On not voting

Some may be wondering if or how I myself voted in the Fidenza elections of a few days ago. The answer is that I didn't, because unfortunately I couldn't. Although I am an Italian citizen, and therefore entitled to vote (even though I'm also a citizen of the USA), currently I can't vote here in Fidenza, much as I would have liked to.

In Italy citizenship is arranged around one's comune, one's home town, which is defined as where you were born or, if you move, where you reside. My comune is Montagano, the tiny village down south in Molise where my Italian "blood" and that of my children was legally recognized two summers ago. In effect, I was born as an Italian there, and now it is my comune, even though I live in California and (slightly less than half the year) up north here in Emilia-Romagna. And because my legal residence is still California, as far as Italy's concerned I'm a Montaganesa who's registered as living overseas.

Montagano and a fellow Montaganesa

Now as an overseas Italian I ought to have been able to vote (by mail) in the European Parliamentary elections that also took place this week. I wasn't paying attention to all this back at the beginning of the year, at which time, as I understand it, the Italian consulate in San Francisco should have sent me my ballot. But no ballot ever arrived, and I didn't notice, so I lost my chance to vote from abroad.

Alternately, I could have gone to my home comune last week and voted there, both for the European Parliament and the Montagano mayor. In fact, a month before the election Montagano sent me a postcard reminding me that I could come and vote. It was sent regular mail and arrived in California about three days before the election, so a little late to make travel plans, even from within Italy. Anyway, the nine-hour trip from Fidenza didn't seem worth it. I am civic-minded, but not quite to that degree.

As a result, I was unable to do anything but watch from the sidelines and wring my hands. It surprised me how much not voting bothered me. It seemed anti-social, like littering or spitting in the street. I want to be a good citizen, in both my countries.

A Fidenza street, where I do not spit.

And the winner is...

The results of the election held in Fidenza on Sunday were announced the next day. The tallies from the European Parliamentary elections were posted early on, and for those of us who aren't looking forward to a return to the 1930s, they were pretty discouraging. Across Italy the right-wing Lega, headed by Italy's Trumpish interior minister, Matteo Salvini, came in number 1, with 34 percent of the vote, while the center-left social-democratic Partito Democratico (PD) polled a discouraging 22 percent. Add in the other nationalist parties (Forza Italia, Fratelli d'Italia und so weiter) and the far right's share of the vote comes scarily close to 50 percent.

Here in Fidenza (as in much of northern Italy, historically the Lega's stronghold) the Lega did even better. In Fidenza it racked up 40 percent of the vote, while the PD received only 25 percent. Combining the Lega's local votes with those for Berlusconi's Forza and the Fratelli, over half of Fidenza voters chose the far right. Pretty grim.

These results were posted early on Monday by the Fidenza administration

All day yesterday we waited to hear the bad news about the mayoral election. Would the PD's Masari be turned out in favor of the Salvini-ish Scarabelli?

Late in the afternoon, the results went up on a screen set up at the front of the town hall. They were also available on the internet, but despite the rain a lot of people came by to see them in person, as it were.

Usually these town elections happen in two phases: the initial vote, and then the two most successful candidates have to go back "to the urns" (the Italian equivalent of "the ballot box," presumably because back in Roman times votes were collected in large jars) for a run-off contest. Rarely does anyone get a clear majority the first time around.

But Masari did, with a stunning 58 percent of the vote. According to La Repubblica, it was the first time in the town's history that a mayor won election on the first ballot.

In an interview with the paper, Masari noted that last year Salvini held one of his innumerable rallies in Fidenza and promised to return after the election to greet the town's new mayor--clearly hoping that the winner would be his party's man.

"I'm expecting him," Masari said. He added that since he's eager to talk to the interior minister about the national government's withdrawal of funding for one of Fidenza's schools and its new police barracks, "I'm also available to go to Rome."

That evening the sound of singing and excited chatter floated up from the street. Masari's election office is just across the way from us, and despite the lousy weather his supporters were celebrating.

I'm no Nate Silver, but it looks to me like quite a few of the same Fidentini who voted for the Lega and the other right parties also voted for Masari. Perhaps they wanted to cast a symbolic vote against immigration, against the status quo, against Europe--the European Parliament is more symbol than governing body, after all. But when it came to how their own town was being run they were apparently happy to keep the status quo in place.

The size of the right-wing vote here isn't entirely a surprise, either. I have heard complaints from several people in town that "we"--we in Fidenza, we in northern Italy--are being taken unfair advantage of by immigrants, by the crooks and layabouts in southern Italy, by the European Union bureaucracy. The tone is similar to the grousing about "welfare queens" and "illegals" that we in the United States heard during the Reagan-Clinton years. It hasn't yet blossomed into the venomous hatefulness we're experiencing now in the Trump era, at least not among the people I've encountered (and have been able to understand--this is a ridiculously small sample). But unless something changes, it seems all too possible it will. 

Not-so-local politics

Italy is holding elections today, Sunday, for both the European Parliament and local municipal contests, including a mayoral race here in Fidenza. And the anti-immigrant anxieties that are fueling the popularity of the nationalist right all across Europe seem to be at play in our little town, too.

Polls are open at all schools today, from 7 a.m. till 11 p.m.

Matteo Salvini, the head of the right-wing Lega (League), is the most prominent right-wing voice in Italy. He's reminiscent of Trump not only in the naked racism and authoritarianism of his rhetoric, but also in his disdain for actually governing. One newspaper calculated that despite being Italy's interior minister and co-head of the country's government, Salvini has spent all of 17 days so far this year actually at his desk. The rest of the time he's been touring around Italy, attending ribbon-cuttings, festivals, and political rallies, keeping his supporters energized and getting his face in as many Facebook posts and media stories as he can.

Salvini's Lega has united with several other rightist parties, including decrepit former prime minister Silvio "Bunga-Bunga" Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the far-right Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy), whose candidates in the European parliamentary elections include the presumptuously named Gaio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, a great-grandson of the fascist dictator. 

The same gang has a horse in the Fidenza race as well, a Salvini-ish-looking young man named Andrea Scarabelli. Like Salvini, he's allied with Forza Italia and the Fratelli. The alliance's office is just down the street from us.

I can't claim to have followed the local race very closely, because my ability to read newspaper Italian remains limited, and I haven't discussed it with any but my closest Italian friends because I just don't want to know if anyone I know is voting for these people.

There are three other candidates in the local race besides Scarabelli. The candidate from the Five Star Movement and another fellow who seems to be running a kind of "Third Way" campaign don't appear to have much support. The most serious contender is the current mayor, Andrea Masari, who is running for another term. He represents the liberal Partito Democratico, which is more social-democratic than the U.S. Democratic Party but seems to have similar difficulties convincing people upset about unemployment, austerity, and inequality that the party's liberalism toward immigrants isn't treachery and that it has something to offer the disgruntled masses beyond the same old same old.

I gather Masari and his team have done a good job in Fidenza, and he is running on a record of enhanced street lighting, better garbage recycling, and other civic improvements. In a move that seems a bit heavy-handed, just a few days ago--that is, a few days before the election--the city installed several dozen trees and shrubs along a block or so of our street, part of a drive to enhance the city's downtown, which is suffering from competition with a shopping mall on the outskirts. 

This is what most of our street looks like...

...but as of last week the next block has become a garden.

As I've mentioned before, Fidenza now has quite a few residents from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, and that's causing plenty of anxiety and resentment among some long-time Fidentini. People question whether these newcomers are really refugees or just economic migrants, competing for already scarce jobs and getting public benefits for food and housing. I saw one Facebook post a while back from a local worthy complaining that there were too many places in town selling "kebabs and shushi" instead of traditional Italian food. (Such concerns aren't data-driven: in fact there are only a couple of kebaberies, zero sushi restaurants, and at least ten Italian restaurants within a few blocks of our apartment in the city center.)

So even though Fidenza's mayor won't have the power to do much of anything about Italy or Europe's immigration policies, the issue appears to be a big part of  what's driving voters' choices, locally as well as in the European parliamentary contests.

By law Friday was the last day of political campaigning; in Italy everyone gets a day to cool off before it's time to vote. All four candidates held final rallies that evening. Masari's, in a local park, reportedly attracted some three hundred people. The other candidates held their events in the main piazza, where I happened upon them. Five Star had a table and some balloons but very few supporters, and I didn't spot the other minor candidate at all. Scarabelli had a bigger crowd, perhaps because his get-together was held outside a bar where a singer was crooning "Hotel California" and other oldies. I couldn't tell who was there because of political allegiance and who was just having a drink in the piazza. 

That's Scarabelli in the center, in the brown shirt, er, jacket. 

I was slightly scandalized to see the Lega candidate pouring prosecco for all comers. Is this how people get votes in Italy? But Romano tells me that wine and food were served at Masari's rally, too. This is just how it's done. How very American of me to be surprised by it.

Yesterday the local paper ran a summary of the candidates' remarks at their respective events. Scarabelli talked vaguely about "security" and how Fidenza needs to "improve" and thanked his supporters for having "the courage to show their faces," perhaps implying that the Salvini-ites aren't so popular around here. Masari, for his part, cited new jobs and new public investment his administration has already brought to Fidenza and pledged, "We will continue to work hard, without ever asking 'Where do you come from' but always 'What are you willing to do for our community?'"  

But the newspaper's editorial on "Why it's important to vote" hints at the deeper issue. It warns of "an invasion from the South," claiming (without citing any sources) that Africa will have some four and a half billion inhabitants by the year 2100, while Europe will have only 700 million by then. It concludes, "These are the practical reasons that should inspire our vote." 

No wonder my fellow left-liberals are worried. We'll all be watching the election returns with hope and a lot of trepidation. 

Happy ending

Andrea the plumber came yesterday, as promised.

He brought with him the new toilet and went to work taking out the old "water" and installing the new one. Then he hauled the old one away, all for a modest fee.

We now have a beautiful new toilet that flushes like a champ. Here it is in the act of slowly, quietly closing. Doesn't it look like it's smiling?




We are smiling, too. The three-week wait no longer seems quite so annoying.

Adventures in plumbing

Last month, not long after we arrived in Fidenza, our toilet started running. Not just a discreet dribble, but a loud and semi-permanent flush. Usually you can fiddle with the mechanism in the tank--the Italian equivalent of the familiar ballcock--and the running stops. But in this case the only way to stop water from pouring through the toilet, like some sort of anti-soothing water feature, was to turn it off altogether.

I assumed we'd have to call a plumber. But I'd just called our favorite idraulico, the ever-helpful Rodolfo, to discuss putting in a new second bathroom, and learned that an injured shoulder had him out of commission for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, Danny has somehow accumulated all sorts of know-how about how to fix all kinds of things, including bathroom fixtures. All we had to do to flush the toilet, he explained, was to fill a metal mixing bowl with water in the sink and dump it into the bowl. This seemed counter-intuitive to me--we're putting more in there?--but it worked. We could get by like this for a few days until one of Rodolfo's colleagues could come and fix our gabinetto.

Now this toilet is probably half a century old, original to the building, and we've never much liked it. The inside of the bowl is shaped in such a way, with the hole way in the front,  that, to put it delicately, pretty much anything that goes in there leaves its mark. Moreover, the water pressure was weak and the pipe going out to the main is small. Compared to the Japanese Toto toilets we have in California, this one seemed unpleasantly low-appetite.

Once we started flushing by hand--that is, by pouring bowlfuls of water in ourselves--we noticed that the toilet looked vastly cleaner, just because it was finally getting a decent amount of water flow. That settled it: we didn't want the toilet fixed, we wanted a new one.

There's nothing my husband likes more than shopping for home goods of any kind, from spaghetti to major appliances. Off we went to a nearby emporium to see what was available. Danny eagerly gathered data.

Man on a mission

Surprisingly few of the toilets were compatible with our old-fashioned plumbing. It appears that when Italians redo a bathroom, they want to tear the whole thing apart and start over, with tankless toilets and high-gloss finishes.

I really get a kick out of Italian style, even if I'm not (yet?) Italian enough to embrace it.

We connected with Rodolfo's colleague, Andrea, and he sent us to a second bathroom emporium, where we found a toilet that met our requirements, including a seat with a quiet-close lid. (Once you've lived without hearing that annoying crack! every time someone uses the bathroom, it's hard to go back.) At first we were surprised by how very expensive it was. Then we realized that the salesman had included not only a toilet, but also a bidet, because here you evidently never have one without the other. We convinced him that the bidet we already have was perfectly functional and that a toilet was all we needed.

This was shortly before our trip to New York, and the salesman assured us the toilet would be delivered to Andrea and ready for installation in ten days. Perfect--we'd have it put in as soon as we got back.

You can guess where this story is headed.

Where we're still at.

It is now more than three weeks since we first ordered the toilet. After a series of prodding calls and messages, Andrea told us that the toilet had arrived, but not the seat. That was a week ago.  Today, after I sent him a slightly hysterical and probably ungrammatical message, he promised he'd be around tomorrow afternoon to put the toilet in. But it's not clear from what he wrote to me whether it will have a seat or not. At this point we don't much care.

I keep remembering what Pam told us when we first moved here: the only way to survive in Italy is to take a very Zen attitude about how long things take and the impossibility of ever finding out why what you want can't possibly happen when you want it to. Here is another aspect of Italian style that Danny and I can appreciate in the abstract but are finding exceedingly difficult to adopt ourselves.

Today in history

As I walked through Piazza Garibaldi today on some errand or other I noticed this sign posted on the front of the town hall.

Today, May 13, is the 75th anniversary of the Allied bombardment of Fidenza, which pretty much destroyed the center of town (it was a significant rail hub) and must have killed any number of civilians. There were no parades of vintage military vehicles and no one showed up dressed up as G.I. Joes and Janes. Instead the occasion was marked only with a rosary in memory of the victims and an afternoon mass. (Church and state are not separate in Italy.)

The announcement notes that this anniversary "reminds us that war does not distinguish between friends and enemies, the guilty and the innocent, but strikes all indiscriminately." I read this as an implicit rebuke of those who idealize the swaggering bellicosity of Mussolini and of others of his ilk, then and now.

Hiatus

My apologies to my small band of faithful readers. Danny and I went to New York for a week and my blogging fell by the wayside. Then we returned to Fidenza with colds, a further reason to postpone taking up the blogging burden. Our runny noses are due either to being with so many members of the family or to the whipsaw effects of the repeated time changes. Just when we'd begun sleeping through the night in Italy we traveled to Eastern Standard Time and were six hours off again, and once we'd settled into that time zone we came back to disrupted sleep in Italy.

My mom continues to amaze us all with her almost supernatural staying power. She moved into a new apartment in the same building, which turned out to be bigger than her old one and with an actual river view. Despite the inevitable disruption, we were all happy with the move. (Me especially, since my New York brother and sister have been saddled with most of the work of sorting and arranging what Dot wanted to keep and disposing of the things she didn't. I love you guys!)

Our daughter had flown in as well, so the whole nuclear family was on hand for dinner at our son's place. To think this guy used to be someone who thought putting a Pop Tart into the toaster oven was as much cooking as he ever wanted to do... He served us hamburgers, and they were easily the most impressive burgers I've ever had, and the most delicious. And they must have taken him several days of work.

He made the buns himself (they were gorgeous as well as tasty), made the ketchup, ground the meat (hangar steak, rib-eye, and short rib), and made the "special sauce" (a cream-and-leek-based version of the Big Mac condiment).

He cooked the burgers sous vide, each in its own little vacuum bag, then deep-fried each of them for exactly 10 seconds to give them a sear. God, they were good.

But wait, there's more. He'd also whipped up his own high-end version of Velveeta, using some chemical wizardry to create a shiny, easy-melting "cheese food" that was made with gruyere and cheddar instead of whatever reject cheese Velveeta is made out of. And a cucumber salad. And a big green salad. (I'm sure his lovely domestic partner had a hand in at least some of this extravaganza, too.) Plus there were wonderful salted chocolate-peanut-butter cookies for dessert, homemade, of course. And did I mention the two of them also made the dishes the food was served on?

He did not, however, make his own Tater Tots.

While this dinner was a show-stopper (and a bit of a gut-buster), the other big meal of the week charmed with its nonchalance. For my birthday, my brother and his wife hosted a party for the whole family, including our mom and her helper, plus several dear friends, including a couple who came all the way in from the wilds of Connecticut for the occasion.

My brother showed once again that he can whip out a terrific dinner for a dozen people as easily as if he were slapping together a sandwich. He and his wife are somehow able to throw any kind of party, intimate, large, or huge, without any visible signs of stress, and do it really well, from the opening drinks and hors d'oeuvres to the post-prandial table tennis on their dining-room table and the late-night conversations over the last of the wine (or beer). I can do a dinner party, too, but there's a hell of a lot more ulcerating involved.

The dinner itself was great: salmon with mustard-and-dill sauce and with teriyaki sauce, rigatoni with pesto and tomatoes, spinach with garlic, a big salad, and plenty of bubbly. (I'm afraid I was too busy enjoying the latter and gabbing with everyone to take photos of the food, which, trust me, looked as good as it tasted.) And for dessert my daughter took up the considerable challenge of cooking in someone else's kitchen and made her and my favorite layer cake, the "Hurry-Up Caramel Cake" from The Wooden Spoon Cookbook. It's a bit heavy, full of brown-sugar flavor, and sweet enough to make your teeth sing. High-calorie heaven!

Here I am, about to (successfully) blow out my candles.

To have so many of those I love feeding me so well, and being such caring people, and gathering around for my birthday...all that left me with very little to wish for. Except perhaps a quick cure for jet-lag.

Back in the swim

When we were last here, in the summer and early fall of 2018, I signed up for fitness classes at Fidenza's huge open-air pool, determined to keep up my two- or three-times-a-week water aerobics regimen. I was less concerned about health or "feetness" (as the Italians call it) than about burning enough calories to keep me in the same blue jeans while consuming pasta, pizza, wine, and Aperol spritzes at an Italian-holiday clip.

Unfortunately, my mother's ill health meant that I flew back to New York several times during our stay here, which disrupted my exercise schedule as well as my biorhythms generally, and aqua classes were one of several things that slid off my to-do list. Back in California, it took almost six months to get rid of the ten pounds I put on during that high-anxiety, low-activity stretch in Italy and New York.

Getting back into aqua classes was therefore at the top of my task list when we got to Fidenza a few weeks ago. I wanted to be able to keep eating like a tourist without having to invest in a series of new wardrobes.

The "why" of my commitment to exercise

At this time of year the classes are held indoors in Fidenza's "piscina coperta," the covered pool, so Pam drove me out there. It's a third again as far as the open-air pool I went to last summer, almost two kilometers (a little over a mile) from where we are in the center of town. It's out in what used to be countryside and is now a neighborhood full of apartment buildings, which is what most of newer Fidenza--that is, most of Fidenza--is like.

The pool is behind those green-trimmed windows. It's part of a big municipal sports complex, with soccer fields, a track, and a huge gym devoted to basketball. Ah, socialism...

No unauthorized photos allowed at poolside--I pulled this off the internet.

The pool isn't as immense as Fidenza's open-air pool, but it's plenty big, and they have a full schedule of activities.

Pam helped me get signed up. I had to pay about $150 for 20 classes, plus a small fee to join the Italian Sports Center, whatever that is. I also had to present a letter from my doctor in the U.S. certifying that I am capable of "recreational physical activity." Luckily I'd learned about this the last time and had a signed and translated letter in hand. Now I was ready to get back in the water.

There doesn't seem to be an Italian word for "fitness"

Not having a car, I've had to walk to and from the pool for classes. The walk to the pool isn't bad, when the weather's nice, which it has been. The walk home is more of a challenge, because after one of these classes the last thing I feel like doing is walking a mile plus. However, there isn't any other option--Uber and Lyft don't exist here, and the only bus runs infrequently--so walk I must.

The first class I attended was aquagym. I guessed this was similar to the water aerobics I'm familiar with in California because the other women who arrived early for the class all looked to be closer to my age bracket, most with the bright red-maroon hair that so many Italian ladies develop once past their 50th birthday. 

The shallow end of the pool, where the class was held, was almost up to my chin, so not all that shallow, which my knees were grateful for since we were doing a lot of jumping and bouncing. The instructor appeared and cranked up the music, an EDM mixtape with a "wumpa, wumpa, wumpa" beat that echoed all through the hall. I didn't recognize the instructor at first, but as soon as she started bellowing, "Uno, due, tre..." I realized she was the same terrifyingly energetic Amazon who'd taught the classes I attended last summer, although now minus her summer tan. 

By now a few younger women had joined us, and there were about 18 of us running, jumping, and scooping in the water. Unlike the classes I go to in California, this one offered no rest breaks and no opportunities for conversation, just nonstop frantic activity. As we churned away, the air in the huge hall seemed to get rapidly hotter, thicker, and more chlorinated. When I'd first seen the schedule I'd been disappointed that the classes were not the hour I'm used to, but only 45 minutes long. Now, as I huffed and puffed through the moves, I was grateful.

On Saturday I went in for "aquatrek." This consists of running on a treadmill in the water, interspersed with kicks, jumps, and arm scoops, to the same booming soundtrack. The class consisted of only two young women, me, and the instructor, and the pace was even more grueling. The whole idea of tossing a big metal treadmill into a pool seems mad, and I kept worrying that I was going to either slide off the back or, if I moved forward, tip the whole thing over. But it is certainly a strenuous workout.  

This is obviously another internet photo, but you get the idea. 

A few days later I turned up for aquabike. This time everyone in the class was half my age or less, with the exception of one leathery gal whose ropy muscles marked her as a serious athlete. We had a different, slightly less intimidating instructor, but the class nearly killed me. It probably didn't help that I'd already walked a couple miles that morning, in a quest for a new toilet (about which more anon), plus the mile and a bit to get to the pool. Five minutes into the class and my legs already felt like they'd had quite enough.

A stock photo. I have yet to see a male at any Fidenza aqua class.

Thanks to the water I was able to sneak some time sitting down when we were supposed to be standing in the pedals, and I didn't even make a pretense of going faster when the instructor flogged us on with cries of "Accelerare!" When she stopped after 40 minutes, turned the music down, and led us in a few minutes of stretching, I was almost tearfully grateful.

My fellow water aerobics enthusiasts in California have become a tight-knit group that often goes out for coffee together and even on occasional road trips. So I wondered if the aqua classes in Fidenza, in addition to providing exercise, would also give me a chance to meet some Italian women. But whereas the post-class locker room in California is abuzz with conversation, the one in Fidenza is quiet as a tomb. Which is strange, since in every other situation Italians seem to like nothing better than to talk and talk and talk to each other.

Is it fatigue that keeps the aqua women of Fidenza so quiet? Or being in a shameful state of undress? (A sign in the shower room warns, "It is obligatory to wear a bathing suit when children are present," a rule that certainly doesn't apply in the El Cerrito showers, where exposing children to a bunch of naked old women, and vice-versa, is regarded as a valuable life lesson.) Or is it the disturbing presence in their midst of an exhausted, graying foreigner who keeps looking around yearningly, hoping to make friends?