mercoledì 25 novembre 2009

Say Formaggio

Once upon a time, many moons ago, I promised to write a post about Italian cheese. The other day, after being baffled by the range of delights in my local French cheese shop, where I spent 30 euros on 5 smelly concoctions that I didn't even know the names of (to justify myself, mostly to my mother, I should say that I was going to a dinner party and had offered to bring the cheese course!), I decided that Italian cheese was a slightly more approachable subject than French. So here is the post – Formaggio for Beginners.

The two most famous Italian cheeses must be mozzarella and Parmesan. The best mozzarella is made from buffalo milk. Good mozzarella has a delicate, creamy flavour, but in the bad versions the taste quickly becomes bland. I've often been surprised by how good basic supermarket mozzarella can be, but it varies a lot, so experiment!

Parmesan is the matured version of Grana Padano. The name “Padano” comes from the Pianura padana, or valley of the Po river, where it's made. Interestingly but unrelatedly, the name La Padania was appropriated by the Lega Nord as a possible name for a separate northern Italy and the area sends sports teams to competitions for nations that are not officially recognised. Grana Padano cheese is common in Italy but in the UK, most people have heard more about Parmesan, the real version of which tastes nothing like the dry flakes we used to sprinkle from a tube on to spaghetti bolognese when I was a child in the 80s. Italians do sprinkle it on pasta, soup, risotto and pretty much any primi piatti that aren't made with fish, but you can also eat it in small chunks by itself or, even better, with slices of Parma ham.

Asiago is another one of my favourites. Like mozzarella, it's mild, so when it's good it's very good but when it's bad it can be tasteless, and you find it everywhere. It exists in an aged form, but I never tasted it.

Provolone is also common. It comes in two kinds, dolce and piccante. The texture is quite like Emmental and the dolce version tastes similar. “Piccante” means “spicy”, but it's not hot, it just has more of an aged flavour. I never particularly liked it either, but maybe that's just personal taste.

Mr A and I used to call Scamorza “penis cheese”. On reflection, this is pretty gross, but it was only because the first ones we ever saw did bear a striking resemblance to penises. Actually, it's a smoky cheese that tastes delicious and melts nicely on to pizza.

Toma and Taleggio are two creamy mountain cheeses. Most of the Taleggio I had was stronger than the Toma but the texture is similar. Like all the others, these are cows' milk cheeses. I'm not a huge fan of goats' cheese (caprino) and didn't come across much sheep's cheese (pecorino) but the different regional varieties of both could make up a blog post in themselves. Interestingly enough, when I looked up the origins of all the cheeses I ate regularly, they were all relatively local to Milan – mostly from Lombardy, the Veneto or Piemonte – so the shops and markets in the South might well sell a completely different selection. I plan to go there again eventually, and I promise to do some research!

lunedì 23 novembre 2009

Why I Pay for Italian TV

With my internet package here in France, I get high definition TV bundled in with the phone line and internet connection that are the reasons the package is actually worth paying for for me. There are 150 TV channels included, but nevertheless, I was more than delighted when I realised that for a bargainous 3 euros per month, I could add the Italian “bouquet”, which gives me access to Rai 1, 3 and 3 and 24 hour news just as if I were in Italy. Given the reputation of Italian TV, it may come as a surprise to you to learn that anybody, least of all somebody born and bred outside of the borders of the Bel Paese, would actually pay to watch it, but there are two reasons why I do.

The first reason is that French TV is pretty bad. It doesn't have the same number of high-quality programmes that you get in the UK, but, unlike Italian TV, it doesn't give you much opportunity to laugh at it rather than with it either. Imagine Italian TV made boring. That's French TV.

The second reason is just one programme: L'Eredità. L'Eredità alone is worth 3 euros a month. It's a quiz show, on at 7 o'clock every weekday evening, where contestants answer questions in a range of formats, being eliminated as the show progresses until only two participants are left. These two then answer questions to “inherit” each other's money until eventually the winner takes it all.

The quality of the questions varies. Some are pretty stupid but some are amusing and quite a few are really interesting. One of the rounds is a guessing game that is actually really difficult, and overall, the questions are interesting enough to keep you watching and not make you despise the contestants too much for their stupidity when they get it wrong.

L'Eredità is also good for language learning because, as well as involving a wide range of vocabulary, the questions appear on the screen as you watch, helping you to understand the basics of what's going on. After the contestants response, there is a longer explanation of the answer that is a bit more complicated to follow.

As Italian TV programmes go, L'Eredità is surprisingly inoffensive. There are fewer flashing lights than in your average quiz show (and possibly even your average nature programme in Italy) and the host's skin is not too ridiculously orange. The contestants look like normal people and do not seem to have decided to appear purely in the hope of nabbing an evening gig at Berlusconi's villa. Just to add that hint of Italy, however, there is this incongruous moment where the glamorous female assistants have to dance before going on to report on relatively well-researched answers to the questions. It's bizarre.


The way that things worked out, I haven't found myself back in Italy as often as I expected to over the past few months and I feel like a bit of a fraud for carrying on this blog when I don't live there any more. I'm not ready to give it up just yet though, so let's just hope that La Rai and a few trips in the next wee while will give me enough to keep writing about.

mercoledì 7 ottobre 2009

Ritorno a Milano

I went back to Milan last weekend for the first time since I moved away in August, what seems like seven very long weeks ago. As I was expecting, it was an emotional weekend. Mr A and I broke up when he was here in the summer and visiting Milan really brought home to me the reality of what had happened. Needless to say, that hurt.

At the same time, though, the visit was a very positive experience. I was worried that I would have grown apart from my friends since last year and that without working together we would have nothing to talk about any more, but in fact that wasn't the case at all. On Friday night I slept at my friend S's house and we stayed up until 3 in the morning catching up, then on Saturday night a big group of us from my old work went out for pizza and drinks (which turned into pizza, profiteroles, ice cream... and drinks) and had a great time.

On Saturday, I stayed with two other friends and we spent most of Sunday making ravioli from scratch:




The whole process took about 4 hours, so I ended up scarfing my bowl in about 20 minutes and running off to the airport, but it was worth it just for the fun of the cooking!

The weekend was tiring and all too short, but I was glad that I went. Lots of the good things about Italy are good in France too, but Italy has this kind of exuberance that makes you smile and makes you cry in a way that no other country I know of does. Like when I was in the supermarket and the woman in front of me paid with a handful of small coins. “Della moneta – che bello!” rejoiced the checkout assistant. Or when after all those hours in the kitchen, we finally sat down to eat and realised that the pasta was delicious and we had made it all ourselves. Or when my my plane took off from Malpensa as night was falling and I caught a glimpse of the mountains rising out of the clouds into the darkness and realised that despite everything that had happened recently, Italy, that other love of my life, was still going to be there for me.

lunedì 28 settembre 2009

Muse on Italian TV

I have been cracking up tonight over this clip of one of my favourite bands taking the mickey on Italian TV. Aside from the obvious joke of the guys switching places, the fact that the presenter manages to get so excited about a band that clearly knows nothing about (unless she's doing an excellent cover-up job) is hysterical. I was also laughing at her for going on about how having an English language band was "so international" ("international" is cooler than a mint granita in Italy right now, but you don't have to do much to achieve the cachet), but it turns out that Matt Bellamy has an Italian girlfriend (boo!) and the album was recorded between Milan and Como. Why did I ever leave?

lunedì 31 agosto 2009

Stresa in the Sunshine

I realised that after my long story about sly old ladies skipping the queue at the train station, I never posted anything about my actual day in Stresa.

I've probably said this before, but I love Stresa. It's as if they combined the best of Italy and Switzerland and put them into one little town surrounded by stunning mountains and lakeside scenery.

That day two weeks ago, my first goal was to do something energetic, so I got the cable car up to Mottorone (Ok, so not that energetic!) and set off for a bit of a hike. This is where I finished up:








If I hadn't been starving and short of water, I would probably have done the 2.5 hour walk back down to Stresa, but under the circumstances I decided that it would be better to go back to the cable car. In the interest of diversity, I decided to go back a different way, and it turned out to be steep, exposed and definitely longer than the way I came. The sun beat down and the sweat dripped off me and the half hour back to the cable car seemed endless. I arrived looking as though I had been swimming and was too embarrassed to sit in the restaurant to eat, so after mopping myself down in the toilets, I bought a sandwich and found a place to hide among the trees to eat it.

Then I got the cable car back down to Stresa and jumped straight in the lake, which is probably what I should have done at the very beginning. Hiking at midday in 35 degree heat is not good for your health!

sabato 29 agosto 2009

The Post Office Again

Just in case anybody was thinking of sending parcels from an Italian post office and was utterly terrified after reading about my experiences, I thought I would post the end of the story here. Four of the boxes arrived within 3 days with most of the stuff intact (although one broken mug did lead to a whole other adventure).

The other one arrived almost 3 weeks later, when I had given up hope and was assuming that customs officials had taken umbrage at or a fancy to the bottles of wine that were carefully wrapped and included in the package. When I went to collect it at the post office, I was surprised to be given a completely different box, smaller than the one I posted and covered in Chronopost International labels. Some of the stuff was missing and a lot of it was broken. A lot of the things were newly wrapped in cardboard. A lot of the things were covered in red wine.

I'm assuming that since so many of the things were broken and since they had taken the trouble to repackage the whole lot that this was somehow the post office's fault and not mine, but there was no explanation, so who knows?

Incidentally, one of my friends posted boxes and boxes full of old clothes from Italy and wasn't even asked at the post office what was in the parcels.

martedì 18 agosto 2009

Buying a Train Ticket

I came back to Milan on Saturday, and with a day to spare before getting the train back to Paris, I decided to go to Lake Maggiore on Sunday. Before I even got on the train, however, I found enough material for an entire blog post.

The trains to Lake Maggiore leave from the Porta Garibaldi train station, which has over 20 platforms and lots of departures, even early on a Sunday morning. Despite the frequency of the trains, however, the ticket office was closed. This would not have been a huge problem if two of the automatic vending machines hadn't been broken, meaning that anyone who hadn't bought their ticket the day before had to either use the regional ticket machines, which only accept coins, or the one main line ticket machine, which took bank notes but could only give change up to 4.95.

This initial hurdle eliminated many participants before the ticket buying test had even really started. Many wandered off towards the bar, which was desperately asking customers to pay for their 85 cent coffee using something other than a 50 euro note. The rest of us passed on to the competitive part of the exam: queueing like an Italian.

The queue was long. I arrived and took my place behind a guy with a suitcase. An elderly-ish woman came and stood next to me. Possibly even slightly in front of me. Despite the fact that she was invading my personal space, I sidled a little further into the space between me and suitcase man.

At this point I should say that I am normally nice to my fellow citizens. I give up my seat on the bus, let people with one item in front of me in the supermarket and would have no problem letting someone who was about to miss their train go in front of me in the ticket queue. Where I am perhaps not so nice, however, is in the fact that I like to have a choice about it. If old ladies try to cheat me, there is no way they are getting my place in the queue. Being British, however, I am incapable of turning to people and saying, “Excuse me, I was here first.” Instead I sidle, refuse to make eye contact, and spread my feet and elbows out in an attempt to fill the space that they are trying to steal from me. So, for several minutes, that is what I did.

Old Lady Number 1, however, was an amateur compared to the next one that came along. Peering over her glasses, she pretended to be examining the machine in an attempt to understand how it worked. She sighed a lot and addressed a few questions to the crowd. (“What do I do? Does it take banknotes? Can I buy a return ticket?”) A man near the front of the queue who was clearly a better person than me answered all her questions.

“Oh, signore, do you think you could help me buy my ticket?”

And with one neat move, there she was by his side at the front of the queue.

The fun didn't end there though. The machine refused to accept people's banknotes. It spat out their cards and cancelled their transactions. People at the back of the queue were offering change to people at the front in a desperate attempt to get their tickets on time. Old Lady Number One began to feel concerned. She asked Gentile Signore to help her. Gentile Signore looked worried. He had a train to catch.

“Don't worry, I can help you,” I said. We arrived at the front of the queue and, after a couple of attempts, bought first her ticket, then mine. She thanked me, and I smiled back.

“My pleasure,” I said. And it was.

Apparently, living in Italy can bring out the wartime spirit in all of us.

In the Veneto




When I first came to the Veneto, it was not my favourite part of Italy. After the Amalfi Coast, the lakes, and the rocky cliffs of Liguria, its plains seemed dull and the mountains on the horizon far more enticing than the flat fields that surrounded me.

That was before I discovered thunderstorms and the big, dramatic skies that come with them.

Shooting Stars

Last Wednesday I discovered a new Italian tradition. For an hour and a half, from nine thirty until 11, I lay on a sun lounger in the dark, staring up at the sky and looking for shooting stars. It's traditional to do this around Ferragosto (the 15th August), when there are many of them in the sky. I saw about 7 or 8, but the children I was with (aged 7 and 10) managed to see “20 real ones and lots of fake ones.” I was distracted some of the time by trying to convince Child 2 (aged 7) that there weren't any wolves lurking in the garden ready to come and get them, and some of the time by convincing him to pretend to be the wolf to scare his brother, and some of the time by laughing so hard whenever we tried to do wolf calls in the dark.

It's something everyone should do. Lie down in the dark, stare at the night sky and watch as the stars multiply as it gets darker and your eyes adjust to the lack of light. Watch the aeroplanes, some low and some far, far away and be amazed as every so often a shooting star zaps across the sky. It feels like watching the universe go by.

And if all that sounds a bit too exaggerated, make sure you have a wriggly and slightly scared seven year old next to you to bring you back down to earth.

Turandot



On Friday night, we went to the opera in the Arena di Verona. Tickets for a plush red velvet armchair in the stalls cost a fortune, but if you are prepared to sit for five hours on a hot stone step, you can get a seat at the top of the arena for under 20 euros.

I went to the opera in Verona last year, to see Rigoletto, and, although it was worth going just for the experience, it wasn't necessarily something that I was desperate to repeat. Turandot was different though. It had all the over the top extravagance that you expect from opera, with a gorgeous set, an exciting story, an enormous cast and fantastic performances. Sometimes the stage was so busy that I didn't know where to look – at the opera star singing the arias or the acrobats and dancers who were creating a virtuoso backdrop to the story. Like everybody else in the arena, I was looking forward to hearing 'Nessun Dorma', but I didn't expect it to be so entrancing that it sent shivers down my spine. The poor orchestra didn't even get to the end before the whole of the audience burst into applause for the singers.

I like the idea of going to the opera in an enclosed theatre, where I would probably see and hear what was going on better, but the atmosphere in the Arena was something special. Sitting there with my wonderful Italian friends, in a building constructed by one of the world's great civilisations, listening to music by a native composer, I was reminded that there are many things about Italy that are hard to beat.

Bardolino


On Sunday, we did actually make it to Lake Garda. We went to Bardolino, a town pretty much like all the others on the eastern shore of the lake, with pretty streets, clean water to swim in and lots of extremely civilized tourists. We were particularly taken with this mother duck and her one little ducking, who very kindly stopped to preen their feathers just a couple of metres away from us on the beach.

There was also this little leaning tower just behind the harbour. Almost as good as Pisa!

Vicenza


On Saturday, one of the other camp tutors and I went to Vicenza, which is a small town about 40 minutes on the train from Verona. We were planning to go to Lake Garda, but it was cloudy, so we went to the trian station and picked a destination at random, realising after we had bought the tickets that we should probably have checked if there was a train to come back. Luckily, there were plenty, and in fact our mistake turned out to be buying tickets for a EuroStar train (in Italy, that's just a fast train, not necessarily the one that goes under the channel!), which cost 3 times as much as the return journey on a Regionale train, but Vicenza was worth it. It's famous for its architecture, with the Basilica and many of the palazzi having been designed by Palladio, but we were also pretty impressed by the peace and quiet and the cold cucumber soup and wine at 80 cents a glass in the restaurant where we had lunch.

Summer Camp

After precisely 5 days in France, I was back in Italy. It was cold, grey and rainy as the train rushed its way across France but as soon as we crossed the border, the train slowed down and the sun came out. I spent only half an hour in sticky Milan before I was on my way out in to the bella part of Italia again, on my way to Verona.

For the past four years, I've worked every August at an English summer camp for kids in a small village in the Veneto. I started when I was a student, but despite the fact that I now have a real job, I keep going back because these two weeks in August are an experience of everything that is good about Italy. In the morning, we teach crazy Italian children useful phrases like “Bananas of the world, unite!” and in the afternoon, we have long naps, soak up the sunshine and stroll around Verona feeling smug about not being tourists.

The best part of the whole experience is that we stay with the family in their amazing 100 year old farmhouse where the water comes from a spring and the stairs going up to my bedroom are made of cool, bare stone. The house is so big that up until this year I didn't even know that the room that I'm sleeping in existed. We are ridiculously spoiled by the Nonna, a proper Italian grandmother, who cooks amazing food using fresh vegetables from the garden.

In fact, the children at the camp this year are calmer than they have ever been before and the past ten days have been ridiculously easy. Every so often they entertain us with questions such as “Why are your eyes that funny blue colour?”, “Are you Scottish or Moroccan?” (In this part of the world all foreigners are either Scottish camp tutors or travelling salesmen from Africa, apprently) and (my personal favourite) “What world are you from?” Obviously, we are partly there to widen the children's horizons, but at the same time, their innocence is nice. Where else would you find 13 year olds who don't know what Facebook is and are still happy to spend a week of their holidays singing the aforementioned banana song?

giovedì 30 luglio 2009

Moving to Paris 3

Well, I made it! And so did 4 out of my 5 boxes, in only 2 days. I would be able to track where the other one was on the internet except that the link to the tracking page is broken.

I'm going to keep posting here about my exploits in Italy (i'm not finished there yet!) but stories about my new life in France can be found at http://parisatmyfeet.blogspot.com. Enjoy!

mercoledì 29 luglio 2009

Moving to Paris 2: Last Night in Milan

After the ordeal of sending my parcels yesterday, my cleaning schedule was about six hours out. This was a problem, as Italian landlords generally expect you to do a very thorough job before you leave, sometimes going as far as repainting the walls. I didn't manage that, but I did stay up until 2 am cleaning the oven, washing the floor and trying to get a reading from the gas meter, which is cunningly positioned so that you can only read it if you have a head no bigger than a Barbie doll's. I did, however, take a couple of hours off for aperitivo in the lovely Brera district, one of the few parts of Milan that is actually beautiful, with J. and L.. We found a great bar with friendly staff and a huge and varied buffet. It's on the corner near Lanza metro station and is called, ironically, 'The Old Post Office'.

Moving to Paris 1: The Post Office

This post comes to you from Artesia train 9242 'Alexandre Dumas' from Milano Centrale to Paris Gare de Lyon. I am sitting in a comfortable seat with a view of the French Alps outside the window. I have a small bag under my seat and a suitcase and a rucksack sitting neatly in the luggage rack at the end of the carriage. That accounts for around a quarter of my personal possessions. The rest are … somewhere else, and, courtesy of the Poste Italiane, I have no idea when I'm likely to see them again.

The Post Office in Italy is almost legendary. In the UK, people pop into the post office for a few minutes in their lunch break, or maybe allow half an hour or so to complete a complicated transaction. In Italy, you take the morning off work to go.

Knowing that sending my things from Italy to France was never going to be simple, I started doing my research months ago. Most of my friends were away from Milan for the summer, so I was expecting to be on my own. Companies like DHL and FedEx were expensive and posed the unusual but awkward problem of being able to get my stuff to Paris faster than I could get there myself, so I decided to use a service provided by the Post Office called Paccocelere that would ship the things in around 2 days. After reading about it on the internet, I went to the main post office in my area to check that it was indeed the service I wanted.

Alarm bells should perhaps have started ringing when the man behind the counter had never heard of Paccocelere and had to check the post office website himself to find out what it was. However, he confirmed that I could use it to send “personal effects” such as clothes and books and gave me a large bundle of forms to fill out so that I could prepare my shipment in advance, and I went home to book my trip to Scotland and my train to France based on a timescale of 2 days and allowing a few extra days in case things got held up. I wasn't able to leave any more time because I need to go back to Italy at the beginning of August to work at summer camp, but I figured that was pretty reasonable.

I was expecting to have to take the boxes to the post office in a taxi because nobody I knew who was still in Milan had a car but luckily (perhaps the only lucky part of the whole story) my friend S. came back for the weekend and offered to take me in her car. We planned to go to the post office about eleven and meet another friend, J., for lunch around one, allowing what seemed like a very sensible two hours to complete the process, but we got held up by S. sleeping in and me running out of parcel tape and taking over an hour to fill out the three forms that had to accompany each of the five boxes in triplicate. As instructed by Mr Post Office Man, I wrote “effetti personali” on the customs declaration and S. said I could use her address as the return address on the ominous part that said “In case of failed delivery a) return the shipment to me at my expense or b) abandon the shipment.”

We decided to go for lunch first and then tackle the post office, and poor J. innocently offered to help. So, around 2.30, we headed to the post office and between the three of us, managed to pile up the boxes in a small space by the door. I took a number from the machine and, after a surprisingly short wait, was called to the counter and explained what I wanted to do.

The woman, who we will call Ms Slightly Too Efficient, looked at the customs declaration.

“You can't just put 'effetti personali'. You have to be specific. What's in the boxes?”

Confident that I was not attempting to ship grappa, explosives or child ponography, I replied, “Just clothes, books and some kitchen equipment. I'm moving house.”

“Let me just check that for you.” She typed a few things into the computer. “You can't use Paccocelere to send these things.”

She turned the computer screen towards me and sure enough, there it was in bold red letters. You are not allowed to send your own used clothes into France using Paccocelere.
Another post office worker, who we will call Ms Know It All, confirmed that this was indeed the case.

I started to panic. Was I not allowed to take any clothes to France at all? Would I have to arrive with nothing but the clothes on my back and kit myself out with an immediate trip to the Rue de Rivoli? It turned out, however, that you can send used clothes by road freight but not by air.

The mind boggles as to what spectacular fusion of French and Italian bureaucracy might have produced that rule. (A friend later told me that Germany has an equally bizarre rule that says that you can't send anything wrapped in polystyrene into Germany for environmental reasons, despite the fact that the Germans are perfectly at liberty to manufacture and export polystyrene themselves.) Road freight, however, was not enough to solve my problem by itself, however, because by the time the stuff arrived, I would be gone. Nevertheless, I collected another pile of forms to fill in and went to talk to my friends about what to do. J. lives outside of Milan and S. was going away on holiday again that night, so there wasn't a lot they could do to help, but S. suggested going into school to phone my landlord in France and see if I could send the shipment to his address instead of mine.

So we left poor J. at the post office guarding the boxes and S. and I went to school. I spoke to the landlord, but he was going on holiday. I phoned FedEx to see if they could store the things for me for a day but they couldn't. Another friend, M., offered to send a FedEx shipment from the school for me once I was gone, so I phoned them again but they couldn't do a pick up at the right time. Time was running out. School was closing and J. had been at the post office for almost an hour. The only solution was for my landlord to ask one of my neighbours to help me after I arrived. So I decided to send my worldly goods off into the blue.

By 4 o'clock, we were back at the post office. My three extremely tolerant and understanding friends helped me to fill out the new forms in record time, all three of them scribbling away around a tiny table, and eventually I was once again called to the counter. To Mr Post Office Man Number One. He almost told me to send the shipment using Paccocelere, which I would have willingly taken the risk and done (rules are flexible in Italy) but then I was directed to another counter where Mr Post Office Man 2 was waiting. He too almost let me use Paccocelere, and without the customs declaration too, but Ms Know It All was looking over his shoulder and said accusingly, “These are the people who wanted to use Paccocelere before but they can't because there are old clothes in the boxes.” So the ironically named “Quick Pack” road-freight service it was. (Perhaps tellingly, Mr POM2 had no idea what “Quick Pack” actually meant.)

The computer system was down so he had to write my receipts himself with a pen that J. lent him because why would a post office supply their staff with pens? Halfway through the transaction, he told me that, despite the fact that this was a large Post Office operating a banking service, I couldn't pay with my debit card. Having heard this before, I had had the presence of mind to bring my cheque book. Nope, no cheques either. Only cash or a Post Office bank card. Which would have been OK if the cash machine had been working when I went to the bank in the morning, but it wasn't. And only my own bank would let me take out enough money at once to pay for the shipment.

But once again, S. was there to save me. “I'll pay. I've got cash,” she said.

“Have you really? “ I said in disbelief."It's going to be about 500 euros." But she did. Italy being a third world country that has somehow managed to slip its way into the EU and the G8*, she had received her child benefit in cash that morning.

There was one last hurdle to overcome. When all the boxes were finally weighed, labelled, customs declared and paid for, Mr POM2 gave me a handful of “receipts”. Being the bottom carbon copy of three from a top copy that had been written by hand, they were almost illegible and certainly didn't look like anything I could hand to my new employer to claim as expenses. I politely asked him if it was possible to have a receipt for the total amount that somebody with less than second sight would be able to read. Instead of either giving me one or politely saying “no,” he decided to take this as an insinuation that he hadn't done his job properly, was planning to steal my money and was consigning the packets to the fires of hell. Sally and Maggie being fluent in Italian, the whole very Italian experience ended with a loud argument before we said our polite goodbyes and headed to the bar.

So I am cursing my foolish decision to put any trust in the Italian post office, but feeling eternally grateful to my wonderful friends who gave up their whole afternoon to help me out. And please, hold your thumbs, cross your fingers or pray that my boxes get there, preferably by the end of the week, but if not, the middle of August will do. Thank you.

*Harsh, but under the circumstances, also quite fair.

martedì 28 luglio 2009

Como Again


I couldn't leave Milan without one last trip to the lakes, so on Friday J and I packed a picnic and got on a train to Como. From Como, we got the boat up the lake to Argegno, where there is a lakeside lido where you can sit on the grass and jump into the lake. When we got there, though, we discovered that the lido was closed and there was nowhere else that was really suitable for swimming. We sat in the sun, which was so hot we were dripping with sweat just sitting still, and ate our picnic, but after that we could take no more and went into the bar to ask if they could recommend a place to swim. They told us that there was nowhere else in Argegno, but suggested that we took the bus up the road to Grianta, and it turned out to be a very good piece of advice. Grianta is a gorgeous town just down the lakeside from Menaggio, where scenery starts to get even more dramatic and there are great views across the lake to Bellaggio and the mountains. On the edge of the town there are all these incredibly luxurious looking villas with private swimming pools, but normal people like us could go to the small stony beach to swim in the lake.

We didn't get there until about three o'clock, so after our swim there was just time to dry off and get chatted up by the local old men, who were shocked that we were spending the summer in Milan and offered to pick us up and bring us to the lake the next day too (if they had been about thirty years younger it might have been an attractive proposition), before it was time to go and get the bus. We decided to get the bus all the way back to Como so that we had more time at the beach, and it turned out to be a good choice, because the road back was spectacular and you actually see more from the bus than you do from the boat. The man in the bar that sold the bus tickets very kindly exchanged them for us and pointed us in the right direction. I find people in Milan pretty friendly most of the time, but once you get outside the city, the locals put their urban neighbours to shame! My guide book doesn't even mention Grianta as a place to visit and it's hard to find information about the buses up and down the lake without actually being there, so it was entirely thanks to them that we found the place and didn't melt into little pools of sweat for want of a place to swim.

Lido di Milano

One sweltering hot day last week, my friend J and I finally made it to the Lido di Milano, which is at Piazza Lotto on the red metro line. After you pay at the gate, you walk through changing rooms which reminded me ominously of school swimming lessons in the 1980s, but you come outside to trees, flowers and an enormous outdoor pool. (It looks at least Olympic-sized, although it's a bit of a funny shape. There's a bar and picnic area and water chutes and games for kids, and you can hire a sun lounger for 4 euros or pay 11 euros to sit in the VIP area and be gently sprayed with cold water, but we just sat at the edge of the pool on our towels, along with most other people, and went in for a swim every time it got too hot. Highly recommended, and much more spacious than the My Island “beach”!

giovedì 23 luglio 2009

Choose Life

...but which one?

I had a fantastic time at home last week seeing Mum and Dad, catching up with all my friends and appreciating the oasis of cool tranquillity that is the UK after the experience of summer in Milan. I indulged in endless hours in chain coffee shops drinking ersatz Italian coffee and delighted in the concept of putting these coffee shops in bookshops so that you can be tempted by cake and literature at the same time. I breathed in the fresh air and the smell of grass and hedgerows after a summer shower and I drove on well signposted roads where people respect the speed limit.

I also began to look forward to going to Paris. I found out more information about my job and got excited about furnishing my flat on Ikea online. I discovered that one of my French friends is moving back there in September and I started to plan all the things that I want to do when I get to Paris.

Then I came back to Italy and sat in the park in the sunshine and watched the well dressed people go by and went to the Lido with my friend and remembered all the wonderful things about Italy.

As it happens, my choice is made. In a way, it was made for me. But if I had completely free choice, which would I choose?

Vodafone Passport

Ever since I destroyed my internet connection and my boyfriend went back to England for the summer, I've been suffering from communication technology withdrawal. After a week at home where I socialised with my friends all day every day and abused my parents' broadband, I was a little sad to be coming back to Italy and my 50 cent per minute international mobile calls.

So when I arrived at the airport and saw an advert for Vodafone's summer promotion, my heart leapt. I have an O2 phone in the UK, but Vodafone have abolished roaming charges in Europe for July and August and are giving away a free sim card when you buy £15 worth of credit. Because I bought my phone from the Carphone Warehouse, where most of the phones are not network-locked, all I needed to do was put in my new sim and activate Vodafone passport and I was ready to go. From Italy, or anywhere else in Europe, I can now phone home for no more than it would cost me to make the call in the UK.

I have the same promotion on my Italian phone but that only lets me call Italy when I'm away. Vodafone Italia also has a promotion called One Nation that lets you make cheap international calls on your Italian mobile in Italy, but after I activated it and accidentally spent a fortune calling Britain and France, I found out that it doesn't apply to European countries. (Why???)

At the moment, the Vodafone promotion is only for July and August, but I'm hoping that, seeing as it seems a great way for them to get ahead of the competition, they'll continue the promotion for at least as long as it takes for me to get broadband and Skype in my new flat. And, knowing France, that could be a long time!

venerdì 17 luglio 2009

Racism

I often find myself wondering in this country whether the statement “Italians are racist” is, in itself, something of a racist, or at least prejudiced statement. It is definitely fair to say, however, that racist attitudes are much more socially and politically acceptable here than in the UK or France. Not only is the Lega Nord, which has policies that are so racist they don't even like Italians from the wrong part of the country, one of the major political parties, but politicians from the so-called “centrist” parties make openly racist statements too.

Yesterday, with a whole day entirely by myself to fill, I spent some time reading the back issues of the newspapers which I tend to buy, read the magazine section and fail to finish the news and I came across an article where Berlusconi and other politicians were claiming that Milan is in danger of becoming “an African city” and criticising the fact that there are so many black faces on its street. It's hard to imagine mainstream politicians in the UK getting away with making that kind of statement, but even the Corriere della Sera, which is one of the more enlightened Italian papers, could only manage a tone of mild criticism of their attitudes. To put the statement into perspective, around 13% of the population of Milan is made up of “foreigners”. That includes the fashion designers who create the clothes of the rich and famous, and the international footballers that Berlusconi himself pays a fortune to import for his team. It includes people like me, who come to give Italian children the education in English that their parents covet and the Filippinos that they trust to look after these children while they go out to more attractive employment.

Where the anti-immigrant voices of Italy often go wrong, deliberately or otherwise, is in failing to make a distinction between immigrants and illegal immigrants, which makes it easier for them to make the presence of foreigners seem like a threat and therefore makes all racism seem more acceptable. “Of course that black man is not to be trusted,” the thinking goes, “because he is almost certainly cheating the system and stealing my country's resources.” (Never mind that the best people at cheating the system in Italy are the Italians themselves.) And perhaps what makes these foreign faces so supposedly prevalent on the streets of Milan is the fact that these racist attitudes make it very difficult for the “wrong” kind of foreigner to get a job that will take them off the streets and into a job that is more profitable than selling crummy plastic toys in the metro station.

Why Don't We Have That at Home?

Three of my favourite inventions that make life in Italy that little bit easier:

Dividers at the checkouts in the supermarkets. When the checkout person has scanned your stuff and you've paid, they can push your stuff into one section and start scanning the next customer's things so that you don't have to worry about taking your time over packing your bags and holding everyone else up.


My dish-drying cupboard. The perfect invention for people who are too proud to have dishes on show and too lazy to dry them with a dish towel.


Bidets. When it's hot and dusty they're good for all kinds of washing, but especially your feet. And when it's cold, you can revert to British traveller mode and dump the washing in them.

Parli Italiolo?

After my mum left last week, my friend R. and her boyfriend P. came to stay. R. is Scottish, but she lives in Seville, and P. is Spanish. As I know about twenty words in Spanish, most of which make up bizarre curses which R. taught me when we were flatmates at uni, and P. only spoke a little bit of English, we spent the next three days testing the theory that Spanish and Italian are mutually comprehensible languages (that is, that Italian speakers can understand Spanish and vice versa). I came to the conclusion that this theory is exaggerated. While the two languages, like Italian and French, are very similar grammatically and many of their words have the same origins, differences in pronunciation and in many very common words mean that, while it may be very easy for an Italian speaker to learn Spanish, just as it was easy for me to learn Italian after learning French, everyday communication is not that easy. Interestingly, I found it easier to understand P's views on bull fighting and opening the market for illegal drugs than to figure out what he wanted for breakfast, but that may have had something to do with the amount of wine we both drank before the first two conversations started. At one point, though, P. and R. got into a very animated conversation about cock-fighting (la pelea de gallos) and I found myself wondering what people from Wales (el pais de Gales) had done to upset them.

On Wednesday night, I introduced them to aperitivo and Milanese cocktails and we had an evening of complicated but great fun conversation with two of my friends from work. On Thursday, they went sightseeing in town and on Friday we went to the beach. In Milan.


Technically, the “beach” in Milan, which can be found in Piazza Carlo Magno next to the Fiera Milano City, is My Island, an outdoor swimming pool surrounded by sand, artificial grass and sun loungers, which has been created in the middle of what would otherwise look like a building site. The pool is not enormous and it was full of children when we were there, and the bar staff were a bit grumpy, but in a city that has so little outdoor space where you can laze around in the sunshine, it was a nice place to spend an afternoon. As well as the pool, there are tennis and volleyball courts and the whole venue turns into a bar/club at night. Even the DVD of waves crashing on a beach that was projected onto a screen above the pool was quite nice...



until the credits started to roll!


martedì 14 luglio 2009

Stresa





Mum came to Italy with one wish: to see the Italian lakes. Our walk on Thursday was lovely but we weren't high enough in up in the mountains to actually catch a glimpse of the sparkling waters of Lake Como, so on Saturday we went to Stresa for the weekend.

Stresa, like Como, is only about an hour from Milan on the train, but the trains aren't all that frequent, so we had to get up early on Saturday morning. When we arrived, the first thing we needed to do was find a hotel. After walking along the lakefront and admiring the Astoria, the Regina Palace, and the impossibly beautiful Grand Hotel des Iles Borrmomées, we eventually settled for the Hotel Elena on Piazza Cadorna in the centre of town. It didn't have a swimming pool or live music and dancing on the terrace in the evening, but we had a balcony, the staff were friendly, and who needs a swimming pool with Lake Maggiore on their doorstep?

In the afternoon, we went to see an example of luxury that surpassed even the Regina Palace Hotel: the villa on the Isola Bella. The Isola Bella is one of three islands that are only a short boat trip from Stresa (and if you go with one of the unofficial ferry companies, it can be a short and exciting trip as you bounce along the waves created by the much larger official boats). On the island is a huge villa built by a member of the Borromeo family in the 17th century. The scale of the baroque architecture would put many churches to shame and as well as the (at least relatively) tastefully decorated rooms upstairs, there is a spectacularly hideous series of artificial underground grottoes on the lower floor of the villa which house everything from a collection of marionettes to a canoe dug out of a nearby peat bog.

My favourite bit of the villa, however, was the gardens. A series of terraces stacked up from the lake level and populated with specially imported white peacocks leads to an enormous centrepiece decorated with statues and fountains. While some of it verges on being over the top, the flowers, the sunshine and the way that the land is shaped to take best advantage of its position in the middle of the lake are beautiful and if I were a 17th century countess, I certainly wouldn't be offended if my husband built me a garden like that.

On Sunday, we got the cable car from the Lido in Stesa to Mottorone, a mountain behind the town. At the top, you get amazing views over the lake, across the mountains, and down to the Lago d'Orta on the other side. There are several waymarked hiking trails, of which we did one lasting about 2 hours, or you can go to the small dry ski centre or just have a picnic. About half way up the mountain, at one of the cable car stops, there is an alpine garden. There weren't many flowers out when we were there but it might have been more interesting at a different time of year.

Both nights in Stresa, we ate at the Osteria degli Amici, which is not far from Piazza Cadorna. The first night I had grilled trout from the lake and an amaretto mousse for pudding and the second night we both had pasta with saffron, bacon, courgettes and prawns. I left my umbrella under the table on the first night and not only did they remember me and give it back on the second night, they reminded me to take it away again when we left the second time. So different from the Milanese and their umbrella-stealing ways!

On Monday, we walked along the lake front to the gardens and zoo just outside of town. The zoo wasn't very big, but it had some very cute little goats and deer, some llamas, a zebra and an aviary. Most of the zoo was nice enough, but seeing this toucan with his bright colours in a dull empty cage made me feel a little bit sad.

We sat in the gardens for a couple of hours, mostly because I was in the middle of reading The Savage Garden, which is a mystery novel set in a villa with a large garden in Italy, and I couldn't have found a more appropriate setting to finish it in. After that, we walked back into Stresa and had a swim in the lake before catching the train back to Milan.

Hiking in the Triangolo Lariano






Mum arrived for her visit on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, I sent her off to Bergamo while I did boring but useful things like going to the bank and shifting boxes with Mr. A. On Thursday, however, I decided it was time to join her on holiday and we went for a hike in the Triangolo Lariano, which is the bit of land between Lake Como and Lake Lecco.

You get the train there from Cadorna station in Milan and get off at Canzo station. Just outside the village, there are lots of marked walking trails up into the mountains beyond. A friend had recommended the area to me, but unfortunately I only vaguely remembered the directions she had given me and it took us about an hour to find the tourist office and get out of the village. It's just on the left as you walk up the hill from the train station into the centre of town, but we managed to miss it and did a couple of circuits of the village, asking three passers-by where it might be. The last person we asked was an old man sitting on a bench outside the bar who had probably seen us go past twice and very kindly took pity on us and actually led us to the door of the comune, where the office was housed. That door turned out not to be the actual door for the tourist office, but the woman was incredibly kind and went and got all kinds of maps for me, including one that she gave me for free but I'm sure I should have paid for. She must have realised that somebody who was looking for tourist information in the anagrafe office, which deals with things like residency and taxes, was clearly in need of a map.

Once we had the maps, it took us another couple of circuits of the town to find the right way out. There are 5 or 6 routes, all signposted with the traditional red and white striped markers, and we weren't quite smart enough to remember the number of the path that we wanted to take, which led to us taking another detour, this time up a very steep hill, but eventually we got ourselves on the right one and were heading for the Tre Alpi.

The walk up to the Primo Alpe was steep but not too difficult. The path was shaded by trees and we saw lots of pretty orange butterflies. At the top, there's an education centre and a picnic area. The Secondo and Terzo Alpi turned out to be very close to the first one and the path flattened out, so that part of the walk was easy. On the way, there is a chapel of St Miro, who apparently brought rain to the area during a long drought, and at the top there's an agritourismo. It was a bit late for lunch by the time we got there, but we had a drink, admired the farm tools and the corns hanging from the walls and the ceiling and watched the owners chasing the goats out of the house.

We wanted to go down by a different route, but it wasn't signposted and after our experiences in the morning, we decided it was safer to follow the main path, especially as the thunder was starting to rumble. We made it back to the village just as the raindrops were becoming really big, and were just in time for a train back to Milan.

Bureaucracy with a Smile

Over the past few months I have been developing a theory about bureaucracy. In the UK, at least compared to other countries I've lived in, paperwork is kept to a minimum and is generally relatively easy to complete. As a result, people who administer it are generally pleasant and efficient, but rarely anything more than that. In Italy, on the other hand, bureaucracy is a crazy, incomprehensible mess that can only be confronted three days a week between the hours of 10.30 and 11.15 in an office on the other side of town from where you thought you had to be. As a result, the people who administer it feel the need, every so often, to be incredibly helpful, just to remind themselves that they are still human beings and that all this paper has nothing to do with the real world.

Because I work with children, I needed to get a certificate from the police before I left the country stating that I had no criminal record in Italy. The first part of this process is astonishingly simple. You fill out an online form and send it off, and a few days later you get an email telling you that you can collect the certificate, in my case from the Casellario Giudiziale di Milano.

This was where the fun started. At 11.30, after doing another little job in town, Mr A. and I set out to look for this building. Our search was somewhat hindered by the fact that my map of Milan, published by the ATM (which runs all the public transport) has an index that doesn't correspond to where the streets actually are on the map. As Mr A. kindly pointed out, if I had acquired a little less Italian inefficiency, or was less Scottish and less mean, I would have bought a new map by now, but seeing as I am clearly one or both of the above, we ended up wandering around for half an hour before sneaking a look at a street plan in the Mondadori bookshop. We found correct entrance to the Casellario Giudiziale, walked through the metal detector, surrendered our cameras to security and asked for directions for where to go.

And let me tell you, that place is massive. As well as what looked like court rooms and hundreds of offices, it also had its own bank and post office. The man who gave us the directions waved vaguely to the right, muttered something about “on the left” and sent us off on our way. It took us a good ten minutes to find the office number 500, which was not particularly near 500 bis, or where it appeared to be on the maps of the building. By this time, it was about 12.40 and the office workers were getting hungry and disinclined to work. I handed my piece of paper to the man behind the desk, along with my passport, and hoped for the best.

Only one problem. I needed a “bollo”. After ten months in Italy, I still don't really know what a “bollo” is for, but it's a little sticker that you can buy that appears on most official paperwork. I knew that I would need one before I went, but I didn't know where to buy it. I asked the man behind the desk and he gave me some more unclear directions. I asked him to clarify. If it was far away or there was a queue, I would never make it back before the office closed at one and would have to come back the next day. The guy said something else, which I didn't understand. I was obviously still looking confused, and he obviously wanted his lunch, because he asked if I had the 3.52 euros and, when I said that I did, reached into his bag, pulled out a stamp, stuck it on the piece of paper and handed me the certificate.

Italian bureaucracy at its best!

venerdì 3 luglio 2009

At the Garage

After our encounter with the friendly mechanic at the Fiat garage in Via Corsico, Mr A. and I went back on Monday morning to drop "La Punto" off. (Because the word for car in Italian (macchina) is feminine, you use la even when the name of the car is masculine.) We met another mechanic, who was the one who actually ended up servicing the car and sat down to discuss prices with us. I had brushed up on some vocabulary this time and the guy was both very friendly and very professional. He gave us quotes for prices and an estimated time to do the work, remembering that it might take longer to order the parts for a British car, and when he heard that Mr A. was taking the car back to England for her MOT, we had a chat about the differences between the UK and Italian versions of the test. (In Italy, they only check the basics (brakes, lights, tyres etc) whereas in Britain, everything that worked in the car when it was new now has to be in working order to pass the test.) We arranged for the work to be done and when we went back on Tuesday to collect the car we found that he had also very kindly checked the oil and put air in the tyres to prepare the car for her long journey home.

On the way back into Milan we stopped off at a tyre place to get a quote for replacing the two front tyres and had a very different experience. The mechanic who greeted us had a big smile and a loud chuckle and looked unnervingly like a clown in his red overalls. There were no other cars in the garage, only about three other mechanics with nothing to do. The conversation went something like this:

Me: How much will it cost to change the tyres on the car?
Clown: Hmm, let me have a look and see how many need changed. (Something in Italian that I didn't understand.)
Me: I'm sorry, I didn't understand that.
Clown makes a gesture that clearly means, "turn the steering wheel so that I can see the tyres." Mr A. opens the driver's door and turns the wheel. Clown stops peering in the passenger side of the windscreen and starts to laugh.
Clown: Ahahahahahaha! It's an English car! The steering wheel is on the other side! Hahaha!
Clown finally manages to stop laughing. Mr A is beginning to look worried.
Me: So how much will it cost for the tyres?
Clown looks up price list behind the counter.
Clown: Well, you've got Michelin tyres but we're out of these. I could do another make for 220 euros.
Me: Mr A., he says 220 euros.
Mr A. starts to get back into the car.
Mr A.: The guy at the Fiat garage was only 200 euros. Let's go.
Me (to clown) : Thanks, but another garage gave me a better quote. Goodbye.
Clown: Ah, just hold on a minute. I can give you a cheaper offer with another make of tyres. How much did the other garage say?
Me: 150, including labour. (Afterwards, I decided I should have said 100).
Clown: OK. I can do it for 140 euros.
Me: He says 140.
Mr A. (still looking worried): OK, let's go for it.
Clown 1 calls Clown 2 over to get started on the work. Clown 2 gets in the passenger side of the car. He passes me my handbag, which is on the floor, then realises something is wrong and starts to laugh hysterically.
Clown 2: It's an English car! I was wondering where the steering wheel was! Ahahahahah!
Clown 2 eventually stops laughing, gets in the driver's side of the car and starts the engine.
Clown 2: This feels really strange. I don't know if I can drive this thing. Puts his foot on the accelerator. Get out of the way guys, I'M COMING!!!!


3 days later... The car has arrived in England. The tyres are still OK. The new brake pads that they ripped us off by telling us they were selling us 4 instead of 2 seem to still be attached to the car. Mr A's hair is not yet grey. And once again, I got a lot of education and an amusing story out of the experience.


lunedì 29 giugno 2009

Bits and Pieces

A couple of weeks ago, my internet key broke. After all the tears and frustration of getting one that worked in my apparently aging computer and figuring out how not to get ripped off by Alice Mobile, it just broke. I took it out of my bag one day, plugged it into the computer and the little green light just didn't come on. The bit that plugs in feel too loose, so I figure it was probably all my own fault because I didn't look after it properly. There's no way of replacing it that would be worthwhile for the six weeks or so before I move to France, so at the moment I am internetless and scrounging friends, school and the internet cafe in a bid to stay in touch with the world, because it couldn't have happened at a worse time. I need to book flights, arrange to ship my stuff to Paris and plan a holiday for me and my mum, and this has really brought home to me how dependent I am on the internet for information and communication. I'm sure all of these things can be done in other ways, but it's just so much more difficult. (The best places I've found for internet here are the major bookshops. Although Mondadori is closer for me, I tend to use FNAC because although the internet cafe is open all day at Mondadori, they only sell credit at certain times, and never at weekends. Trust Italy to make even the internet inconvenient!)


Anyway, apart from finding myself temporarily on the wrong side of the digital divide, here are a few of the things that have been happening in the past two weeks.

Summer has definitely come. The school year has ended, it's 30 degrees outside, and the comune (town hall) is shutting for it's 3 month long holiday. It's only open for 5 hours a day at the best of times, so I guess 3 months of being completely closed won't make much difference.

With the end of the school year have come lots of goodbyes and farewell parties. Two of my favourites have been at the bar of the Mondadori bookshop, which has a terrace which is open to the public all the time and another one for private parties, and at La Toscana, a bar and restaurant on the Corso Porta Ticinese. I also attended a Partyamo event for the first time. Partyamo is a social group organised by a Scottish guy called Steve who has been living in Italy for 15 years and that lets foreigners and Italians meet and speak in different languages.

On Friday, my friend and I went shopping in Nadine, which is one of my favourite shops in Milan. She was exchanging a skirt and I actually didn't let myself even try anything on because I was scared I would want to buy everything! Italian fashion, I will miss you...

The highlight of Saturday was quite definitely a visit to the car wash. Mr A needed his car repaired before driving it back to the UK this week, and we were actually looking for a garage but ended up in the car wash by mistake. 4 euros bought us a good half our of fun with the high pressure hoses, the foam brush and a special machine for washing the floor mats, and weirdly enough the place, which had room for about 30 cars, was full of other people doing the exact same thing. It was great. Then we actually did find the Fiat garage (on Via Corsico) and met a very friendly mechanic who, despite the fact that he was closing up, came out into the street to look at the car and listened very patiently to my attempt to explain the problem without any technical vocabulary and then offered to let us skip the queue for repairs first thing on Monday morning.

And now there are just a few days of packing, cleaning and paperwork before Mr A goes back to the UK for a few weeks and I get ready to entertain my mum, who's arriving for a week's holiday on Tuesday, and enjoy Italy like a tourist again!

Paris, je t'aimerai

A while back, I wrote a post about staying in Milan for another year with a list of reasons why, despite my suffering respiratory system, this was a good idea. Well, that's changed. For reasons that I'm not going to go into here, I'm leaving my fabulous life in Milan for what I hope will be an equally fabulous one in (or at least near to) la ville des lumières.

It wasn't an easy decision to make. I was never planning to stay in Italy for ever, but another year to appreciate it would have been nice. My Italian is not as good as I would like it to be yet and I haven't seen half the things I wanted to see yet. I have lots of friends here, a nice flat and a great life. Most of all, I have Mr A, who will still be staying here for at least another year. (Does EasyJet do airmiles?)

So, although it may sound crazy, I'm excited about living in France but I'm not over the moon. It's a great opportunity and I intend to make the most of it, but I've lived in France before and this was not quite the future I had planned for myself. Sometimes, though, life just deals you a crappy hand and if the best way to cope with that involves moving to one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, I guess that's not all bad. I'll try to come back with some more enthusiasm next time!

lunedì 22 giugno 2009

Camping at Lake Garda

Last Saturday afternoon at around four o'clock, I was lying on a sun lounger beside an azure blue swimming pool, drinking a mint granita, watching the thermometer fluctuate between 29 and 30 degrees and vaguely contemplating when to go for my next swim. Beside the pool, a wide avenue of perfectly pruned trees led down to the lake shore, where earlier in the day we had been relaxing on the beach, jumping off the jetty into refreshingly cold water and buying ice cream from a boat instead of a van. In real life, this is what other people do once a year on holiday. In Italy, it's what you do on any June weekend when you feel like it and you can do it less than two hours' drive from your house.

Admittedly, we were lucky. Not every campsite in Italy has lakeside pitches fenced in by box hedges where you can park a car and pitch two tents before you go off to shop at the market, eat in the restaurant, drink in the bar, or go and swim in the 25 metre pool. But the Camping Lido at Lazise does, and that was why we went there.

After our laid back day at the campsite on Saturday, we went to Sirmione on Sunday. Unfortunately, so did most of the rest of the population. Sirmione is a historical town with Roman ruins, city walls and a castle that sticks out into Lake Garda on a peninsula on the southern shore. It's a gorgeous place with a lakeside promenade, lots of little shops and the most extravagant gelaterie I've ever seen. You can't drive in the town, so after getting as far as the city walls without finding a parking space, we ended up doing a few 3 point turns in tiny car parks and parking a good half hour's walk from the old town centre. Once we were there, however, it was actually very calm. There were lots of people, but most of them, like us, were just strolling, sunbathing and swimming. Despite being slathered in sun cream for most of the weekend, I had caught a bit too much sun on Saturday, so one of the highlights for me was being able to buy a big floppy straw sunhat with a ribbon. Mr A was not particularly convinced that this was a good look, but I decided it was better than sunburn. And I can wear it wherever we end up going next weekend too...

Parco di Monza

From my flat in Milan, I can get to the metro by turning right at the corner of my block. I avoid the eyes of the shady men who hang around my street and step carefully among the rubbish on a dusty, smelly street to arrive at the metro, where battered looking grey carriages rattle through the tunnels in the belly of the city. If I get off at the Porta Garibaldi station, I can walk along underground corridors in a station where few of the ticket machines work and the office isn't open on a Sunday and get on a graffiti covered train to Monza, ten minutes ride from Milan.

Things are different in Monza. Outside the station, the streets look a little bit scruffy, but if you follow the main road you soon arrive at a pedestrianised high street with expensive shops, flowers, and a fountain that sparkles in the summer sun. On a Sunday, people stand around outside the beautiful churches in expensive looking designer clothes (I find this weird) and drink post-communion coffee on the terrace of a bar.

If you keep walking, the atmosphere changes. There are people, many people, and especially families on bikes. After a while, you realise that most of them are going in the same direction. If you go with the Sunday afternoon flow, you will find yourself in the Parco di Monza.

The park is a proper Sunday afternoon place. It has a large villa with landscaped gardens, statues and a lake, where you can take a leisurely stroll. Further out, it becomes wilder, with forest trails where people go running. There are some wide roads and tarmac paths which are perfect for gentle cycling or rollerblading. Further out still, there are pony rides, bike hire and fields where people have barbecues.

I went there one Sunday and spent three wonderful hours wandering, rollerblading and reading under the trees.

Then I went back to the station and got a nasty surprise. Even in Monza, the ticket office was closed and none of the ticket machines were working. I guess it's not so far from Milan after all.

giovedì 28 maggio 2009

It You Don't Laugh...

I had a good chuckle to myself today while reading the online version of the Corriere della Sera in my lunch break today. Headline news was, of course, the latest in the Berlusconi saga. The Corriere della Sera is one of the more reputable newspapers and has taken an anti-Berlusconi stance on several big issues, so I was interested to read what it had to say.

Just in case you have been hiding under a stone for the past couple of months, here is a quick summary of the story so far.

Back in April, Berlusconi invited several potential candidates for the European elections to his party headquarters. Among those on his list were an actress, a daytime TV presenter, a former contender for Miss Italia, and an ex Big Brother contestant, none of whom had any political experience.

This, however, was only the beginning of the scandal. In May, Berlusconi's wife, Veronica Lario, filed for divorce, accusing him of “consorting with minors” after he attended the 18th birthday party of Noemi Letizia, who was, he claimed, the daughter of one of his friends, and presented her with an expensive necklace. Since then, Noemi has given interviews claiming that Berlusconi is something of a grandfather figure to her and that she hopes that he will set her on the road to a successful political career. La Repubblica, however, then published an article in which Noemi's ex-boyfriend claimed that Berlusconi had got to know her after seeing photos of her in a casting book that was accidentally left on a dinner table by her agent.

All of this has been reported on in the national press, but the harshest criticisms have come from outside of Italy, where the Italian electorate's reluctance to reject Berlusconi seems less comprehensible. As a result, as the Corriere reported today, Berlusconi's foreign affairs minister has just made a speech in which he condemns the foreign press for its interest in gossip and for lacking the moral values of the Italian papers. Which might just about be believable if a) Berlusconi were not the owner of three television channels specialising in directing camera angles up women's skirts and b) if he were referring to the Daily Mirror and the Sun . It all becomes somewhat less convincing, however, when you have watched the said TV channels for about 20m minutes and when you learn that the main target of the attack is the Financial Times.

Berlusconi's own response to the situation was to say, “Mussolini had troops of Black Shirts, while I, according to the newspapers … have troops of starlets... at least it's a little better.” Well, perhaps, but is that the best that Italy can do?


domenica 24 maggio 2009

Montalto and the Oltrepo Pavese







Who would have guessed that all of this was just 1 hour's drive from Milan? The Oltrepo Pavese is a wine producing region and you can stop off at numerous little production places by the side of the road and taste and buy wine. Personally, though, I'd go again just for the flowers!

mercoledì 20 maggio 2009

At the Barber's Shop

I've always thought that if I ever decide to change careers, I would like to be a freelance interpreter. I have a friend who does this job and she has interpreted everywhere from at meetings about politics with the German chancellor to meetings about tractors in fields with two farmers. Every so often here in Milan, I find myself acting as somebody's informal interpreter and never is it more stressful than when Mr A decides that he needs a haircut.

The first time we went, he ended up more or less with a shorter version of his previous haircut, but he wasn't too impressed with his experience in a mixed salon, so this time we went to a proper barber's shop. You could tell it was a proper barber's shop because it was furnished with an ancient leather sofa, lots of wooden furniture and two of those chairs that hold you up off the ground and make you feel like a six year old again. All over the shop there were “no smoking” signs and yet the place reeked of cigarettes, and the barber himself was impressively portly and disconcertingly bald. An old man who was waiting for a shave kindly let Mr A go first, probably because he sensed the potential entertainment in the situation.

Mr A sat down in the chair and I explained what he wanted. (“Like this but shorter and take a bit more off the back.”) The barber got to work and began to chat to us about where we were from, whether we liked Italy etc. After hearing that we were British, he pointed out a wobble in Mr A's fringe and said, “The last time you had a haircut, was it in England or Italy?” When we replied that it had been in Italy, he said, “And was the hairdresser Italian or Chinese?” Despite the fact that we said that he had been Italian, the barber then insisted that he was going to give Mr A “a proper Italian haircut.”

And to give him his due, he did. He got out a comb that looked none too clean, combed Mr A's hair and then proceeded to give him a haircut that was very short, but perfectly done, with the hair perfectly trimmed and shaped around the ears. For a man's haircut, it took a long time. Or maybe it just felt like that because I was watching the hair get shorter and shorter, and Mr A's voice was getting quieter and quieter and I was terrified that he didn't like it and that this was somehow all my fault for not explaining properly. At the same time, however, I was carrying on a conversation with the barber about how good the food was in Puglia and all the places in Italy that we had visited. He finished the whole thing off with a cut-throat razor, repeatedly saying “ferma, ferma!” (“stay still, stay still!”), which Mr A appeared to understand without my help.

Then it was time for the moment of truth. Mr A stood up and, as the barber disappeared into the back shop, I asked Mr A, “Do you like it?” To my huge relief, he smiled, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yes.” Then the barber reappeared and before we could pay him and leave, the old man who was watching insisted that I gave him a kiss. Not that I objected to that, because with his short, “proper Italian” haircut, Mr A looked very like a star from a very old but classic movie. And luckily, when we got home, a bit of gel brought his look back into the 21st century and the interpreter didn't get the sack.


sabato 16 maggio 2009

The City of Ham and Cheese

I have been in Italy at least once a year for the past five years of my life. I've been on a gondola in Venice and a scooter in Rome. I've eaten pizza in Naples and been cheated in Salerno. I've been to Verona and Mantua and Trento and Turin. But, until last weekend, I had never been to Parma, supposedly the town with the highest standard of living in Italy, and certainly with the best ham and cheese. And anybody who has known me for any length of time knows that ham and cheese are very important to me.

In the interest of having a restful weekend, we took the train to Parma. Driving can be stressful for Mr A because he has to avoid the maniacs on the motorway and for me because I take my responsibilities of paying the road tolls, calling the other drivers morons and waving like the queen at people who stare at Mr A's British car very seriously. Taking the train was a great idea, apart from the fact that we had a very long walk in the heat to our hotel, which according to the booking website was “centrally located” but turned out to be on the wrong side of the motorway from the centre of town.

That aside, we really did have a restful weekend. On Saturday morning we had a little bit of excitement when Mr A tried to buy a pair of sunglasses from a market stall and the vendor was very persistent, following us and trying to convince Mr A while at the same time running away from the police. We had lunch on the terrace of a cafe, where I had what must be the pinnacle of ham and cheese sandwiches and Mr A had a roasted vegetable panino with parmesan cheese.


We wandered around the town for a little while before what turned out to be the long walk to the hotel. Apart from the fact that our non smoking room was equipped with two ashtrays and smelled of cigarettes, it was worth the walk. We had a lovely big room with a nice bathroom and, to Mr A's delight, a TV with one English channel. The best thing about it, though, was having breakfast on a huge terrace in 25 degree sunshine.

Everybody told us that the point of visiting Parma is really to eat, so we did. We walked back into town from the hotel and, after exploring the centre a little bit, sat down in the square under the impressive clock tower for a delicious aperitivo served in tiny dishes and watched the well-dressed world go by.



For dinner, I had filled pasta in a butter and parmesan sauce and Mr A had asparagus risotto that was also loaded with parmesan. We're going to try recreating it at home this weekend with the cheese that we bought. 

On Sunday, we managed to be a little bit cultured and visited the cathedral. All the paintings have been restored and it has a gorgeous octagonal dome with a painting of Mary's ascension on it. The work was controversial at the time because Mary, as seen from below in her billowing dress, does not look pious or dignified, but more as if she has been swept away by the wind, and today, even to someone with very little knowledge of art like me, it still stands out as different from your normal religious painting.

We had a lovely walk in the Parco Ducale, where we watched terrapins swimming around the pond and had a glass of Malvasia wine in the cafe. I'm not usually a big fan of sparkling white wine but this one had a lovely delicate flavour that matched the setting among the spring greenery perfectly.


We finished our visit to Parma with a classic regional dish: a board of ham, salami and cheese served with fresh crusty bread and a glass of local wine, then sat in the park in the sunshine. Parma is a great place because it's quite a small town where you can wander around and sit and relax without being hassled, but at the same time it has a university and seemed to have a fairly large immigrant population, so it was still quite lively and interesting to visit. 

This blog probably gives the impression that I spend a lot of my time in Italy sitting around eating and drinking. Often, this is true. Eating, drinking and visiting churches is what you do in Italy. In my own defence, though, I would like to point out that I weighed myself last week and I was actually 3 kilos lighter than I was when I arrived in Milan in August, so my lifestyle may sound indulgent but it appears to be doing me good. Admittedly, I haven't quite dared to step on the scales since last weekend...