The Italian Gerald

Back in the 1930s, the English travel writer E. R. P. Vincent wrote that “Italia is not Italy”, making the then novel argument that “Italia” (the real Italy) was not in fact the same as the “Italy” experienced ­ by English tourists. Surveying his contemporaries’ travel guides, Vincent felt obliged to warn his readers that, try as they might, they would not be able to spot Botticelli’s models on the streets of 20th century Florence.

“Italia has a future”, Vincent wrote, “Italy does not, it only has a scant present and an immense past. Italia has bitter icy winds, Italy basks in perennial sunshine. Italia is a strange, hard, throbbing land, Italy is accessible, straightforward and very dead.” Apart from proving that whenever travel writers attempt to write purple prose the result is inevitably purple-headed – “strange, hard, throbbing” indeed – Vincent’s point is a valid one. Most 21st century visitors to Italy see little of Italia, but unlike Vincent, New Zealand Gerald thinks this is in fact a good thing.

Outside of the precarious precision of package tours, Italy is a shambles. Unless you’re willing and able to pay tour operators hundreds of euros to insulate you from the chaos, or villa owners thousands to rub you down with truffle oil under the Tuscan sun, the most lasting souvenir you’ll have from your Italian experience is likely to be post-traumatic stress disorder.

Italian airports betray unmistakeable warning signs of the chaos that waits beyond the arrival halls like a lion that’s been starved for two weeks ahead of Christian Night at the Coliseum. Unless you arrive on the very first flight of the day, you will see neither hide nor hair of a trolley at the baggage reclaim.

The Germans, by contrast, police their trolley stands with eagle eyes – you will never find one empty. Manned and womanned motorized collection vehicles insure that the average time a trolley spends abandoned is just 8.6 seconds. In Italian airports, not only is there no attempt to collect the trolleys discarded by the first arrivals of the day, many of those arrivals are stymied by the fact that they have to be in possession of a 1 euro coin before they can liberate a trolley from its stand.

After you’ve risked hernias and musculoskeletal injuries lugging your bags up and down what feels like Rome airport’s recreation of the city’s Seven Hills, the neon glow of the car-hire counters seems to offer some respite – but not for very long. In Italy, even if you can speak the language, “customer service” translates as “me ne frego” (I don’t give a shit).

When I visited 2 years ago and attempted to collect my hire car, the Europcar representative made it perfectly clear that she held me personally responsible for her having to be conscious at that ungodly hour (it was after 9 am). Italians don’t have jobs, they have inconveniences. Jobs are inherently unItalian, like poor dress sense – without slaves, the Roman Empire wouldn’t have made it across the Tiber.

Italians themselves have no illusions about how long things take to get done in Italy. Anything involving even the slightest amount of official administration takes between 6 weeks and 6 months longer than it does in any other country that claims to be civilized. Unless of course you are a member of the most notorious gang of cowboys in the West: the Italian government.

A friend of New Zealand Gerald’s who has lived in a small town in Tuscany for some years believes that the Italy of today cannot realistically be called a democracy – it is in fact an oligarchy. Corruption is so rife that even the espresso machines in the parliament canteens are paying protection. The premier, Silvio Berlusconi, treats the Italian statute book like his own personal Etch A Sketch, making and repealing laws to stay out of jail and in power.

As an example of just how beyond the pale Italian politics is, take the case of the “proposed” autostrada (intercity motorway) extension that would significantly reduce the time it currently takes to drive between Rome and Livorno. The route initially proposed by the government minimized the destruction of houses by allowing for tunnels to be blasted through inconvenient hills. Last month, however, it was announced that there was no longer enough money for the tunnels and that a new route, one that would require the destruction of thousands more houses, had been decided upon.

In fine Italian style, the minister for infrastructure is also the mayor of Orbetello, one of the towns that will be heavily affected by the new “proposed” route. In his ministerial capacity he appointed the head of the company that the government had chosen to build the motorway. Italian-English dictionaries provide no translation for “conflict of interest”.

A group of outraged Orbetello citizens have formed an association with the goal of forcing their mayor/minister to rethink.* Not only have their homes been marked for destruction overnight, the delicate ecosystem of the region is also under threat. The environment, they say, will be irreversibly damaged by the new motorway route. Their resistance is brave, but one fears it will be futile.

Orbetello’s many-hatted mayor is a symptom of the diseased order from which emanates the stultifying chaos of Italy. Only in a society that is so distracted by the chaos of everyday life could the leaders behave in such a cavalier fashion and actually be rewarded for it. A telling postscript to the tragedy of Orbetello is that the residents voted their mayor in after he had been appointed minister for infrastructure.

 * You can increase their chances of achieving this goal by liking their Facebook page: NO all'Autostrada su Colli e Laguna di Orbetello

B. J. and the Bear

Two weeks ago an Italian friend made me an offer I could have refused, but didn’t. She needed help with a story she’s writing for Tavolo, one of the world’s premiere food magazines. Tavolo shocked the Italian food writing establishment in the 1960s by consistently linking the pleasures of food with those of amore. It could not have declared its intentions more clearly with the cover of the first issue: Sophia Loren was pictured with pasta sauce all around her mouth. She was wearing a wig-cum-brassiere made entirely of spaghetti. And nothing else.

Simonetta (the Italian job) writes a column in Tavolo that showcases Italian restaurants outside of Italy. She’d already covered the UK, the US and Australia, and wanted me to send her the good oil on the NZ scene in return for a few gallons of her family’s very good olive oil. I was engaged.

My brother was conveniently directing the children's play Thumbelina in Wellington and as I was already flying thither I decided to investigate one of the city’s best-known Italian restaurants, Scopa. This audacious “caffé cucina”, I reckoned, would tickle Tavolo’s fancy for carnal cuisine – in English its name means – wait for it – “fuck” (I ought to declare at this point that my Italian is passable). While scopa can also mean “broomstick”, every Italian over the age of 3 knows what it really means.

For years this restaurant has been getting customer reviews that suggest it’s a case of Scopa by name and Scopa by nature. Interestingly, while none of these reviews betrays any awareness of what scopa means, most of them complain about the staff’s “fuck off” attitude. The following unedited, semi-literate excerpt is typical of the negative reviews:

After going to this restaurant with about 7 other people i must say the food was good but the staff are completly rude. when i first walked in i wa waiting to get to my table as it was very busy and people standing around the waitress completly shoved me out the way with no excuse me or anything....not only that when we booked the table we originally had ten and went down to Seven and the waitres didn’t seem to be happy about this and asked very rudly why we booked for ten we advise that we did change the amount of people and then there was a bit of wine in the bottle and the waitress asked “can you finish this” and then last but not least we were asked if we could leave as there was another booking at 10pm after we were told when we booked that you couldn’t book after 8. 

My Scopa experience was by no means as traumatic – the food was the typical approximation of authentic Italian one tends to be presented with in NZ, and the staff, though obviously very much aware of the place’s filthy name, were by no means filthy themselves. Their attitudes wouldn’t have been out of place in the majority of Auckland and Wellington restaurants.

Back in Auckland, I knew exactly where my next Italian dinner would be: Me Ne Frego in Epsom. What is it about Italians moving to NZ and opening offensively named restaurants? The best translation of me ne frego is “I don’t give a shit”.

The Italian joker behind this restaurant has also been lambasted online. Despite knowing what the name meant, this patron nevertheless felt obliged to complain about the service:

 . . . if you don’t mind waiting for 55 minutes for your main course, & get verbally abused by a non-civilised, non-professional, hippie, dishevelled Italian guy, then by all means you should definitely check out the place, as i heard the food is actually quite good....

i didn’t get passed the appetizers, because i couldn’t wait any longer for my main course...

it’s just being told to f*** off in front of your family simply because you asked when the food would arrive after almost an hour waiting, well, it just didn’t go down well with me. 

To be fair, the owner/chef certainly can’t be accused of false advertising. What’s more, his food has been praised just as often as his service has been panned, and it is unquestionably autentico. My cautious attempts at the lingo defused his desire to tell me to vaffanculo and a very pleasant evening was had by myself and the one other customer who was cowering in a corner.

At this point I had two juicy morsels for Simonetta, but I really needed a third course to round things off nicely. I scoured the directories for another restaurant that might somehow fit into Tavolo’s theme of carnal cuisine. Things were not looking good. Try as I might, I could not read sex or offence into the names of the other Italian restaurants in Auckland.

I once had a student who made pizzas at Gina’s and who was learning far more interesting things from his Brazilian co-workers than he was from me. It was he who taught me the Brazilian slang for lesbian: “Velcro”. It was a lopsided exchange: all I taught him in return was bad poetry. This anecdote, while charming, was more Brazilian than Italian, and I was beginning to despair.

But then Dio smiled on me. I was driving through Kingsland intending to dine (reluctantly) at Papas Pizza Café when I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye a sandwich board saying: “Pompino Ristorante”. I simply had to check it out, for reasons which will soon become clear.

I parked near Winehot and walked a little ways up New North Rd to where the sandwich board teepeed the pavement in all its hand-painted, red-white-and-green glory. I opened the restaurant’s door, bells tinkled, and the ugliest woman I had seen since leaving Wellington materialized from behind a beaded curtain. She must have been Simon and Garfunkel’s biggest fan: she had the height and impishness of the former and the hair of the latter.

“Can I help you?” she asked in a voice that was so uncannily like John Key’s I was momentarily at a loss for words. As I regained my composure I had time to note the two Davids above the till – Michelangelo’s and Posh’s. The place reeked of new paint, had six tables, no muzak (not even Andrea Bocelli), and far too many empty Chianti bottles in straw baskets.

“Table for one, please.”

“Anywhere you like,” John Key ventriloquized and left me alone with the sound of silence.

I seated myself and began to peruse the menu. After a few minutes I was approached by the second-biggest man I have ever seen. He all but shattered the beaded curtain and lurched across the few feet separating us. He was unquestionably several over the otto and Italian as Barilla pasta.

“Calla me Orso, ita meansa ‘bear’ in Italian!” he boomed in such a way that I thought he was somehow channelling an aftershock from the Christchurch earthquake. Gondola-like, his right foot collided with my table and made leaning towers of its Chianti bottles.

“Piacere, Orso,” I replied after the table recovered. “Mi chiamo New Zealand Gerald.”

“You speak Italian!” he rumbled, in Italian (the ensuing dialogue has been translated).

“Yes, sort of. Excuse me, but I have to ask you – why did you call your restaurant ‘Pompino’?” Orso, who indeed resembled nothing so much as a grizzly with a third-rate full-body wax job, bared ursine teeth and smiled from ear to ear – a good 12 inches at least.

“Ah, of course, you know what it means, eh?”

“Yes, I do,” I smiled back.

“Well it’s like this,” he said. “My wife, she’s always breaking my balls. She won’t learn any Italian and my English is not good. And she’s no oil painting – you saw her yourself.”

“She seemed nice,” I lied.

“She isn’t. She never lifts a finger in the kitchen – I have to do everything.”

“But why ‘Pompino’?” I persisted.

“Like I said, I have to do everything. She’s never given me a pompino and she never will – but the joke’s on her now, eh?”  

The End Is Nigh

Yesterday I bought the October issue of Metro magazine. If Dante was right, my purchase will have condemned me to his Seventh Circle of Hell, where I shall suffer eternally with those who were violent against themselves. But I have already paid dearly for my sin in this life – Metro now costs $9.75.

The current incarnation of Metro is clearly suffering an identity crisis. The advent of the cannily conceived MiNDFOOD in 2008 must have knocked Metro’s minders silly. “It’s like six magazines in one” claims MiNDFOOD’s advertising. It’s really more like six half-arsed magazines in one (giving it three arses?),  but its owners know exactly what they are doing, unlike ACP.

In March this year it was reported that Metro’s circulation was just 9,680 and that it was likely running at a loss. Former editor Bill Ralston wondered whether ACP would soon be forced to combine it with North & South. Meanwhile MiNDFOOD was described as one of the few titles that were not haemorrhaging readers, and its website puts its current circulation at 30,758 (NZ Audit Bureau of Circulation data). Based on the same data, MiNDFOOD is the fastest-growing magazine in the country. Ralston’s speculation could well come true, sooner rather than later.

But one certainly doesn’t get the impression that Metro’s current editor, Simon Wilson, can hear the wolves baying for his publication’s blood. Reading one of his editorials is like having your brain rubbed with an oil called “Essence of Smug”. Wilson was presumably on holiday for most of September; his October editorial certainly reads like it was written while he was out to lunch.

Just how little effort Wilson puts into his editorials becomes obvious when you read Nicola Shepheard’s excellent cover story, “Shark Attacks Granny”, in which she expertly covers The New Zealand Herald’s tabloidization under the deputy editorship of Shayne Currie, NZ’s tinpot William Randolph Hearst. Wilson doesn’t feel under any pressure to lead from the front in his editorial: he simply rehashes Shepheard’s best lines and steals some of her considerable thunder. On the rare occasion that he actually tries to write something off his own bat, he falls flat, just like this sentence, which has too many rhymes for “prat”. How about this for a paragraph, which begins with a relative clause, no less:

    Which means if you want to blame anyone [for the tabloidization of the Herald], blame all of us. We’re the ones buying, or not buying, the paper.

This kind of blarney makes a Woman’s Day editorial look profound. We’re all to blame; we’ve all sinned. Thanks for that, Simon Magus. In the rest of his editorial Wilson tells us who his heroes are, like a 5 year old listing his favourite superheroes. Along the way he manages to misspell the surname of one of them twice, “as you do” (to quote him on Steve Braunias’ taking of his daughter to the races).

Mention of Braunias, who has been peddling his unique blend of Scroogery and schmaltz for so long that he has become a national institution (surely a fate worse than death for a writer with subversive pretensions), brings me to the issue’s special feature, “One Big Day in Auckland”. Braunias headlines “24 other top writers and photographers” who together attempt to chronicle the events of Saturday, September 4, 2010 in Auckland, “the city we love”. It’s hard to describe the result.

The birth of twins (who problematically didn’t arrive until the 5th) is documented in graphic detail. There are two poems, the less said about which the better. Tessa Duder goes for a sail. Emily Perkins makes lamingtons. You get the idea.

Apart from Nicola Shepheard’s cover story, which shines out like a light when all around is dark, the October Metro will do nothing to improve the mag’s ailing circulation. Utterly ignorant of Dylan Thomas’s sound advice, Metro is going gentle into that good night.