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September 24 , 2010 My butcher’s selling something new, something grim. It looks disturbingly like Seabiscuit.
I feel alone, among strangers. Nearby Catania, the city under Etna, has long feasted on horse. They grill it over red-hot coals, and turn it into a great big horse-burger. Do you believe in following local customs when you’re in foreign lands? I’m repulsed, but curious. Should I? Would you? ***
September 17, 2010 “Can I take your picture?” I ask the phalanx of guys warming themselves in the sun. “Sure,” says the baby-faced man in the foreground. “But hurry up. We’re all on our way to the cemetery.”
That’s Sicilians for you. Curious dark humor. History’s to blame. Tyranny. Plague. War. Famine. Earthquake. Poverty. Excellent cadavers. Having survived all that, you’d be telling black jokes, too. *** For some more black Sicilian humor, read Camilleri (if you like mysteries), or Pirandello’s “The Oil Jar and Other Stories” (see my review here), or see the wonderful (long) Taviani Brothers’ film Kaos (Chaos), based on four of Pirandello’s short stories. The village scenes in Kaos were filmed in my town! *** September 3, 2010 Yes, Sicily has changed me. I hang out my wash, speak in pantomime, keep odd Sicilian hours, wear D&G spectacles, tolerate absurdity. And knock back raw milk. Not quite straight from a cow, but almost. You situate your empty bottle just so under a teat-nozzle, deposit your cash (80 cents a liter), squeeze START, and out spurts a stream of pearly-whiteness. And this cow doesn’t kick!  "Just-milked (appena munto) Ragusan milk" I glug the fat sweet stuff right from the bottle; it’s half gone by the time I get home. Could this be dangerous? Am I really “playing Russian roulette with my health” as John Sheehan, director of dairy-food safety at the FDA claims? Was there a good reason for Pasteur’s discovery? When I Googled “raw milk” a thousand things came up. I was surprised to find that only 6 US states allow it, that there’s a raging debate in the US, and a raw-milk campaign. “Why is it that in America it’s easier to buy drugs, guns, and political favors than it is to buy a gallon of raw milk?” asks one site. “Americans are afraid of their own shadows,” someone in Italy said to me recently. Is he right? ***
August 19, 2010 I’m furnishing my home with trash.
The orange trash guys drop by on a daily basis. One day they’ll cart away secco, dry stuff. The next day it’s umido, wet stuff. Another day it might be plastica or carta or lattine. I still can’t figure out what the last thing is. To make matters worse, each kind of rubbish must be tightly wound up in a different-hued bag: lava-black for secco, pistachio-green for umido, and so on. I don’t expect to ever really catch on to a system that’s as complicated, in its own way, as Sicilian codes of honor. But all that’s beside the point. What matters is not the debris they haul away from the house, but what they bring in. Last week one of them, eyes ablaze, said, “I hear you like old stuff, Signora.” “You heard right, Signore.” “Well, I have a piece of an old Sicilian cart. Do you want it?” I took it, of course, along with his picture in the too-bright sun.
Then the next day along comes this: a rusted grinder, still smelling seductively of caffè.
So we’re in business, me and the garbage guys. Will the house soon look like a moldering antiques bazaar? August 10, 2010 Where I come from, junk food is considered a major food group and obesity a national emergency. Italians make fun of our junk-food fetish, calling us—kind of cruel, don’t ya think?—culoni, big butts. Italians believe they’re eating a healthy Mediterranean diet. Take a look in an Italian hypermarket, though, and you’ll see aisles brimming with made-in-Italy junk food. But why in blazes do nearly all the packages bear American names? Can it be that Italians refuse to sully their own bella lingua by putting it on stuff that clogs arteries and fattens fannies?  These'll make you whistle Dixie  As in Yonkers, NY?  Kind of wacko, don't you think?  Named after the Fonz?  Only a hipster can appreciate a Cipster (pronounced Chipster)
 I love this! They stick the Italian plural ("i") onto an English word PS: I hope you appreciate these photos–Supermarket Security made me beg for permission from Store Manager, who looked at me like I was some sort of crazy blogger. *** |
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