What's God's pronoun?

I'm a long-time member of a Twelve-Step group. I'm going to adhere to that world's traditions and not say which one, but the Steps are no secret, and it's well known that they include a lot of talk about a Higher Power, about "God as we understood Him," about "humbly ask[ing] Him to remove our shortcomings" and "praying...for knowledge of His will for us."

Lots of people have had problems with this aspect of the Twelve Steps, including atheists like me, but what I want to discuss here is an issue that has come up in many of the meetings I attend in California, particularly among some of the more earnestly feminist women in the fellowship. They don't object to God being in the steps, but they do bridle at all those Hims. Many insist on revising the steps when they read them aloud to say, for instance, "God as we understood God" and "God's [rather than His] will for us," so that the deity's gender remains unspecified. There has even been talk about trying to get the worldwide fellowship to officially change the Twelve Steps in order to eliminate all gender-specific pronouns.

The same fellowship exists in Italy, too, and there's a weekly meeting in Fidenza that I attend. It's all in Italian, of course, and one of the things that struck me right away is how impossible the gender-neutrality project would be in a country where every noun is either male or female.

Take the Serenity Prayer, which in English starts out, "God, grant me the serenity..." In Italian it's "Signore, dammi la serenita'..." because signore literally means "lord," which is conventionally how God is addressed. Nowadays signore is also the polite form of address for men and not just deities. So every week when we recite the prayer I inwardly chuckle at how indignant my California friends would be at addressing God as "Mister."

When I searched my photos for "god," this old photo of my dad came up. Patriarchy!

It isn't only God who's gender-specific. The prayer goes on to ask for the serenity to accept things I can't change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. In Italian each of these things is assigned a gender identity: serenita' and sagezza are feminine, coraggio is masculine.

So is every other noun in the language, and the logic of which word is assigned which gender is unclear. Milk (latte) is masculine and so are breasts (seni), although udders (mammelle) are feminine. Meat (carne) is feminine and so are machines (macchine). This is one of those things that you learn by memorizing, not by ratiocination.

Moreover, a woman can't be a scrittore, a writer. She's a scrittrice, a writer-ess. She's not a dottore, but a dottoressa. The de-gendering of words such as "actor" or "waiter" that's happened in English would be hard for Italian speakers to wrap their minds around.

I've read that countries with gendered languages adhere more closely to traditional stereotypes about men and women, and I can see why. In Italian a noun's gender affects so much in the typical Italian sentence that, for a novice speaker at least, gender has to be kept in mind all the time. Adjectives have to be in gender agreement with nouns, and so do plurals. Children are either female (bambine) or male (bambini), and if I want to say "We went to Parma" it's Siamo andate if it's Pam and me but Siamo andati if I went with Danny.

That's because when boys and girls or men and women are together, it's always the masculine form that predominates. So even though I have two sisters and one brother, my siblings are i miei fratelli (literally "my brothers"). Even though I have a daughter and a son, my children are i miei figli (literally "my sons").

One additional bit of confusion arises when using Italian's formal form of address. When you're speaking to someone older or more important than yourself, or just someone you don't know very well, instead of using "tu" (the informal second-person pronoun) and its associated verb forms you're supposed to use Lei, which also means "she." Maybe this stems from antique forms of address using feminine-gendered nouns of respect, such as Sua signoria, "your lordship," or Sua eccellenza, "your excellency. I've also read that it derives from Spanish court traditions, from the era when Spain ruled large parts of Italy.

Whatever the reason, someone working in a store, for instance, will say Cosa potrei offirLa? or Grazie a Lei! ("What can I offer her?" and "Thanks to her!") to a male customer, just to be polite. The femininity of this form of gentilezza, as well as its purported foreign roots, led Mussolini to ban official use of the formal Lei while he was in power, in favor of the older, supposedly more Italian use of voi, the plural "you," as the courtesy form.

When I told my Italian Twelve-Step pals that some Americans wanted to eliminate the male pronouns in the Steps, they were plainly baffled. Everything in their version of the Steps, everything in their world, is either male or female. It was hard for them to imagine how that could be changed, or why anyone would want to change it.

But perhaps change is on the horizon. There are regional elections coming up in Italy later this month, and the parties of the right and left see this as an important test of strength. Just before we left town I noticed this poster in downtown Fidenza.

I figured this gal for a right-winger just because of her Fox News makeup and bottle-blonde hair, and sure enough, she's a leader of Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the candidate of a coalition of right-wing parties calling themselves Popolo della Famiglia, "People of the Family." And the only political content on the poster is the battle cry No gender nelle scuole, "No gender in the schools."

That slogan notwithstanding, I don't think neofascists in Italy are on the same gender-neutral page as California feminists. I haven't been following Italian politics as closely as I should, but no doubt these rightists are trying to make political hay with the same "bathroom bill" homophobia that their counterparts in the U.S. have been hammering on. In the U.S. these right-wing campaigns have been all about emphasizing so-called biological gender, but in Italy the push is to not talk about gender at all. Here the bright line dividing the world into male and female must seem--to some, at least--omnipresent, eternal, all-inclusive, beyond argument. Not unlike God Itself.

Goats, cabbages, and other wordplay

Although I'm still painfully far from fluent, my Italian is coming along. I'm able to make conversation that's comprehensible, if not entirely grammatical, and I even successfully make jokes now and then.

However, understanding Italians when they speak at their normal clip is still way beyond me. I've realized that I have the same problems understanding Italian that my very hard-of-hearing husband does with English. If there's background noise, or the person is facing away from me, or if a regional accent is involved, I'm lost. I don't know the language well enough to fill in the blanks, the way I can in English. I need every bit of information I can get to even halfway understand what an Italian speaker is saying.

Eavesdropping is one of my favorite activities, and Italy should be paradise for eavesdropping, since Italians talk everywhere, all the time. Unfortunately, I can get only a random word now and then, never the gist of what other people are talking about.

I am, however, starting to learn the kinds of idioms that make a new language so much fun. Herewith a few of them:

Tocca ferro! "Touch iron," a phrase similar to our "Knock wood," except Italians seem to use it to ward off something bad rather than encourage something good. Like us, they will say it and tap their own head.

In bocca al lupo! A dialect phrase that means "in the wolf's mouth" is the way you wish someone good luck. A cruder version is In culo alla balena!--"in the whale's ass."

Lei ha fetta di salame sugli occhi. "She has slices of salame on her eyes," meaning that she is refusing to see something obvious. Prosciutto sometimes fills in for the salame.

La goccia che ha fatto traboccare il vaso. The Italian version of "the straw that broke the camel's back" literally means "the drop that made the vase overflow."

Terza giovanezza. "Third youth" is a polite euphemism for old age, similar to our "golden years." Although it sounds amusingly similar, it does not mean the same thing as "second childhood."

A cavallo by the sea.

A cavallo del secolo. "Astride the century," the Italian way of saying "at the turn of the century."

La verita' nuda e cruda. "The truth, naked and raw," or as we would say, "The whole truth and nothing but."

Avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca. The Italian version of "having your cake and eating it, too" is "having a full barrel and a drunk wife."

Salvare capra e cavoli. There doesn't seem to be an exact English equivalent for this one. "To save the goat and the cabbages" means to achieve two seemingly incompatible goals and derives from an ancient riddle about a farmer who has to ferry a wolf, a goat, and a crate of cabbage across a river. He can only take himself and one other item in the boat at a time and he can't leave the goat with the cabbage unattended, nor the wolf with the goat. Danny solved this instantly; I had to look up the answer online.

Mi formicola il piede. "My foot tingles, my foot fell asleep." This tickles me, so to speak, because the verb for "tingling" comes from formica, ant, and evokes little critters crawling around under your skin.

Mamma mia! I am delighted to report that Italians really do say this, all the time. It's adorable.

Architecture of death

Ever since I was a child, death and its trappings have fascinated me, perhaps because death was--is--so huge and so terrifying and yet so rarely talked about with any candor. Graveyards I found particularly intriguing, since they were not only full of dead people but also crammed with stories that were compelling yet incomplete. How did that long-ago mother feel about burying three young children, and how did they die? What happened to the man who passed away at the age of only 23? What led a family to erect a granite monument to their father but leave him all alone when their own time came?

I therefore would have been fascinated by the cemetery in Fidenza even if it had been just another graveyard. But it is also weirdly, wonderfully different from the American graveyards I'm used to.

Located just on the other side of the railroad tracks, a few blocks from our place, it is very large and has a variety of resting places. Unlike an American graveyard, Fidenza's isn't all graves but is made up of lots and lots of structures. There's a chapel, but most of the real estate is taken up with open-air breezeway sorts of things.

The majority of cimitero residents are tucked into niches in the walls of these buildings, a practice that echoes Fidentinos' evident fondness for living in apartment buildings rather than single-family houses.

There are miles of these niches, called loculi, and most seem well tended. (Although a few have notices taped to them asking any relatives to please contact the cemetery office immediately. I suspect a bill is overdue.)

When I visited the cimitero on a recent Sunday dozens of people were coming in and out, making visits to deceased relatives. The loculi are engraved with religious emblems, inspirational sayings, photographs, and expressions of love, as well as names and dates. Most are adorned with flowers as well, often artificial but frequently fresh. The cemetery provides ladders, watering cans, and brooms to help people keep their kin tidy.

There's a tiny Jewish section tucked away in the back. I had a hard time finding it again. 

All the spots along the sides are marked with just a number. Whether these are unclaimed plots or anonymous dead I don't know. I'll have to figure out who does.

Although almost all the cimitero's graves are decorated, few are very elaborate. This isn't anything like the famously over-the-top Staglieno cemetery in Genoa (which I am determined to go see in the not too distant future). Most of what's in Fidenza's cemetery is the opposite of spectacular, just sadly everyday expressions of grief and love.

This ode to motherhood caught my eye. "The poetry of life is composed of a single word: Mama."

Fidenza has been around for centuries, but most of the folks in its cemetery departed this mortal coil within the last thirty or so years. My friend Franca explained that Italians have a system for not letting the dead take up too much space.

Forty years after someone is interred, she told me, they open up the loculo and pull out the coffin. If it still feels heavy they put it back and give it some more time. If it's light, they open it up and move the bones--which is all that's left--into a much smaller box that can share another relative's loculo or... Well, Franca wasn't sure what happens if there aren't any relatives left to deal with the bones, but the authorities put them somewhere. Presumably there's a record of where they've been laid to more permanent rest.

I'd assumed this box I glimpsed when I was wandering the grounds one afternoon was empty, but now I wonder if it was someone in the process of relocating.

I have to say that I found Franca's explanation more than a little shocking. But when people have been living in the same place for thousands of years a system like this is probably necessary.

Most likely the 40-and-out rule doesn't apply to those loved ones who are housed in separate mausoleums, of which the Fidenza cemetery has dozens and dozens lining its streets.

The array of architectural styles is amazing. Some mausoleums look like offices, some like spacecraft, some like bank vaults or jewel boxes.

Do people pick the designs out of a catalog or are there architects that specialize in customized tombs? I hope I can find out.

 

Only a very few of them resemble what I would expect a mausoleum to look like.

I was particularly struck by how tall all of them are. A few weeks ago we went house-hunting with an Italian friend and saw a place whose ground floor ceilings were eight feet high, something you see often enough in U.S. apartment buildings. The realtor told our friend that legally the downstairs space could only be used as a garage, because the ceilings were too low for human habitation. Or at least for Italian habitation. Well, apparently even in death Italians can't live without at least 10-foot ceilings.

The cemetery also offers more conventional graves, and there are hundreds of those, too.

The wooden crosses seem to be new arrivals.

The headstones come later. But they're propped up with wooden boards...is that a temporary measure during the rainy season or some kind of budget alternative to the more firmly fixed headstones further back?

I'll end with a picture of a little monument near the front gate. The motto means, "To all the dead." I wish I knew the history of this, too.

There are so many questions about the cimitero that I'm dying, er, very eager to get answers to. Good thing I'll be back in a few months.

Anolini

Here they are, in brodo. Delicious. Happy 2020!

Holiday doldrums

One of our favorite restaurants in Fidenza is one I've mentioned before, Trattoria San Giorgio, a very unprepossessing place that serves a home-cooked three-course lunch, including wine, water, fruit, and coffee, for 13 euros. We are heading into our last week here and wanted to get one more San Giorgio meal under our belts, so we went by today for lunch. A sign on the door announced that they're closed for the holidays until next week.

How unprepossessing? When we first saw the restaurant we thought it was a soup kitchen.

Similar news greeted us last night when we walked over to another budget favorite, Ugolini Ristorante e Pizzeria. And two coffee bars we frequent told us that this week they're not serving hot lunches, as they usually do, just sandwiches and focaccia. So we had to make do with brie and eggplant on an Italian version of a bagel and a focaccia strewn with grilled red onions. Delicious, both, but not the full-blown lunch we'd been looking forward to.

It's not just restaurants that have closed up shop at year's end. Aqua classes at the town's covered pool are canceled till sometime next month. We've been going to a qi gong class in a little studio down the street, which in addition to being excellent for my back has been great for learning anatomical Italian. But that class has been off line for two weeks and will remain so until after we leave. Even the local supermarket is on reduced hours this week.

As you can see, it's qi gong for older folks.

As you can also see, I am by far the largest woman in class. Guess which shoes are mine?

Moreover, most of our Fidenza friends are on break, too. Some are going away to visit relatives or to have one of those travel experiences everyone's so keen on nowadays, and others are in town but busy with family. No wonder all the restaurants are closed--this week apparently everyone's eating at Nonna's house.

One of the few restaurants that has remained open is a brand-new Indian-Pakistani place, the only one in town. The food is good, especially the vegetable dishes; their baingan bharta (stewed eggplant) is the best we've ever had. But most of their business is takeout and the restaurant's empty tables, harsh lighting, and lack of heat make for rather grim dining. We hope they can hang on until the weather gets warmer and we come back.

Not wanting to spend our last week here eating Indian, we have been relying on take-out pizza and our own cooking. Today, in search of something appropriate for New Year's Day, we went down to the Latteria--which, incredibly, was open--and bought some anolini. We already have brodo on hand to serve them in, which we picked up a couple days ago at the supermarket. We'd been eyeing these slightly sinister-looking bottles of mixed-meat broth (chicken, beef, pork) ever since we first got to Fidenza, because their generic labels make them look a bit like medical waste.

We had some a couple nights ago with those tortelli d'erbetta we bought from Gelopasta last spring. (It's probably good we have to eat at home, since it's helping us clear out our freezer.) The broth was delicious--light but flavorful, a perfect complement to the pasta. I'm looking forward to ringing in the new year tomorrow with the rest of it and the anolini. Lucky, lucky us.

As I was writing this the piazza outside erupted into explosions and squeals. Not a terrorist incident, just free-lance fireworks to celebrate the midnight hour as 2019 becomes 2020.

Buon anno e auguri a tutti! Happy new year, everyone!