More superficial insights

We just spent a week in London, visiting various friends and relatives, which gave me a new opportunity to come up with some grand generalizations about national character based on hardly any evidence.

I couldn't resist comparing Fidenza to London, because both of them are foreign and unfamiliar enough to seem easy to summarize. True, one is a small town (population 27,000) and one is a sprawling metropolis (population close to 9 million), but London is as much an aggregation of villages as it is a city, and the part we were staying in, Crouch End, had a definite village feel.

The Crouch End clocktower

I don't know what adjectives characterize this sort of architecture, but there was a lot of it in the area, and I noticed that I had a visceral "Ooh, how pretty" response to all of it. Italian buildings of the same vintage are more austere, less cosy looking, more guarded.

Fidenza's old hospital

I love the way Fidenza looks, but it doesn't instantly make me think of Christmas and Mary Poppins and my childhood amid the fake Tudors in Westchester County, New York.

Maybe that's part of its charm.

Another thing that struck me is how Italians' rabid sociability shapes urban space. Maybe small British towns are as chatty as Fidenza, but I doubt it. Morning and evening--though not during lunchtime--Fidenza's streets are full of people blabbing away to each other, and even though I can't understand most of what they're saying, it almost always seems very friendly. People sit on benches and around tables at cafes or stand in the street and yak away. In London people talk to each other, but it seems to happen by appointment. London didn't feel unfriendly, but it didn't have the radiant social warmth that Italy seems to give off.

On the other hand, I have to give the Brits high marks for their green spaces. There are big, beautiful parks all over the place, and they feel like pockets of wild nature tucked into the city. Hampstead Heath, which we visited one day, is a particularly spectacular example.

Fidenza has parks, too, but they're small and very firmly domesticated, tidily symmetrical and tending toward lawns, benches, and play equipment. In my mind this is associated with the fact (it is a fact, isn't it?) that Italians tend to think that it's silly to put effort into growing things you can't use or eat. To rural people who had to labor hard for every bite of food they wrenched out of the earth, cultivating nature for its own sake must have seemed ridiculous, and Italy was until the 1950s an almost entirely rural nation.

Then there's the difference in food. I can remember when the only good food you could find in an inexpensive London restaurant was Indian, when English food meant canned beans on toast and greasy fish and chips. In the rapidly gentrifying precincts of Crouch End and vicinity there's now an abundance of "artisanal" eateries serving delicious updates of classic English food, like the extremely tasty version of beans on toast I had for breakfast one morning.

The beans came with two perfectly poached eggs and a dollop of avocado mashed with lemon. Lovely!

Where British cooking really shines is stodge. If I had to pick one cuisine to eat for the rest of my life, it would be Italian. But I have to admit that Italians are relatively weak in the sweets department. A few nice cookies, jam crostatas, and variants of tiramisu and English trifle are pretty much all there is. Every cafe in our London neighborhood, on the other hand, had dozens of different cakes, fruit tarts, chocolate confections, iced cookies, scones, buns, and on and on. (I'm really sorry I didn't take photos.) Pam thinks this is because Brits pretty much lived on tea and sweets for much of their history. In Britain high tea is, after all, regarded as a meal.

It's not only sweet stodge where Brits excel. We were lucky enough to be treated to a real English Sunday roast by a very gifted and sort of English cook, and it was spectacular. 

The roast lamb was perfectly cooked but it was really just the pretext for the rest of the plate: buttery mashed potatoes; roasted parsnips, potatoes, and carrots; heart-stoppingly rich cauliflower cheese...

  ...and--of course!--Yorkshire pudding. It was a fantastic meal but a bit like a full Thanksgiving dinner, something you enjoy but wonder if you'll ever recover from. (I'm not sure I have, and neither is my bathroom scale.)

Italians like starch, too. Who doesn't, after all, aside from keto-obsessed hipsters? But Italians would never dream of having a meal of spaghetti, polenta, bread, and potato gnocchi, which is what I imagine the Italian equivalent of that roast dinner would be.

We had a lovely time in London, but when we got back to Fidenza the buzz and clamor of our street was truly music to my ears. I was equally happy to be eating Italian food again, which seems like cuisine minceur after our roast dinner blow-out. My pleasure was tinged with sadness, though, because I knew we had only a few days--which would mostly be spent in packing and cleaning and saying good-bye--before it was time to head back to California.