by buying some of their jam and soon we were all chatting away--in English, which most of them spoke. They were a jolly lot.

The order they belong to, the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, was founded just a few years ago, in Spain, and these sisters hailed variously from the U.S., France, and Austria. (The name sounds better in Italian--Sorelle di Maria Stella di Mattina--as well as less reminiscent of the Herman Wouk novel.) 

Once it became clear that a couple jars of jam was all we were willing to purchase, the nuns bid us adieu and climbed into a little white van. The order has 250 members in small communities around the world, including a convent in another nearby town, Fontanellato, that these nuns call home and where I presume they were headed.

I am such a social being that I feel a momentary urge to join virtually any group I encounter, even when they don't wear the kind of outfit that struck me as the height of glamour when I was a prepubescent fan of The Nun's Story. (Audrey Hepburn can make anything look glamorous.) Doesn't the nun-mobile look like fun?

I was curious enough to look them up online later. They are a contemplative but not cloistered order that believes in manual labor and physical fitness, which latter strikes me as very 21st-century spiritual aspiration. They live on charity and what they earn by making jam, sandals, and the like, so perhaps their lunch depended on Mark's jam purchase.

They maintain silence except during one meal a week, but evidently that rule isn't in force when they're selling their wares to the public. Indeed, their eager friendliness--Barbara dubbed one who was particularly insistent "the marketing sister"-- took me back to the days when the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas were glad-handing every young person they met on the street.

That is unfair to these nuns, I'm sure. And becoming a Morning Star sister undoubtedly entails a lot more than spending a weekend being love-bombed and handing over your trust fund. Which is perhaps lucky for me.

Later I reflected that there was really nothing all that exotic or even interesting about this series of little incidents--the wedding, the crowd in the cathedral, the nuns and their jam. The same encounters in California probably wouldn't have me reaching for my camera and thinking about writing it all down. I am reading Michael Pollan's book about psychedelics and he talks about how these drugs make even mundane things--a flower, a rain shower, ambient New Age music--seem brand-new, awe-inspiring, magical. Being in Italy makes me feel a bit that way quite a bit of the time. I hope I can hold onto that for a while longer. 



  

The kids come for a visit

The same evening that we returned from Southern Italy with our son in tow, our daughter and her partner arrived. Our son's girlfriend got here a few days later. It was the first time any of the young people had seen our place in Fidenza, and I was a bit nervous about how they'd react. Would they grasp the subtle charm of the town? Would they like the apartment?  Would they spot dirt, excessive eccentricity, or other signs, invisible to their aging parents, of our cognitive decline? Would they find the beds in the guest rooms acceptable? And could we all stand to share a single bathroom?

Our progeny immediately made themselves at home, settling into the two most comfortable seats in the living room and marking their territory by spreading around their footwear.

One thing that I knew would help make the visit work is our shared love of Italian food, preferably in large quantities. Their visit provided an excuse to revisit some of our favorite local restaurants: Ristorante Astoria for pizza, Ristorante Ugolini for pasta and pizza, Trattoria San Giorgio for their down-home prix fixe lunch, Trattoria Antica del Duomo for torta fritta and salumi, and Osteria Ardenga out in the countryside for good things too numerous to list.

The kids were even more enthusiastic about the food here than I'd hoped, and the area's fizzy red Lambrusco was a great favorite, too. They also bought a lot of cheese and salumi at the Latteria 55 downstairs. We consumed so much prosciutto crudo (the raw cured ham we in the States know as plain old prosciutto) that it probably would have been more economical to buy a whole leg and one of those big industrial slicers, too.

We did a little sight-seeing, to the Duomo in Fidenza (to see San Donnino's decapitated skeleton), the Baptistry in Parma, several of our favorite stores and supermercati, and the outdoor Saturday market.

Lina took this lovely picture of fresh borlotti beans.

I was amused to note that the same high spirits the children displayed when we first visited Fidenza with them in 1989--there was a lot of tussling, running about, and shouting of ribald insults--were still very much in evidence. Although they are successful grown-ups by all measures, sophisticated and highly intelligent, when we get together as a family, and when there aren't any outside witnesses, they still enjoy insulting each other and trying to put garbage in each other's pockets.

When they were little I usually found their bad behavior amusing, which is probably one reason there was so much of it. Today I still do; in fact, I haven't laughed so hard, at such silly things, in a long time.

We played several interesting table games, something we hadn't done as a family since they were tiny. I was surprised how much fun it was, even when I didn't win. But most of our time together was spent planning the next meal, consuming it, complaining about how full we were, and then taking restorative naps so that we could repeat the whole process again.

For reasons I can't explain, I have no photographic mementos of any of these meals. Apparently I was too busy eating to take any pictures. And since my tech-savvy children are very averse to having their photos posted in any kind of public forum, even one with only a handful of readers, I can offer no pictures of them, either. But trust me, they and their significant others make a very handsome group.

Somehow the bathroom usage sorted itself out pretty much effortlessly and the beds were acceptable, if not quite up to the luxurious mattresses that they have at home. Whatever signs of our decrepitude they spotted they politely didn't talk about (or maybe they did and it has slipped my mind).

All in all we had a lovely time with them. When the day came for them to go back to their own lives, I felt a bit envious of those old-fashioned Italian families where the children and grandchildren all live a few blocks from their parents' house and all have dinner together every Sunday. Realistically I don't think any of us have a high enough irritability threshold to endure that kind of closeness week in and week out. But for a few days it was wonderful to be together and to do it here. I hope they will want to do it again.

Another link in the chain

By luck and by design, our kids' recent visit to Fidenza coincided, more or less, with a significant birthday for Danny and the 48th anniversary of our wedding, so the many meals we enjoyed together had a celebratory overtone, further enhanced by fizzy wine and clinking glasses.

As it happened, we also got the new brass plate for the bell plate by our front door on the day of our anniversary. So Danny ceremoniously screwed it into place... 

... Lina snapped a commemorative photo....

and now we are linkd together even more permanently.

Natural wonder

While we were still down in Montagano a week and a half ago I went for a country walk one morning, trying to work off a little of the delicious Molisano food people kept plying me with (and that I kept saying yes to). I headed to Matrice, the next town over, which is about 45 minutes by foot from downtown Montagano.

Matrice is home to the Molino Cofelice, the mill whose owners gave us a great pasta-making class last summer and where we've enjoyed shopping for pasta, stone-ground flours, and other delicacies. This time I was amused to see they'd created a gigantic hay-bale couple to welcome visitors.

A few meters farther on, on Strada Provinciale 56 just past the intersection with Strada Statali 87, I noticed a cluster of hand-painted signs alongside the road identifying various trees, shrubs, and minerals. One explained that this was an area didattica--an educational area, open to all--and another proclaimed  (in Italian) "Dedicated to those who love beauty." I walked into what appeared to be an orchard with dozens of trees, each bearing a hand-painted Italian label--a cherry, a grafted apple with four varieties on one tree, a pear, a pomegranate, plus all kinds of pines, oaks, and other trees.

I returned later that day with Danny in tow and we toured the whole garden, a labor of love that veers hard in the direction of obsession. It features not only local plants but exotica such as gingko biloba and a giant sequoia that's already some thirty feet tall.

The proprietor, Rocco Cirino, and his wife, Gabriella, came out to greet us and eagerly showed us around. He's a retired geography teacher, she a retired teacher of accounting or economics (I wasn't quite clear on this noun), and the garden and its signs are his handiwork. Covering a hectare of land (about two and a half acres), it surrounds a rather grand house and tennis court that appear to have received rather less of Rocco's attention than he's given his educational project.

He showed me the Pond of Love where frogs mate every April and the couple introduced us to their dogs, Molly and Bianco, their large family of cats, and the goldfish in the Gabriella Pond, which surge to the surface when she feeds them. (You can see Rocco and his giant sequoia in this Italian TV clip about a prize honoring his commitment to the environment.)

That's Molly on the left. The way they pronounce her name is adorably Italian.

Despite his fervent environmentalism, Rocco is opposed to wind energy, at least when it comes to windmills in Molise, of which we'd spotted one or two. Several signs in his area didattica declare opposition to l'eolico selvaggio, savage wind. Windmills are fine when they're off the seacoast, Rocco explained, but they make too much noise to be put anywhere near where people live.

In the multi-room garage-cum-basement under the house, Rocco has put together his own natural history museum packed with maps and books, seeds and birds' nests he's gathered, and rocks and fossils he's found at local building sites.

Rocco with a woodpecker nest

Adding to the somewhat otherwordly atmosphere were several dozen larger-than-life papier-mache puppets lurking in the dark beyond the museum room. They are put together by local children and displayed in the town's annual Carnevale parade, Rocco told me, and the Cirinos have volunteered to store them for the town the rest of the year.

That's a map of Matrice in the foreground. Rocco points out it's shaped like a bird.

One of the cartoons looming in the background, alongside what I think is the mascot of the Matrice soccer team, is the U.S. president, For some reason they dressed him as the Fonz.

There is just no escaping him, I guess.

After giving us an extensive tour (in Italian--I don't think they speak much English), Rocco and Gabriella urged us to come in and have a little something. This is southern Italy, after all, where every encounter seems to start or end around a table. But we were already behind schedule to meet up with our evening engagement (it involved pizza) and we begged off rather than show up an hour late. Sometimes we are terminally American.

I suspect anyone else who stops by Rocco and Gabriella's eccentric but charming educational garden will be greeted with similar hospitality. So if you visit, allow plenty of time.

Tomato time

My Irish-American grandmother, the one married to my Italian grandfather, famously snarked that "Italians would eat shit if you put tomato sauce on it." I like to think that this was less a slap at Italians than a backhanded tribute to how good a well-made tomato sauce can be, a truth that has been validated yet again by the deeply satisfying tomato sauces we've been served over the last couple of days.

Danny and I and our son are currently back in Montagano, the little mountain village in Molise where my kids and I were officially registered as Italian citizens following our residence here last summer. Max wanted to return to get his Italian carta d'identita', and Danny and I were happy to come back to see our friends here and enjoy the beauty of the town and the surrounding countryside. And, of course, the food.

Molise is part of southern Italy, where tomatoes are an essential ingredient for all kinds of mainstay pasta, meat, and vegetable dishes, and where putting up your own tomatoes is an essential domestic skill. At an outdoor market in the regional capital, Campobasso, several vendors were selling tomato pulverizers and big bags of jar lids, and one stand had a gigantic electric tomato press and cooking pots the size of hot tubs. Which just goes to show that tomatoes are serious business in Molise, even for people for whom it isn't a business.

Tomato love is particularly strong in Montagano, which prides itself on the quality of the tomatoes grown here. They're Romas, firm and bright red and, according to the locals, unusually sweet and flavorful. All around the village are little plots where people grow tomatoes for their own use.

This little tomato patch was tucked into a hill at the edge of town...

...and this one was on the outskirts, on the road to the neighboring town of Matrice

We arrived just as tomato season was ending, meaning that everyone in town has been busy cooking, canning, and drying tomatoes for the coming year.

That includes our friends Rita and Maria. I don't know if we just happened to have become pals with the two best cooks in town, or if--as they claim--everyone around here cooks like this, but these two women and their husbands certainly know what they're doing. 

Rita and Fernando both work full time, but they also cure their own capicola and make their own wine, not as some sort of artisanal cosplay but because that's what you do around here if you want to eat well. Rita also puts up scores of jars of tomato sauce and peeled tomatoes that her family dines on all year long.

On Tuesday Rita invited us over for a lunch that featured the family's wine, salumi, and tomatoes. The first course was pasta e fagioli (white beans and short noodles) in a light, sweet tomato sauce. When Danny asked Rita if she added a little sugar to her sauce, she looked as if he'd suggested she might have used Red Dye #2. "No!" She waved a finger. "You only put sugar in sweets and coffee." When the tomatoes are good, she said, you don't need any added sweetener. And in Montagano, the tomatoes are good.

The next day we had lunch at Maria and Claudio's. Maria told us she'd just finished doing her tomatoes for this year, both peeled tomatoes and tomato sauce. Outside her front door were three crates full of home-canned jars of tomatoes. I assumed this was her 2018 tomato stash, but no, these were just extras she'd put up for her daughter, who'd be coming over soon to pick them up.

Maria's tomatoes figured prominently in the lunch she served us. First, fresh spaghetti in a tomato ragu different from Rita's, deeper and meatier. That's because before Maria poured it over the spaghetti she'd cooked her second course in it, a platterful of pork-and-veal meatballs, spareribs, and sausages.

Danny put the same question to her that he'd asked Rita: Does she add sugar to make her sauce so sweet? Maria was less of an absolutist. "If the tomatoes aren't so good, you add a little sugar," she said. "But this year the tomatoes didn't need any sugar. They were good."

After lunch she let me come up into her attic to see her tomato stockpile: hundreds of jars of Montagano tomatoes that Maria had peeled, cut up, cooked, and canned. She explained that since she and her family eat tomatoes in sauce or some other form every day, she needs a good supply.

In addition to the four hundred or so jars she made for this year, she's got a hundred or two more that she saved back from 2017, tucked behind a curtain. "I like having some extra," she told me, "in case anything happens."

No matter what disaster might occur, it's good to know that at least there will be enough tomatoes.

Fascism here and there

Looking for something Italian to read on the plane during my recent trip back to New York, I picked up a copy of Settimanale Nuovo, a magazine mostly about Italian TV and pop stars. Nice and thick, it was filled with photos of apparently famous people I'd never heard of, most of them in bathing suits, canoodling with others of their kind, alongside articles so brief that even my elementary Italian could get me through them from beginning to end.

Cliches take on a certain charm when rendered in Italian. In regard to a 50-something actress caught on the beach falling out of her bikini: "Sfoggia un fisico che molte giovani donne le invidiano" ("She sports a physique many younger women envy").About the lavish celebrity wedding between a model and a tattooed Italian rapper: "Il 'Si' sara' la ciliegina sulla torta della loro vita da sogno" ("The 'I do' will be the cherry on top of the cake of their dream life").

Also pictured in a bathing suit is Matteo Salvini, Italy's far-right deputy prime minister and minister of the interior. Salvini's is one of the loudest voices blaming Italy's troubles on an "invasion" of "illegal immigrant" "slaves," and he has openly consorted with neo-fascists, who are not hard to find in Italy. The bare-chested photo was part of Settimanale Nuovo's fawning feature about Salvini's summer vacation, which also included shots of the bearded Bannonite playing pinball in a T-shirt proclaiming "Offence best defence," grinning over a "Pranzo all'italiana" (a lunch of tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella), and taking a selfie "smiling beside a regular [that is, not illegal] immigrant."

I enjoyed the magazine's marital advice column written by a priest (shocker: he advocates staying together no matter what) and the story about two long-in-the-tooth pop stars who've both moved on to much younger partners. Now he wants to annul their long-dead marriage so he can marry his new sweetie in a church, and she's refusing because "I don't want to declare a lie."

But speaking of fascists, a few pages later I came on a gossip piece about Benito Mussolini's granddaughter Alessandra, also a far-right politician ("la pasionaria della destra"), also shown in a swimsuit, which makes me grateful that right-wing publications in the U.S. aren't displaying Trump in a Speedo. The article about La Mussolini focused on the fact that her husband, the head of the Italian state rail system, was convicted of buying sex from two underage prostitutes and sentenced to a slap-on-the-wrist year in prison. Photos showed the couple in swimwear on a beach vacation, and in one shot he is kissing her but she doesn't look like she's responding. "Frost on the beach," says the headline. The story reports that she's staying with him only "in nome dell'unita familiare" ("in the name of family unity"). "Forgive my husband?" she said. "What, are we crazy? You live, you don't forgive."

We've all been reminded recently that some supermarket tabloids in the U.S. have a right-wing agenda, and perhaps I inadvertently picked up an Italian tabloid with the same sort of tilt. Or maybe fascism is more mainstream here.

Fidenza is in what used to be called Italy's Red Belt, because of the one-time predominance of the Communist Party and other left parties in the area. In recent years Fidenza, like many Italian cities, has seen major influxes of immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, which as I've written before has turned this little town into a much more cosmopolitan place. I'd hoped that most people here saw this as a plus, and that the area's left-wing past meant that Salvini's Lega and other, similarly nativist right-wing parties didn't have much of a presence.

However, the other day we went to get a key made at a little hardware store near us. It is a funny little place, the kind of store where you can buy one nail (fished out of a bin) or a single scraper blade. While we were waiting for the proprietor to make our key, I noticed the calendar hanging on the wall right next to the counter.

Yes, that's Mussolini scowling in the foreground, and the slogan "Italy to the Italians," and below, in smaller type, a famous quote of Il Duce's: "We dream of a Roman Italy, wise and strong, disciplined and imperial."

We paid for our key and left, and we won't be going back. But I suddenly saw our street through the eyes of someone who might buy a calendar like that, saw all the changes, all the dark-skinned people and their children, the halal stores and the saris. To some the changes may indeed look frightening and unfair, and the fantasy of Italy in the good old days of Mussolini may have appeal, the days when they built the town swimming pool and everyone looked the same and Italy had its own (albeit small) empire of far-off people of color it was entitled to oppress.

And I wonder what we've gotten ourselves into.

Fidenza di Notte

In Italy the nobility of labor is honored on May 1, per socialist tradition, rather than this weekend. But the end of August suggests the end of summer and therefore calls for some kind of celebration.

Colored lights on the town hall--this was a party!

Fidenza responded to the call with Fidenza di Notte, a three-day festa in the town's main square featuring about a dozen food trucks and hours of cacophonous rock music, both recorded and live. Pam, Danny, and I checked out the scene on Saturday night and found the piazza full of happy people eating, drinking, and watching their kids run around like maniacs.

I, however, was depressed by one feature of the celebration: the omnipresence of English. Although I only just got here, and can barely speak the language, I am already outraged at the dilution of my rich Italian heritage by American schlock.

And not just at this event. The Italian for "street food," which is what this festa's food trucks were supposedly offering, is..."street food." If you see someone in a T-shirt with a slogan on it, the slogan is almost always in English. A scandal-sheet story about a high official caught patronizing underage prostitutes was headlined "Lo scandalo baby escort."

So I shouldn't have been surprised that the most popular fare offered by the food trucks that evening was that Italian favorite, the hamburger. There were Calabrese hamburgers (topped with eggplant parmesan), Piemonte hamburgers (topped with some kind of Piemontese cheese), and several other varieties I forgot to note down.

How about some Heinz for your fritta mista?

Meanwhile, the music blaring out of the giant speakers was all dusty American rock, sung in English with great fervor by the (presumably Italian) musicians. "Proud Mary," "Wait Till the Midnight Hour," and other drearily familiar tunes of our long-ago youth continued to serenade us even after we went home and went to bed.

What made all this even more depressing was that just a few towns away a different event was going on, the Festa delle Lumaca.

This was similar to the donkey-stew festa we attended a few weekends ago, except with a main course of snails. I was dying to go to the Snail Festival, but Romano (who likes eating snails) was out of town, and Pam and Danny were both emphatically not interested. 

So instead we watched people eat hamburgers for a while and listened to covers of 1970s American hits. Then we went to a bar and drowned our sorrows in "gin lemon" (not limone) and free pizza.

 On our way home Pam got one of the balloons covered in colored lights that we'd been admiring. That was a reminder that some changes are for the better--I never saw sensational balloons like that when I was a kid. 

But the way English seems to be ever more dominant here has me worried. Don't these people realize what a wonderful language their own lovely Italian is? I'm worried that by the time I can really express myself in la bella lingua, no one else around here besides a few (other) old ladies will even remember how to speak it.

At least they called the festa Fidenza di Notte, and not Fidenza by Night.