The Italian Connection

Sitting on a hillside in the Italian province of Umbria, the wash of a warm, late-afternoon breeze sweeping over your naked torso and the beat of a pulsing sun adding to the fuzzy feeling of well-being as you contemplate the stark blue sky and the medieval countryside below it can certainly go a long way toward easing the misery of long hours of hard, stressful work.

As the children come rushing out of the cool interior of the 200 year-old stone building behind you, where the ceiling fans lazily waft air over the antique furniture, and leap yelling into the pool, so you ask yourself: “Is this all they say it is?”

Well the answer, dear readers, lies with he who proposes the question. What springs to mind for the average citizen is of course images of Tuscany (on the map it’s the neighbouring province, in reality I noticed very little difference), rolling hills and olive trees by the dozen. Platters of Italian salamis and cheese, accompanied by world class wines and antique furniture in ancient stone buildings. Menus to die for in cosy little restaurants hidden under twining vines and heavy beams. Ancient terracotta tiled floors and Roman ruins. Things that people in faraway lands dream of one day experiencing.

Well, I’m a curious fellow. I dream of these things too, even though I can’t stand most things Italian. It’s all about the history, and a lot about the mystique. Why are people so fascinated with Italy, and especially this little part of it? Coming from South Africa’s southern coasts, I cannot imagine a summer holiday without sun and sea, so the logical geographical choice for a person dwelling north of the Alps becomes…you guessed it…Italy. And why not use the opportunity to find out what’s the allure?

I hear you say “what about Spain?” and “what about the south of France?” Well, we’ve been to the south of France and it was pretty disappointing. Not being the type to slip into a suit and spend my life savings in the casinos of Monte Carlo or the restaurants and hotels of St. Tropez, I was left to ponder the squalid appearance and rough pebbly beaches of Cap d’Antibes where Mr. Sinatra apparently had his summer villa. For a simple soul like me it left much to be desired.

As for Spain, well…it’s simply too far away. I have a peculiar addiction to independence. This includes taking my own transport and not being reliant on other, random humans for my mobility. Especially if they speak Chinese…er…Spanish.

So we pack the car and head over, or rather through, the Alps. Leaving at two in the morning to make sure we don’t get caught up in 18km of traffic jam before the 17km long Gotthard tunnel that cuts below the ancient Gotthard pass above, our prudence pays off. The traffic jam is only 3km long at four in the morning. Coming past Milan at around six in the morning gets us safely past the big city before the general commuter rush, but afterwards we find ourselves in 50km of stop-start, bumper-to-bumper holiday traffic. They’re all heading down the main arterial route through the middle of Italy, the A1, and what can one do but grin and bear it? Sooner or later though, all bad things must also come to an end, and at around three in the afternoon we find ourselves parked outside the lovely little house we have rented in the Umbrian countryside.

Check-in time is four in the afternoon, so leaving home any earlier would have saved us some Italian traffic jams, but left us sitting here in the boiling sun outside a locked up villa for a couple of hours. All in all, we reckon we’ve juggled all the problems of our trip pretty well. Sure, it took us thirteen hours to do 800km, but we’re not stressed out, we’ve had plenty of stops and lots of laughs along the way. Almost furtively, a memory slips into my mind of a similar trip in South Africa. In those days my little 1300cc Ford had 120 horsepower less capability than my current carriage, but I still managed the 900km in nine hours. Aaahh….but for the wide open tarmac of South Africa!

Banishing the treacherous memory from my traitorous mind, I focus on good things and positive feelings. After all, this is the longed-for vacation that’s going to give me time to focus on my writing again, time to play with my kids, talk to my wife and just relax. No time for whinging and whining!

So, where is this all going? Well, as I have mentioned, coming to Italy is pretty much a must for us, considering all the factors mentioned at the beginning of this entry. Now it’s time to analyse whether or not it’s all that it’s cooked up to be.

Being a fan of Second World War history, I have read numerous accounts of the Italians by ex-soldiers, almost all of which contain stories of cowardice on the battlefield or cruelty within the POW camps. I need not go into all the details here, as it’s only important that the reader know that the Italian war record is certainly not something worth repeating as far as those Allies who were there were concerned.

Aside from a few exceptionally good chaps I’ve met during the course of my life, both in South Africa and in Switzerland, my general opinion of the Italians is that they are an excitable, loud and difficult bunch of posers, who delight in screaming their opinions at anyone who will pay attention, yet so long as one roars back with suitable threat of repercussion they will willingly back down and behave.

Sitting here in this extremely homely, comfortable and well-appointed little home, surrounded by the proverbial olive groves and with a view over endless rolling hills, where the little stone villages perched on their tops all seem to have a rather large central construction that was so obviously the seat of the feudal lord of ancient times, one has to admit that the romance and mystique of the area is evident. Not being a fan of Italian wine (my tastes run to Spanish and Chilean reds), I am pleasantly surprised to find that the bottle of red presented to us by our absent landlord goes extremely well with my typically South African first evening’s meal of grilled beef steak, sautéed potatoes, fresh bread and salad (note to self: expand knowledge of wine!).

The roads are atrocious, the buildings run-down and dilapidated, and the incessant barking and braying of a thousand mongrels all day and all night long do tend to give an impression of the old apartheid-era “homelands” (read “reservations” if you’re American) of South Africa. However, having grown up in a country where vast tracts of land were filled with such squalor, it’s not hard to put it out of one’s mind and get on with things. After all, these days I’m one of the elite again, aren’t I? Not white and privileged, just another “rich” tourist with no need to experience the day-to-day realities of life in a large country filled with struggling peasants who know nothing of their political and industrial masters’ lives of luxury.

One does of course, have to be fair. While all other roads (the ones with some semblance of asphalt on them, that is!) leave one with the impression of being on a rollercoaster ride of bumps, jolts and incredible, stomach-turning ups and downs (this at the great speed of 40kph), the many hundreds of miles of highway that we have travelled have been examined at length by my father (accompanying us on this vacation) and myself. Generally no less than three lanes wide, they are bounded by barriers of high quality galvanized metal with anchor posts of thick, galvanized steel at least every one and a half meters apart. Comparing this to the wooden post every three meters or so securing the same galvanized railing on a South African highway, we began totaling up the differences in safety factor and cost. Appallingly vast were these differences. Hats off to Italy!

The highway itself might have been somewhat uneven (at 130kph one nearly lifts off at times), but doing a traffic count at one of our pit stops while munching sandwiches gave both of us ex-traffic policemen pause for thought. The two-thousand-car-per-hour tallies of the summer holiday period in South Africa on the highway from Johannesburg to Durban paled in comparison to the incredible amount of traffic using this Italian roadway. With that volume of traffic, the fact that the Italians are able to keep the road surface covered in asphalt at all is a major accomplishment. Once again, hats off to the Italians!

On one of these pit stops, we decided that something hot to eat was called for. The vast amounts of sandwiches prepared at home and consumed along the way had left everyone yearning for hot meat of some sort (a typically South African yearning) and we found ourselves queuing at one of the many highway “Autogrills”. Just the part that says “grill” is enough to create a particular, mouth-watering desire in my South African brain, and quite frankly I would have even settled for a cardboard and soya MacDonald’s burger at that point in time. Alas, I had forgotten my pet hate regarding Italy: the food!

Despite the vast array of counters, with sweating, gesticulating and screaming chefs behind them, there was not one hot piece of meat to be found. A mind-boggling array of hard, dry rolls filled with even harder, dryer cheese and various assortments of desiccated cold meats seemed to be the only thing on offer. A slice of pizza with many variations of vegetable, interspersed with minute scraps of the aforementioned meats was hot and dripping with a myriad layers of cheese, yet somehow lacking in appeal. Brief thoughts of mixed grill platters, hamburgers and chips, hot meat pies and the like, to be found in a South African highway restaurant, were banished as I located a small sign next to a cash register that advertised ham and cheese toasted sandwiches with a coke for three Euros. Seeing that it was a kiddies menu didn’t put me off. At least it was a hot sandwich with a reasonable portion of meat on it.

Fighting my way through a mass of screeching, gesticulating humanity, I arrived at the only manned cash register to place my order and pay. “Io no parley Italiano” was my pathetic opening parry, which was greeted with a malicious stare and violent shrug of the shoulders. “Uh…sprechen Sie Deutsch?” was my next lame attempt. A long-suffering sigh and condescending look followed this gem. Fleeting thoughts of my great-uncle strafing Italian lines with his 20mm cannon seventy years prior to this moment gave me a momentary feeling of satisfaction which helped to quell my urge to leap over the counter and throttle the uncooperative b-tch, but then I played my trump. Knowing how the Italian-speaking Swiss in the canton of Tessin detest us German-speakers from over the Alps yet willingly converse in broken English with all and sundry, I asked “Can you speak English?”. As mentioned, in Tessin this was always greeted with a big smile and “Si, a leedle bit!”

Alas, we were too far south! It seems the Italian citizens are not quite as accommodating as their Italian-speaking Swiss cousins further north. A tirade of rapid-fire Italian followed, accompanied by enough gesticulation to make me wonder if the lady had accidentally connected herself to the main electricity supply. “Ok, ok!”, I interrupted, “just gimme five (holding up five fingers) of these damned toasted sandwiches here!” I pointed at the little cardboard poster next to her till. With apoplectic fury she screeched “No, no! Bambini, bambini!!” all the while pointing at my ten year-old daughter. “Yes yes,” I replied, as soothingly as possible under the circumstances, “give her the kiddies menu version, but I want four of the damned toasts in adult size for the rest of us! Grande, comprendez? GRANDE!” Spreading my hands wide and tapping the picture of the toasted sandwich with the fingers of my left hand at the same time. “NO! No, no, no! Bambini!” was the infuriating response.

As my gun hand’s fingers began twitching and reaching for the non-existent pistol at my side, I struggled for some semblance of control and took a deep breath. “Toa-sted-sand-wich…quattro, bitte!” (one can’t help throwing in a few words of whatever foreign languages one speaks when dealing with foreign language speakers!).
“Aah, tosht!” my antagonist replied, breaking out in a beam of comprehension. “Si…si, si, si!” I answered, a rush of gratitude at her sudden mood swing causing me to fall over myself to express my undying love for the great Italian language. Once again I had been subjected to the amazing capacity of Italians to turn molehills into mountains without once realizing the amount of rage they are inducing in their more reticent fellow human beings.

We received our toasted sandwiches and made a hurried escape from the harrowing crowd. Out in the parking lot, I rapidly tore apart the many layers of paper and hungrily bit into my purchase. The lukewarm bread had not a trace of brown on it and the processed cheese had barely begun to curl on the corners. The ham filling was cold and there was not the slightest trace of butter to be found. With each chew, more and more dry bread and cold lumps of cheese and ham clung to the roof of my mouth and coated my throat. Swallowing was a painful experience. My daughter’s sandwich hadn’t been included in the package, though we’d paid for five, so I handed over my unfinished specimen of Italian attempts at western fast food to her and drank a sip of water.

During the last couple of hundred kilometers before reaching our destination, my mind was filled with visions of sizzling steaks and rich, meaty sausage, known in South Africa as “boerewors”, or farmer’s sausage. Once we arrived at the supermarket near our rented villa, I headed straight for the meat counter, my stomach rumbling and my head filled with malicious thoughts of revulsion for all Italian culinary inventions. Hard spaghetti covered in weak sauces with no meat, tasteless doughy pouches filled with a single grain of mincemeat and the ever-present thin tomato sauce or the rock hard, seemingly week-old bread which they so love. Meat, I need meat, I thought.

Selecting a huge portion of beef and directing the eager little man behind the counter to cease and desist with his butchers knife (no five-millimeter-thick cuts of meat for me!) I grabbed my hunk of meat and was ready to go in search of lettuce, tomato and onion for my salad when my attention was grabbed by a tray of meaty-looking sausages that looked so much like South African boerewors that I was forced to a hesitant stop.

Now, I’ve had experience of these sort of things before, one must understand. Similar looking sausages are available all over Switzerland under the label of Italian specialties, yet no matter how many I’ve tried they’ve all been made of very finely ground meat with either a particularly bland taste or three tons of pepper, and always bone dry. What with South Africa having been founded as a way station on the spice route to India, we have a particular love of spices and their various applications that I have yet to experience elsewhere, so it is of course entirely natural that one would be unlikely to find the equivalent of South African boerewors in any other culture in the world.

Nevertheless, always being a good sucker for punishment, not to mention an eternal optimist, I bought a kilogram of the succulent-looking sausages. Now here’s the clinch. That evening’s barbeque proved to me that the Italians really must have once been a great, awe-inspiring culture. Those were the best damned sausages I have ever tasted! I’ve had them for supper, for breakfast and for lunch since then, and I will be buying more as soon as possible. Uh…hats off to the Italians!

The last thing I wish to mention here is our little trip of discovery yesterday. To those of you who have read this blog before, you’ll recall how I enjoy sitting with the old men of the village back in my hometown in Switzerland, or the hamlets of the Black Forest in Germany. One picks up a lot about the feel of a place and the ways of the locals simply by observing and listening. The humour and ragging that is bandied about speaks volumes about the character of the villagers and the mood of the place one’s in. Taking a drive through the countryside with my wife and kids while grandpa had an afternoon nap resulted in us pulling up at a local watering hole not far from where we’re staying.

A group of four old men were sitting at an outside table in the dappled sunlight, loudly contesting a game of cards. A few skinny youths with the facial expressions of wannabe Sylvester Stallones were lounging around near the pinball machine in a corner inside. Behind the solid old bar counter was a lean, sinewy man with the hard eyes and face of a fighter, the amount of tolerance he possessed displayed by the folded arms and studied indifference he showed as this family of tourists entered his fine establishment.

He and I were both surprised when I grinned at him and said “Due Birra…grande, por favore” and he smiled a brilliant smile of welcome. Indicating the children and enquiring in Italian if they too would like something, he moved over to where they were standing. My daughter was hemming-and-hawing around the ice-cream counter, and he swiftly homed in on her, patiently explaining in very slow Italian what each and every delicacy on offer was. With big, uncomprehending eyes, she made her selection, followed by my son. Once our two beers had been meticulously poured from the fresh barrel he mounted in our presence, my wife and I, followed by the happily licking and smacking children, retired to the terrace overlooking the dusty main street outside.

The number of old men had increased, and a girl or two had joined the teenagers who were now also seated outside. A feeling of leisurely camaraderie emanated from all these people, and as we moved onto our next beer more old men began arriving, shouting loud greetings to their comrades at the cards table. A middle-aged man on a scooter arrived, his little daughter seated in front of him and doing the driving. No helmets, no worries. He downed a beer, her a cold-drink, and then they were off again. The crowd of old men grew bigger, and shouts of greeting were yelled at acquaintances passing in the street as the card game expanded and began to take on epic proportions.

There and then I vowed to learn Italian. This was the perfect situation in which to get to know these excitable, loud, irritating and yet affectionate people. Right here in their own back yard.

I will be back. Not for the cuisine, not for the fabled Etruscan countryside, and not for the love affair people have with Italian culture. Just for the simple folk, whose stories must be the same as their peers the world over.

I need to hear to hear those stories…