It's Good to Talk?

It occurred to me recently that it had been a while since I posted any witty (or otherwise) observations on the Italians and their crazy ways. I was reminded of that thought this afternoon when, standing in the queue in the supermarket, I noticed that the woman next to me was holding a dog in her arms and realised that I wasn't particularly surprised by the sight. (It was, admittedly, not as dramatic as the time my mum and I were in a restaurant in France and saw that some other customers not only had a dog with them but were giving it the restaurant plates to lick.) Perhaps I've just lived too long in Mediterranean countries to be surprised by the dog dirt on the pavements, people attempting to run me over on pedestrian crossings and the fact that it is 100% socially acceptable to drive when drunk.

One thing that still astounds me about Italy, though, is the noise. People seem to just have louder voices here. The sweet little 5 year old girls that I teach talk about playing with their dollies at about 100 decibels. If you want to know anybody else's business, you can walk 50 metres behind them in the street and still hear their phone conversations. You know what your neighbours are having for dinner because you can hear it through the walls, as long as you can make out what one of them is saying over the interrupting voice of the other.

On the plus side, I suppose that this love of loud conversations is a sign of one of the nation's great virtues: it's sociability and willingness to share. That may be worth far more than French discretion or British reserve. The problem, though, is that when everyone is talking, nobody's listening. Kids at school don't learn because they don't listen. People sell you the wrong things because they weren't listening. And, as a foreigner, it was very reassuring for me to realise that often, when people don't understand what you're saying, it's not because you're saying it wrong. It's because they weren't listening.