Winning and Losing in the Great Umbrella Game

People from Northern Europe tend to assume that Italy is sunny. Recently, at least in Milan, this has not been the case. The rain has been pouring down for about a week now, with only odd breaks in between torrents to fool us into thinking that summer might actually be coming.

One of the consequences of this is that there are numerous opportunities to participate in The Great Umbrella Game.

Like most things in Italy, The Great Umbrella Game is not organised. Rather, it occurs naturally on rainy days as a result of a combination of Italian habits, social behaviours and survival instincts.

This is what happens. If you go to a bar or a restaurant on a rainy night, you leave your umbrella in a pile, or, in more upmarket places, an umbrella stand at the door of the establishment. At the end of the evening, you go and retrieve an umbrella from the same place. What makes all of this interesting is that the chances of you retrieving the same umbrella as you left are slim. It is more than likely that somebody else has already taken your umbrella.

The first time this happened to me, I exchanged a new umbrella that I had bought from a street vendor for three euros with a handle that didn't work perfectly but that nevertheless kept the rain out for one with broken spokes that I threw in the bin somewhere on the way home. Last night, however, I discovered that somebody had taken my dilapidated green brolly and left me one that at first glance seemed similar but that on handling turned out to be in perfect condition and significantly more solid than the one I had lost.

Last night, at least, I was a winner in the game.

In Which I Fall for the Oldest Trick in the Book

I had a long day yesterday. I got up at four o'clock in the morning, was travelling for most of the day and arrived back at the Stazione Centrale at half past eleven at night. Mr. A was coming to pick me up in the car, but my bus got in early, so I had to wait for him outside the station in the area where the airport buses arrive.

That part of town has a bad reputation, so when a man approached me saying, "Taxi, taxi, taxi?" I made a point of saying,"No, grazie" very firmly and walking off. Unfortunately, I did have to wait for Mr A, so I stopped a little further down where one of the airport buses was getting ready to leave and there were plenty of people around and put my two bags down at my feet to wait. 

I was tired, hungry and somewhat pissed off by this stage. Then a second guy approached me and asked me where to go to catch a train. I could tell from the way he asked the question that he wasn't really looking for a train and assumed I was in for the usual, "You're not from here, where are you from, do you have a boyfriend" conversation, so I decided the best thing to do was just to give a quick answer and then ignore him and, if necessary walk away, but he pretended not to understand my answer and I had to repeat it. It was then that I heard someone on the bus banging on the window and shouting, "Put it down! Put it down!" I turned around to see one of my bags lying on the pavement a few metres away and another guy running away around the back of the bus.

In years and years of travelling in big cities in Europe, this was actually the first time that anything like this had ever happened to me. I get the "friendly" harrassment conversations all the time, but I'm usually really good at looking after my stuff. In fact, all my important things were in my handbag, which I was holding on to (although I wouldn't necessarily have noticed if the guy had tried to pick my pockets), and I think the thieves would have been pretty disappointed to open up the other bag and discover nothing but an English newspaper and the remains of my packed lunch, but what scared me was that I didn't even suspect what the two guys were doing. I was so busy expecting one kind of problem that I forgot to be open to other possibilities.

So I guess what I learned from this was: hold on to your luggage, because just watching it isn't enough, and don't ever let yourself be distracted. And I hope that if I ever see anything like this happening to anyone else, I'll be quick thinking enough to stop it as the people on the bus did for me.

Playing Tour Guide

My friend C arrived on the train from Dresden at 07.50 on Wednesday. She left at ten this morning, and in the meantime, I think we did as much as it was possible to do in three days.

On Wednesday, we visited the Duomo, the castle and the Parco Sempione and drank expensive coffee while lounging in the sun on the La Rinascente roof terrace. Walking across the piazza, we had a good laugh at the guys who approached us and said, “You want a bracelet? No? You want a husband?” We went to a local restaurant for dinner and ate pizzas that barely fitted on the table. We spoke German for most of the day, which rendered me completely incapable of saying anything in Italian, and I'm sure my concierge is now convinced that I am guilty of throwing cigarette ends out of my window into the courtyard just because I stammered so much when she asked me about it.

On Thursday, we went with Mr A and his English friend to Lake Maggiore in the pouring rain. We took some hasty photographs and then ran for cover in a restaurant and ate another pizza.



Then we went back to Milan. C and I then visited the Pinacoteca di Brera, where we wondered at the number and ugliness of the paintings of the Madonna and child and despaired over our ignorance of Christian tradition. Then I introduced her to the steepness of drinks prices in Milan and the stupendousness of aperitivo hour in the Bufala Cafe, which, as the name suggests, is all about the mozzarella.

On Friday, we went to Bergamo, resisted the temptation to use the funicular railways and instead walked all the way to the Castello, where we watched planes taking off and thunderstorms rolling in over the Alps. We also visited the botanical gardens, ate pizza somewhere along the way and bought a Polenta e Osei cake to take home. Eating polenta with whole songbirds is traditional in Bergamo but the orignal dish has been replaced with cakes that look similar but are a lot more palatable.

On Friday night we went for a drink in the Navigli, then on to Le Trottoir, a bar in the middle of a roundabout that has incredibly loud live bands and where you can dance to cheesy music until 3 am.

C and I met when we were both language assistants in Compiègne and we hadn't seen each other since I visited her in Berlin in 2004, where I “improved” my German by drinking Glühwein in August because it was all her friend had in the house apart from beer, but it felt as though nothing had changed. Having her here was fun because she made me notice all the things I've been getting used to about Italy, like the grannies sitting in cafes and yelling into mobile phones and the cars being parked in the middle of the pavement. Above all though, not everything has been easy here in Milan recently and it was nice to chat about it all with an old friend and to be reminded about all the good things about living in here.

Easter Monday Barbecue

On Monday afternoon, I discovered what everybody in Milan does if they can't get out of the city does on a sunny bank holiday Monday: they have a barbecue at the Bosco in Città.

The Bosco in Città is a kind of a park on the edge of the city. There's an old farmhouse-type building, some woodland and a lake. It's quite pretty but you never quite forget the dodgy things that might or might not be going on in the bushes as you take your Sunday afternoon stroll there.

In preparation for a long, hot summer, my friends J and L had invested in a barbecue and they invited me and another friend, R, to its inauguration ceremony. While I moved to Italy on a plane, J and L hired a van, and they have an impressive selection of picnic equipment, including a hamper, a rug and a cool box that is also a radio. The three of us lugged it all on the bus out to the park.

We thought that we had prepared pretty well, but relatively, we were were totally underequipped. The park was heaving with people and they all had far bigger barbecues than we did. Some had chairs and tables. Some were eating lasagne. Some of them even had gazebos. The whole atmosphere was a bit like a music festival, except that the only music was some annoying bloke with bongo drums.

We were a bit taken aback at first but we quickly got into the spirit of it. We lit our charcoal and allowed it to smoulder. We drank wine from plastic tumblers as we waited for our burgers to blacken. We tried not to let our little barbecue suffer from an inferiority complex.

Then, in one final monent of glory (or one desperate attempt to drown out the bongo drums), we turned up the volume on the cool box radio and sang along to Bohemian Rhapsody. J insisted that the people next to us were laughing with us and not at us. She might have been right.

The whole experience seemed, as R said as soon as she arrived, completely and utterly chav-tastic. But then five o'clock came, and almost with one accord, people began to pack away their things. They put their rubbish in black bags, piled it up next to the bins and left the park clean and tidy, ready for the next bank holiday Monday.

Camping in Liguria

Mr A and I started planning our Easter holiday camping trip weeks ago, not long after we came back from skiing. We knew where we wanted to go, had decided what we needed and just needed to do one big shopping trip to buy some equipment before we left. Somehow, though, we still managed to leave in an incredible rush, with our departure punctuated by conversations like:

Me: “Do you have a towel?”
Him: “Yes. Did you remember a sleeping bag?”
Me: “Oooops! No!”

Despite the rush, though, we actually did manage to remember pretty much everything we needed and the only major problem was our bed. We had bought an inflatable mattress and a friend had lent us a battery operated pump to blow it up which had a mains adaptor and one to plug into the cigarette lighter in the car. After we had been driving for about an hour and a half, Mr A said, “Do you want to start charging the pump up now?” I reached for the box and read the instructions. “Charge the pump for eight hours before use.” Oh dear.

In our defence, I had never seen one of these pumps before and Mr A had only ever had one which could be used at the same time as it was charging, but ours was clearly marked with dire warnings about what would happen if we tried to do that. Luckily, the people at the campsite were really nice and let us use a pump of theirs. It was enormous and made a huge amount of noise but appeared to do the trick.

Unfortunately, it turned out that all our efforts were in vain because the mattress deflated in the middle of the night and we woke up at 4am lying on hard, stony ground with strange pockets of air remaining around our ears. On the second night, the same thing happened and on the third night we bought a new mattress and finally had a good night's sleep.

We stayed at the Acqua Dolce campsite in Lévanto. It was quiet, clean, had great showers and was almost entirely inhabited by Germans with camper vans and deluxe tents who obviously knew exactly how to live this kind of lifestyle and could be seen in the mornings doing housework in the camper vans and in the evenings sitting outside on folding chairs and tables with table cloths drinking wine and eating dinner. We felt a little bit out of place with our little tent and our failure to organise adequate bedding for ourselves.

Our main reason for staying in Lévanto was to visit the Cinque Terre, 5 little villages propped on the edges of towering cliffs and linked by a coastal path.

I'm a big fan of coastal paths and this was one of the best that I'd ever been on, even if they did charge us 5 euros each to walk along it. If you start at the first village, Monterosso, the walk takes about 5 hours and you can stop for ice cream, focaccia and a laze in the sun at the villages, which are no more than an hour and a half's walk away from each other. Being hardcore, however, we decided to start our walk at Lévanto, which added on an extra 2 ½ hours of walking over a very steep hill but was worth it just for the sense of achievement.

On the second day, we drove to Portovenere, which is near La Spezia, a big port, and at the tip of the Golfo dei Poeti, which gets its name from all the poets that it has inspired. Byron even has his own cave there.

We were totally lazy that day and just wandered around the village and stopped for lunch and ice cream. We ate testaroli, which is like a big pancake that you cut up and eat with sauce. Ours was with pesto, which is another Ligurian speciality.

On our last day, we went back to the Cinque Terre and took the boat between the five villages. The boat was nice, but we both agreed that we appreciated the villages more when we had to walk to get to them!

Mamma Mia!

Because I saw mia mamma at the weekend and it was lovely. She arrived on Friday afternoon and, after a cup of tea and a chat, we did some mother and daughter bonding in Esselunga by discussing the ridiculous price of fruit and vegetables and the merits over mushroom versus meat filled ravioli.

On Saturday, we went to the market, where the stallholders tended to assume that she was the one doing the shopping (because what Italian ragazza would pretend to know more that her mother?) and bought vine tomatoes, cheese and strawberries that all truly lived up to expectation when we ate them for lunch later.

Then we went into town and visited the Duomo. I hadn't been there for about 4 years and climbing up to the roof retained all of its magic. You can walk all over the main roof, getting a vertiginous close up view of the statues surveying the cityscape on their pedestals, and peer down on the piazza below from behind the filigree stonework of the facade. The inside of the cathedral is something of a disappointment afterwards. On a dull day, it's dark and the light is almost greenish, making it hard to believe that the exterior is so light and airy.

By the time we'd visited the cathedral, the rain was truly raining, so after a walk past the designer shops, we headed home. We went out for a meal that night and it was a true Italian experience, with delicious food and small children running around and hitting Mr A. in the back whenever they got bored of waiting for their next course. I'm all for children being taken to restaurants, but surely when they start physically assaulting complete strangers it's time to either tell them off or take them home?

We had planned to go to Lake Como on Sunday but it was raining, so we ended up going to the Triennale design museum instead. This place is incredibly expensive, with entry being 8 euros for each exhibition, so if you wanted to see all of it it would cost you about 32 euros. I also found the labelling of some of the exhibits frustrating because they often just said what the things were made of and who made them without explaining why they were special enough to be in a museum. I enjoyed it much more once I stopped reading the labels and just looked at the exhibits themselves, as there are lots that most people would immediately recognise and some that I even have at home. I've found this often with museums: I tend to read too much and look too little, so maybe it's me that needs to change.

Mum left early on Monday morning and I felt kind of sad as I watched her go. I haven't missed home much since I've been here but seeing her reminded me how new everything here is and how far away some of the things that really matter are. So sorry to all the people that I'm bad at keeping in touch with (having no phone line and rubbish internet doesn't help) and I promise to come and visit soon!

The Power of Words?

There is an advert all over the Milan metro at the moment which shows a woman's coat and legs and bears the slogan “Stilisti, go home.”

The non-English speaking world is plastered with examples of writers who fail to realise that their words may have a double meaning which they never intended to use. (One of my favourites is a sports shop in France called Athlete's Foot.) Given that the advert, which is for the home improvements store Leroy Merlin, is by Saatchi and Saatchi, however, I suspect that the use of this emotive phrase is not accidental and is intented to be provocative in the same way as the recent adverts for a clothing company showing two woman being sexually dominated at a roadside by two armed policemen.

The latter campaign, which was very visual, caused a great deal of controversy, including complaints from the Brazilian government because it had apparently been shot in Brazil. The Leroy Merlin advert, on the other hand, is more subtle, and, given that very few people in Italy will appreciate that it is provocative in the first place, I don't realy see the point of it.