The past isn't past

Italy is well known for being a place where tradition and the past hold powerful sway. Not only is everyone around here happy to eat the same five or six kinds of pasta all the time, for all time--tortelli di zucca, anolini, and so on--but they live in a landscape full of things that are in fact no longer there.

Caffe' Whatchamacallit

For example, there's a nice pasticceria where Danny and I often have a cappuccino after our qi gong class. It's the Caffe' Madeleine, and they make very nice pastries as well as excellent coffee. But when I proposed meeting Pam there once, she looked puzzled. After some discussion of exactly where this cafe she'd never heard of might be, her face cleared. "Oh, Santi's!" she said. Santi was the name of the family that owned the place decades ago, but according to Pam that's still what everyone calls it.

Similarly, many public buildings in town go by the names of what they used to be. The old classical high school is now a community exhibition space called the Ex Liceo (the former high school).

Christmas lights go up on the old high school.

A variety of community groups and municipal offices are housed in a former Jesuit monastery, the Ex Gesuiti. And the community film theater where I go to the movies every week is in what used to be the municipal slaughterhouse, now known as the Ex Macello. 

The Ex Macello includes a gym, a clubhouse for seniors, and the mycinem@ theater on the right.

In the U.S. we would probably not call a community theater "the Former Slaughterhouse." If the place wasn't sold off to real-estate developers and turned into a mall or a parking lot, it would be named after a popular mayor or whoever gave the most money for the theater seats. No one would even remember that it used to be where cattle were butchered.