Fashion notes

❢ You hardly ever see T-shirts here with Italian writing on them. It's all English, all the time, or some approximation of English, from pseudo-college sweatshirts proclaiming "BROOKLYN" to the nice young man we saw in Busseto with "Motherfucker" emblazoned on his chest. (We'd heard a lot about Italian men's closeness with their mammas, but this guy's flaunting of "mammismo" seemed a little over the top.)

When the Italian passion for bling and their love of English collide, the results are, well, striking.

At first I thought "Markup woman" was a reference to Golden State real estate, but it's actually the T-shirt brand. The "diamond" necklace detaches so you can wash the shirt. No, I didn't buy it.

❢ Here's a little family that nicely embodies a certain very popular kind of Italian style. Note the the glittering metal studs on the boy's 1980s-retro jacket and his faux-hawk haircut, the austere elegance of the mom's slightly clownish trousers, and the proud peacockery of the dad's track suit (the photo doesn't capture it, but the matching pants are just as loud as the jacket). Mama mia, that's Italian!

❢ Every year the Italian fashion deep state issues an edict declaring which color will be "it" for the next 12 months or so, and soon the market stalls are featuring lots of women's shirts, dresses, and jackets in that shade. Last year the top trend seemed to be white lace; white blouses with lace ruffles and white see-through lace jackets were all over the place. When we came through this area back in 2009, lavender was the must-have hue.

This year, if Fidenza's twice-weekly street market is any measure, the winner is yellow. 

I can't say that I've actually noticed a lot of women wearing this shade out on the street, although there are a lot of brunettes here and it certainly would look better on them than on me. Maybe they haven't had time to stock up yet. 

Contested liberation

April 25 is a national holiday in Italy, la festa della liberazione, marking the end of Nazi German occupation in the spring of 1945, the collapse of Mussolini's Nazi-backed fascist regime, and the victory of the Italian Resistance. Last year's Liberation Day was a sedate affair, with some band music, a few speeches in the town hall, and a bunch vintage World War II jeeps and trucks were on display in the main piazza.

Most of them were U.S. Army issue, because along with the Resistance, the holiday honors the American and British soldiers who helped defeat Mussolini and the Germans. It's strange to see people celebrating U.S. military force instead of protesting it, but in Italy memories of American soldiers handing out chocolates and helping the locals still seem to have a lot of power.

This year's festa was a much bigger affair. Loud engine noises on our street, usually a pedestrian-only thoroughfare, drew us out onto our balcony. We saw a massive column of military vehicles heading down Via Cavour, as though Fidenza were being liberated all over again.

The vehicles were kitted up as if it were still 1945, and so were the people riding in them. Most of them seemed to be pretending to be American liberators, although there were some pretend Britishers, too.

Since they were in fact Italians, several of them took the opportunity to liberate some gelato.

We walked over to the piazza, where we saw even more vehicles, even more cosplay, and several references to the Allies' success at rescuing Italian art that had been looted by the Germans. (George Clooney was nowhere to be seen, however.) 

Given that most of this part of Fidenza was destroyed by American bombers during the war (the town was and is a railway hub), everyone seemed amazingly pro-American as well as pro-Resistance. And also, one assumes, happy that Italy's fascist government was defeated.

That made me wonder how the Italians who still cherish some nostalgia for the good old days of Il Duce--there seem to be plenty of them--feel about this annual celebration of his defeat, and of the Resistance, which was led by Communists and other leftists. (The right tended to be on the other side.)

Sure enough, they don't much like it. The leading right-wing party here is la Liga, the League, and its head, Matteo Salvini, the country's interior minister, has been known to make comments along the lines of "Mussolini did some good things." A few days ago Salvini announced that he wouldn't be taking part in Liberation Day activities and would instead join an anti-mafia event in Sicily. 

April 25 is about "parades, partisans, and anti-partisans, fascists and communists," he declared. "It's 2019 and I'm not much interested in the fascist-communist derby. I'm interested in the future of our country and the liberation of our country from the Camorra and the Ndrangheta," two deep-rooted crime organizations. 

Other League politicians said they'd also be too busy with other pressing matters to appear at Liberation Day events. And critics point out that Salvini has consistently shunned Liberation Day celebrations ever since he became head of the League. "But today's news," one of them wrote, "is the fact that the minister of the Republic is taking a position of neutrality and equidistance between those who celebrate the struggle for liberation and those who want to memorialize fascism." An Italian version of "good people on both sides," one might say.

Some day soon, will a 21st-century version of the "good war" have to start up all over again, more than 70 years later? As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Where we're at

One thoughtful reader pointed out that it would be nice to give everyone some idea of where in Italy we are.  Here's a map of Emilia Romagna, the province we're in, showing where it's located in Northern Italy. 

And here's a more detailed map of the province, showing Fidenza (just a bit northeast of Parma), some of the other towns, and the Po River. The land here is flat, because this is all river delta, a fact we appreciate every time we go for a walk.

It is thanks to the Po that we have plenty of humidity in the summer and plenty of dense fog in the winter. It's also the reason this has been a very rich agricultural area for centuries, producing an abundance of wheat, dairy, wine, and pork and a traditional cuisine--Parmesan cheese, Parma ham, cheese tortelli in butter, bubbly wines--that takes full advantage of that richness.

I've started reading Giovannino Guareschi's Mondo Piccolo stories, which are set in the rural Po Valley. Early in his first book he extols the un-spectacularly special character of the wide, flat Po, "the only respectable river that exists in Italy," he writes. "Rivers with self-respect develop in plains, because water is stuff made to remain horizontal, and only when it is perfectly horizontal does water retain all its natural dignity. The falls of Niagara are freaks, like men who walk on their hands."

A cure for melancolia

Thursday, our first full day here in Fidenza, dawned way too early. Thanks to the nine-hour time change I was wide awake at five in the morning, bone tired after only five or six hours of sleep but unable to burrow back into unconsciousness. This put me on more or less the same sleep schedule that Pam and Romano normally seem to follow, so at 7:45 we ended up going to breakfast with them across the street at La Strega, our favorite cafe.

Danny at La Strega. He was in a good mood as soon as we arrived in Italy.

A lovely cappucino and a brie-and-arugula sandwich on a rich, salty roll chipped away at my jet-lag-induced gloom. So did watching the Italians all around us gab and gesture to each other, with as much panache as if someone had ordered them all to act like Italians.

But what really pried me loose from my nostalgia per la California was going food shopping.

After breakfast Pam and Romano invited us to join them on a walk to the pastificio a few blocks away. Filled pastas are a required feature of most holiday meals here, and our friends were picking up a few kilos of frozen tortelli--the local pasta specialty that looks like slightly undersized ravioli--for Romano's family's Easter dinner. The place was at the end of a rather grubby courtyard we'd walked by hundreds of times without ever noticing the "Gelopasta" sign on the gate. (Gelo means frost.)

Apparently the majority of Gelopasta's customers are restaurants, but they sell to civilians, too. Pam said the pasta isn't perhaps as delicate as in the best restaurants--that is, the ones where Grandma is still in back rolling out the tagliatelle by hand--but the prices are reasonable and the quality is very high.

Gelopasta's production facility, in the back of the courtyard next to all those cars, turned out to be two small, sparkling-clean rooms with a lot of equipment and freezers full of pasta. The business was started in 1978 by two Fidenza matrons named Adele and Paride. Their web site, www.gelopasta.it, boasts that anyone can come in and inspect the place because "our only secrets are Signora Adele's recipes."

The founders' business strategy was to use only high-quality local ingredients and remain true to the area's long-standing culinary traditions. It seems to have worked. "Only this philosophy enabled them to convince people that filled pasta could be bought ready-made," their web site says, "overcoming the general skepticism." Such is Italians' culinary conservatism that they were still wary of ready-made frozen food as late as 1978, decades after Americans began inhaling frozen TV dinners.

The firm offers the two most traditional local versions of filled pasta,  tortelli erbetta (with ricotta and chard) and di zucca (sweet pumpkin). They also make plenty of other things, including tortelli filled with potatoes or truffle-flavored cheese or spalla cotta, a local corned-beef-like specialty, plus round Parmesan-filled anolini, potato gnocchi,  and little nubs of spinach-potato dough called chicche della nonna ("Grandma's goodies"). 

Pam and Romano were buying tortelli erbetta and di zucca for Easter, plus a version with a filling of cheese and culatello, a fancier and vastly more expensive variant on prosciutto di Parma. Danny and I got a half-kilo each of the erbetta and the tortelli di culatello, and a third package of tortelli with a radicchio filling. The radicchio ones had a sell-by date only two weeks hence (everything else is good till sometime in the fall), so they gave us a second half-kilo of those ones for free.

Romano and one of the Gelopasta pastaioli. That's a half-kilo of tortelli he's holding.

We dropped the tortelli off at home, in the freezer. Then Romano drove us out to the big Conad supermarket outside of town, so that we could stock up on some necessities without having to haul them back on foot. Pam and Romano had some shopping to do, too.

Danny and I got some good bread, a chunk of pork for a stew, beautiful carrots and fennel and lettuce, a leek, a cabbage, and some peppers for a vegetable soup, eggs, milk, yogurt, and wine, a total of two large, heavy bags stuffed with good things to eat. I felt a surge of joy. And as I surveyed all the delicacies that we didn't buy--rabbit roasts, hunks of provolone and mozzarella, focaccia with zucchini, beef-tendon salad, big bunches of bitter chicory and sweet chard--I was glad I'd have a whole three months to enjoy as many of them as I can manage. 

That evening we had some of the radicchio tortelli, sauced with an excellent ragu bolognese that Danny had made and stored in the freezer when we were here last. It was a blasphemous combination--these tortelli are supposed to be eaten "drowned in butter," not sparingly anointed with meat sauce--but it was delicious nonetheless. The tortelli lived up to Pam's recommendation, and the two-euro white wine was delicious. So was the salad of startlingly fresh fennel and lettuce.  

Embarassingly enough, this appears to be all it takes to make me happy. I still miss my friends in California and the rest of my life there, and I'm glad I will eventually be going back to them. But the prospect of living in Fidenza for a while now seems thoroughly delightful. How could I have ever thought otherwise? 

Nostalgico

We left California on Tuesday and arrived here in Italy the next morning. Sometimes these long flights don't seem so onerous, but the Milan-Amsterdam leg this time, on a venerable 747, felt like it went on forever. I think the main reason was that the plane's movie technology was pretty dated--bad sound, too-dark screen--and the selection wasn't that great, either.

Movies have become my favorite way to avoid thinking about being trapped in a metal can, breathing the same air as hundreds of other people, for ten or twelve hours at a time. On this flight I instead found myself mostly reading a novel that I felt compelled to finish but found, in places, incredibly annoying (The Nix by Nathan Hill), while worrying about Boeing's corporate ethics and the clots that I could sense were forming in the deep tissues of my immobilized legs.

But enough whining about the aggravations of air travel, one of the world's most overworked topics. We survived our time in the air, got to Fidenza on Wednesday afternoon, found everything in good order, had a quick nap, and then met Pam and Romano at a bar on the piazza for a drink and some free pizza. The evening air was warm enough to sit outside with a jacket, and the town arrayed around us was just as charming and unself-conscious as it was when we left six months ago.

Nevertheless, I was feeling a panicky kind of homesickness for California--for my many friends there, my chamber music groups, my water aerobics and zumba classes, the clothes in my closet, all the details of an existence already tidily, satisfyingly structured, and conducted in a language in which I can effortlessly say exactly what I mean in just about every situation. 

Fidenza is wonderful, Italy is wonderful, but here I'm facing the slow, hard work of building a life for myself, one that includes chamber music and exercise and friends, all those things that make me happy. And I have to do it in Italian, a language I speak like a mental defective and can barely understand when it's spoken by anyone more fluent than I. I feel like someone who's studied the violin for half a century and now suddenly finds herself having to perform on an oboe.  

The fact that I'd had about three hours sleep in the previous 24 hours no doubt contributed to the hopelessness I felt about all this. But it was a pleasant kind of hopelessness, softened by the wine and the weather and the pleasure of being with our dear friends again. This isn't such a bad place to be homesick in.