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.