San Gregorio Armeno

A few days ago I spent the day at my uncle's store, which is located on Via San Gregorio Armeno (mentioned back in September here: http://emiliadoesflorence.blogspot.it/2012/09/una-giornata-splendida.html ).  I figured I'd lend a hand, maybe speak some English with tourists, but most of all I was looking forward to observing.  

Zio Daniele's store is more than just a workplace.  It's a gathering place.  All day long various friends and family members, neighbors and acquaintances, stop by per fare due chiacchiere, which means to chat.  Some had to pass by there anyway, others simply had nothing better to do.  These moments, although casual in nature and not planned in advanced, are completely expected.  Certain faces are expected, and they are welcomed.  They have inside jokes to make, and gossip to share.  Stories to tell and messages to deliver.

What I noticed most about these conversations is the prominence of the dialect.  Neapolitan, although similar to Italian in some ways, is its own language- I, along with Italians from other parts of Italy, understand very little of it- and the day at my uncle's store was the first day since September where I didn't understand the majority of the conversations I listened to.  Florence has a dialect as well, but it's much closer to Italian (Italian was actually based on Florentine).  I never once overheard a conversation in Florence, whether it be on the street or in a store or restaurant, that I couldn't follow because it strayed so far from Italian.  Additionally, I noticed that in Florence there are a lot of negative connotations associated with the dialect (and with those who speak it).  In Naples it's different.  I'm constantly asking for explanations and translations.  A lot of stores sell things with traditional Neapolitan sayings and proverbs.  I even have a Neapolitan-Italian dictionary, and book of Neapolitan grammar.   

I think it has to do with identity.  More specifically, it has to do with expressing identity.  Speaking Neapolitan for many people may not be a conscious choice- it's the language they grew up with.  A desire or need to express their Neapolitan identity may not be on their minds, but a person who wasn't proud of or who didn't like said identity would speak Italian- and that's what makes the difference.  Two of the books I've read so far this summer mention this idea.  Both books are written by authors who struggle with their napoletanita' - it's not an identity or an association they like or are proud of, and in a way they look down on the dialect and those who speak it.  In Naples, therefore, language is a choice, even if that choice isn't made consciously.  Neapolitan speakers don't necessarily wake up and say "I'm going to speak Neapolitan because I'm comfortable with that part of my identity and want to express it", but the result is the same.  Their identity is expressed via their language.       

My favorite part of the day was getting a better understanding of il presepe.  I had never gotten to really see my uncle work and create before, and it was impressive to see not just what he can create with his own hands,  but also the kind of thought that goes into deciding what pieces to create and sell.  They make their decisions based on demand, of course, but also on tradition.  Il presepe dates back to the 1600s (if not earlier), and the people who make them are very aware of their historical significance.  My uncle, and the other artisans like him on the same street, all at once are artists and businessmen, historians and time keepers.  They take the old and make a place for it in today's world.  

I had never realized it before, but il presepe is an incredibly accessible art form.  It gives anyone who dedicates the time the chance to be a poet, an artist.  A lot of planning goes into il presepe- what size, what kind of scenes and people and images.  So much thought goes into the choices made, and each choice is the representation of a feeling or opinion or idea.  Each choice is a symbol of something greater.  At one point, a man came into the store looking for a small chair.  He had two pieces already- a seated woman and a table, and wanted a chair to accompany them.  We had a conversation about what kind of chair it should be, but first it was necessary to decide what kind of table it was.  Perhaps the woman was selling things, or perhaps it was a dinner table.  When the client picked a chair, he put the seated woman on one side of the table and the empty chair across from her.  We then had a conversation about why the chair was empty.  Forse aspetta qualcuno, perhaps she is waiting for someone.  Who is she waiting for?  Why is she waiting?     

Given its centuries long history, il presepe has become  an important part of people's lives.  It's a standard decoration in a Neapolitan home.  I think when a population has centuries of history and traditions (you know, unlike America), even the simplest most modest people prioritize art.  All of the conversations that took place that day, like the one about the empty chair, are conversations that I couldn't imagine having with people at home, at least not outside of a college campus.  At home we reserve this kind of thinking for such a small portion of the population, and that's a real shame.        

The Town Pool

When I was a kid, my mom, like many other moms around the country, took my sisters and I to the town pool.  The town pool provided an easy and enjoyable way to celebrate summer- by providing a place to go, to socialize, to cool off.  My mother always packed lunch, though my sisters and I inevitably always asked if we could buy fries or ice cream or something from the snack bar- just for the sake of buying something from the snack bar.  We played with other kids, ran around, swam in that water that must have God only knows how much chlorine to keep it swimable.  That was, is, our culture.  We were in a controlled environment, under the watchful eyes of parents and lifeguards, surrounded by people we knew or at least knew of.  At the time, that pool seemed huge.  It seemed like it took forever to swim through all of it (though to be fair I wasn't that strong of a swimmer).  Even just sitting on a lounge chair looking out at it, all the different depths and all the people it held.  At the time, that pool seemed huge.

After a few years, my parents decided to build a pool  of our own, a much smaller one of course, in the back yard.  Maybe I was ten or eleven.  I haven't been to the town pool since.  In my mind, therefore, that pool has always been as huge as my child's eyes perceived it.

Today, years later, as I am about to enter that nether region between childhood and adulthood that is senior year of college, I realized how wrong I was.  The pool at the Syosset-Woodbury park, in the grand scheme of things, is small.  Really, really small, and what made me realize it was the Mediterranean Sea.

I was walking along the lungomare today, near where all the fancy hotels are.  I stopped for a moment to look out the view,  like always.  It never gets any less beautiful or any less moving.  Not far from the shore, which is actually just a long row of boulders, gli scogli in Italian, there was a group of boys, maybe six or seven of them, sitting in two rowboats.  They must have been twelve or thirteen years old, tops.  At one point as I was watching, they all jumped into the water.  The swam around for a while, splashed and dunked one another, and a few minutes later they climbed back in.  As I looked around, I noticed other people swimming, too.  Adults, with swim caps and goggles, doing laps.  There were also people spread out along the rocks: some people alone with fishing rods, some couples, and another group of boys.  They were taking in the sun, the heat, the water.  And all of a sudden, as I was watching these children swim in bay, I realized that the unofficial town pool in Naples is the Mediterranean itself.      

The concept is somewhat similar.  The school year has ended, temperatures are rising, the sun is out, and people of all ages are looking to enjoy these circumstances.  

There are, obviously,  a lot of differences.  

Although I saw both adults and children today, I didn't see them together.  These kids were out in the water on that boat with just each other.  Who knows whether it belongs to one of their parents, or who brought them out there, or the answers to any other such similar question.  And yet what they were doing never once struck me as unsafe.  It didn't really strike me as anything, really, other than enjoyable.  It just seemed normal, that's because it is, and it probably has been for as long as people have been living here (so, forever, essentially).   

Think back to your town pool, if you ever went to one, or the lake at your sleep away camp or whatever the equivalent is for you.  Now imagine that body of water being able to connect you to literally anywhere else in the world.  Try to imagine the place where you spent your summers as a child being the unofficial capital of an entire region of the world, a place that for thousands of years has been a center of cultural, religious, and linguistic exchange.  A place that has experienced the glory of empire, the prestige of culture, and suffered the hardships of loss, war, exploitation and crime.  Over and over again, back and forth, for centuries.

Kids in Naples, kids all over southern Italy, and in Greece and Israel and Syria, and in Morocco and Egypt, grow up swimming, playing and splashing in the waters that gave birth to culture.  They grow up carrying that history, breathing it and seeing it.  Continuing it.  

Kids in the States grow up swimming at the Syosset-Woodbury pool.  

  

The art of "Straight Up Chilling" has long been practiced by Neapolitans.

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I guess in a way Vesuvius is the lifeguard.  He's the only one guaranteed to be watching.  He's always there.  Though lifeguard isn't the right word.  Because the thing could blow at anytime.  

Life is full of morbid metaphors when you live near a volcano.  Morbid metaphors and high insurance rates.    
        

Nothing to do with anything but everything to do with everything.

There are those days where all of a sudden it’s 7 pm. You’ve lost track of time because you spent the majority of your day reading a really sad book that is also a little boring at times and so the breaks you take between chapters are a lot longer than they seem, or than you wanted them to be.  You feel pretty uncomfortable.  Not just because a character died in war and his family has no money and his sister is being forced to marry a man she doesn’t love or the whole town is all up in their business all the time, but also because you didn’t shower this morning.  It was a conscious choice at the time- which was fine given that you knew you were just going to read all day- but by 7 pm you have to remind yourself that you made a choice not to shower, and that you didn’t just forget.  Because there are days where you do just forget to shower.  Or forget to eat or flush the toilet or feed the fish or whatever other thing that is normally, well, normal.  You spend a lot of time contemplating some really sad things- like how small you are in the grand scheme of the whole universe, and how all you’ve contributed today is a decreased consumption of water- at the sake of your hygiene.  You have lots of great ideas though, and in your head you have these really beautiful, articulate and important ways of writing and expressing them but 99% of the time they just stay in your head and never get written down, because the couch is too comfortable or because you’re too tired or because you’re just an intellectual jerk.  Or sometimes you’re afraid of where they’ll take you if you start getting them out of your head.  Or all of those things.  Or none.  It depends on the day, on the instance.  It’s never the same.    

You’re so smart.  And you know that not only because you’ve always gotten good grades or because people have always told you that, though those things help, but you know it because you know that you’re thinking things so many people never contemplate.  You think about your place in the world, your place in the lives of your friends and family and enemies and acquaintances, you think about what you learn in school outside of school, you always have.  You apply it.  YOU are the real life example of the smartass who asked “When am I going to use this in real life?”.  THIS IS REAL LIFE.  USING YOUR BRAIN IS REAL LIFE. YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO DO IT, LIKE, ALL THE TIME. FOREVER.  And you hope so badly that the aforementioned smartass kid is no longer a smartass, and that he learned something at some point, and started using his brain in the way it was intended to be used.  Hopefully he’ll have realized that they don’t teach you history to bore you, but they teach it so that you’ll  be prepared for when it repeats itself, all of a sudden becoming painfully relevant to your present.   The aforementioned smartass will realize that they make you read Romeo and Juliet because one day you’ll fall in love; they make you read The Scarlet Letter because you need to learn what it means to be societally exiled, either so you yourself, should you find yourself there, know how to deal with it, or so that you can recognize the injustice when it happens to someone else.  They make you read books where people die because as you get older a lot of people who have always been in your life are going to die, in a number of ways.  They make you read books about war because those aren’t going away any time soon.  And then they make you read Brighton Beach Memoirs or A Midsummer Night’s Dream or something else that’s funny because it’s necessary to learn the importance of laughter, especially with all that other sad stuff they make you study.  They teach you math and science and physics that seem useless at the time but one day you’ll be driving a car and you’ll accelerate and you’ll be like OH MY GOD THIS IS MATH IN REAL LIFE.  Even all the math and science you’ll never understand, that really hard stuff, even if you personally never use it, it’s present all around you because, the physical world and how it works.  Which is pretty damn important, given that it’s where we all live.  And there are people, a lot of people, who DO understand all that hard math and science and they use it all the time to figure out the world, with the intention of bettering it.  And even if all this didn’t matter,  even if we lived in some odd universe where things just WERE, for no reason at all, they’d still teach all this because WE SHOULD HAVE SOME CULTURE.  What the hell else would people talk about otherwise?  Really stupid things.  Like, objectively and undeniably stupid.  That’s what.  And you, a smart person, and your fellow smart people, are just trying to go through this journey that is life doing the best you can.  And you’re really hard on yourself.  You always think you’re not doing enough, and that whatever you are doing you aren’t doing well, and even though you might lose sleep over it, it’s a good thing to think, because it means you’re thinking.  And if you’re thinking, well, that means a lot of really great stuff.  (THIS IS WHY THEY TEACH YOU PHILOSOPHY).     

It’s okay if your thoughts, when you finally go to write them down, don’t seem to be linear.  Other than actual, physical, literal lines you draw on paper or paint on a road, or a football field, not very many things are linear.  Time I guess, though a bunch of people out there will debate that.   The point is, is that nothing is ever too big of a stretch because everything in your life, LITERALLY EVERYTHING, is related to at least one other thing, though usually very many other things, to the point where you probably couldn’t even wrap your head around it.  But sometimes you will get it.   Sometimes you’ll realize that laziness, and all that’s negative about it, is one of the recurring themes of the book you’re reading, and then you get up to take a break from reading, thinking you’ll get a drink of water and check your email, and then there you are all of a sudden writing something.  Today you wrote something down.

Tomorrow is another day.  You can’t know if you’ll write something or not.  That can’t be forced, no matter how great the ideas in your head are.  Tomorrow, though, you’ll be a better person, even if for only for yourself, for having written.  For having shared.   Because even if nobody else reads what you wrote, by writing you inherently shared those words with some other part of yourself that wasn’t involved.  Because you are complex.  You are made of parts.  Parts that make up one really awesome whole.   Which means you are, just by existing, a reflection of the world.  You are part of this really big web, a web full of other people and words and ideas and foods and things and places, a web which a lot of people like to refer to as the entire universe.  Which is scary, and sometimes sad, but also really great.  And beautiful.   So tomorrow, just try to relax.  Think your thoughts as they come, and act on them as feels right.  You should also take a shower.  

Summer Plans

I suppose I should have written a post about leaving Florence- something about the life changing experience of studying abroad for a year coming to a close, about everything I've learned and seen and become.  And I did think about writing something, but I never sat down to do it.  Final exams were certainly part of the reason, but if I really had something, if there really was something to be written, it would have been written.  But I don't feel as though a blog post would have done it justice.  (An entire book would probably be more appropriate).  I didn't want to summarize, or skip anything, because if I've learned anything from being here it's that every single little thing matters, no matter how insignificant it seems at the time.  And if I leave all of those things out, which I'd have to if I wanted to write something of a reasonably readable length, I'd be negating so much of my experience.

Luckily for me, and to the dismay of some of my friends at home, my experience abroad isn't over yet.  It's continuing for the next to month in a new location (my favorite location in Italy!).  Back in March I applied for a grant that would allow me to stay in Italy for the summer in order to perform a self designed, independent research project.  I designed a two part project that, in short, involves a study of southern Italian writers and a small, ethnographic study of Naples and the surrounding areas.  I was awarded the grant (Thank you, Smith College!) and now here I am.  Today is the first official day of research, and the project runs through July 13 (though I won't be back stateside until the 29th).  

On my second to last day in Florence, I went to get a sandwich at Pino's (I mentioned him in a post a while back).  When I was telling him about my project he seemed pleased at my interest in the subject.  "People like to forget that culture started in the south [of Italy].  We invented culture".  Then yesterday, when I was buying books for the project, the man at the bookstore was quite excited to hear about my plans, and started rattling off a list of literary suggestions.  That kind southern pride, for lack of a better or more creative way of putting it, is something I'm familiar with, but only informally.  My (summarized) goal for the project is, via the literature I read and the local people I meet and talk with, to formalize that familiarity, to put it into a new context (new for me, anyway).

I'll be sharing some of  my observations here, as I've done, or tried to do, all year.  If you've read any of this blog during my time in Florence, thank you.  I hope you'll stay tuned to this next leg of my adventure.