Italy and America: A comparison of cultures

So, I've been back in the United States for over a week.   And it's been a rather busy week.  I've moved back into Boston, then moved right back out to my home town of Honeoye Falls, NY.  In this time I've noticed some striking differences between US and Italian cultures, but ultimately, I think there is more similar than different.

White Oak Barrel in Mt. Vesuvius volcanic cave

We all know the Italian stereotypes.  The food, wine, and life lovers who eat long meals and work short hours.  But I've learned Italians are an incredibly hard working people.  In every city we went to there were shops for food, coffee, or knick-knacks on every street.  On top of that there were several people peddling posters, whirly gigs which could be flung up into the air with a rubber band, and laser pointers.  The Italians I met on the vineyard on Mt. Vesuvius were very kind and also a very hard working family.  They were able to cater a group of twenty-eight for a couple of hours, while we were all running a little late for the next event.  That is on top of running the farm, the fermenting and aging products, and the bottling and sale of their product.  I've also learned that there is a long and strong history of family business in Italy.  The Ducati factory that we visited was all the product of the business founded by three brothers.  And several businesses are owned and managed by one to three people.

Geocentric Model at Galileo Museum

It seems to me that events that reinforce a stereotype stick in your mind longer, while events that work against that stereotype are ignored.  While I was in Italy there were a couple of rail strikes, and several shops closed for lunch, or earlier hours than we would be used to in the United States.  Added to this is the fact that youth unemployment is roughly 37 percent, down from the mid-forties in 2014, but still higher than it has been historically, which was about 27 percent unemployment according to tradingeconomist.com .  But on the whole I would say Italians are no more lazy then Americans, who pride themselves on their "protestant work ethic".  And through my time in Italy I was able to see a strong commitment to the advancement of both science and the arts.

One area where Italian culture diverges from US is food.  In the US I think food is best characterized as a necessity.  Food in America is cheap, filling, and made more tasty through artificial flavors.  Of course there are exceptions, everywhere in the US has regional dishes.  Back home in Rochester there is famous dish called the "Garbage Plate" which consists of macaroni salad, potatoes, hamburger meat, and hot sauce.  This dish is treated with far less reverence than most foods in Italian cuisine.  In Italy there are cheeses whose methods are still made in the traditional style, dating back to the middle ages.  Italy has such a strong history with meats, cheeses, and wine that its government protects the naming rights of these products, and the existence of such geological branding is a source of constant consternation when negotiating trade deals.  Italy's attitude toward food is so strong that its a matter of international importance.

A McDonald's in Venice

Italy's food culture seems to be changing pretty quickly though.  I'm not going to make a value judgement on these changes, but with an increase in tourism, and the reach of international corporations, more efficient food choices are available on Italian streets.  I ate at a McDonald's in Venice, and Milan is acquiring a Starbucks in the coming year.  New experimental wines, like the "super tuscans" perform successfully in markets even though they break with traditional wine making methods.

Milan business district

Italian culture as a whole is experiencing a deep change too.  I noticed several people of African descent in the streets of Italy, and cities like Milan, which hosted the World Expo in 2015 have started looking to the future, and it is apparent in its architecture.  Much like the large American cities, Milan is building large glass skyscrapers.  And more and more Italians are learning to speak English fluently.  Several signs are written in both English and Italian, some in just English.  Italy, like a lot of the rest of the world is undergoing an Americanization.  Much like how cities in France and Spain were strongly influenced by Rome, the difference being that the United States never conquered Italy through force.

But now I'm back in the United States.  I'm sitting at the home I grew up in, in upstate New York.  And soon enough I will move across the country to Silicon Valley, California.  I wonder what, if anything in America should be more like Italy.  More relaxed alcohol laws would top some of my friends lists.  But I think the top of my list would be a greater appreciation for rail transport.  I deeply envy the ability for Italians to move between the major cities faster than highway speeds without needing to go through an airport.  If I could change a second thing I'd want the food culture in America to change.  I'd like more focus on quality than quantity and efficiency.  Americans are on the move, people in the US are more likely to move far away for school or for work, and there is less opportunity to create regional dishes.  It is hard, if not impossible.  But part of the reason why Italy was so interesting was because of its diversity from city to city.  All while it was able to stay under the flag of Italy, and not look out of place.

While I'm sad to leave Italy, I believe I'll always feel more at home in the United States, the Garbage Plate and all.

The infamous Garbage Plate

More like Ve-NICE

Well, my time in Italy is basically over.  These past weeks have seemed like the just blew by.  The perception of the passage of time is anything but constant.  The weather the past few days has been a little down.  But it's fitting that it's been so wet in a city that sits upon the water.

There is no other city like venice in the world.  Sure, other cities have canals running though them, but Venice is a city of canals.  There are no cars, no bikes, the only motor vehicles are in the water.  And it's been that way for hundreds of years.  That's not to say Venice isn't a very different city to what it historically was.  It's been transformed to almost exclusively a tourist destination.  There are very few actual residents of Venice, and even fewer who don't work in an industry directly linked to tourism.

The first days in Venice were actually really nice, I may not have been fair to the climate here.  We hopped off the train onto Venice, the only land connection to the outside world, and set off to explore the city.

Venice really is a pretty small city.  It's confined by the size of the island, and it can't really build up because it's on a swamp.  And tall buildings would ruin the allure of the city.  Though when taking heavy luggage places it is better to take public transportation, rather than walking.  The vaporettos are medium sized boats which navigate the broader canals of venice to move people place to place.  When people think of Venice they certainly think of the Gondola's, and their drivers in straw hats and stripped shirts.  And there are certainly plenty of those in Venice.  But the service runs upwards of 80 Euros, so I decided against using onef this trip.  Maybe next time Venice.

Please excuse the HDR halo

Venice is a city dotted by buildings with neat architecture and monuments.  Part of the charm of some of the buildings is that most of them have entrances from the water.  But there is also the fact that the buildings look old, damaged by time and salt creeping under the plaster from the canals and the air.  Decorated wells are all around Venice.  They were originally used to collect rain water to drink.  None of the wells are in active use, as the city has drinking water brought in an aqueduct along the train tracks.  The canals were used for sewers at the time, so it was not a good idea to drink from them.

One might wonder how Venice was able to not die from horrible disease.  Part of it was that they did.  Venice was a very unsanitary city for a long time.  Napoleon, when he invaded had to do some very basic things to make sure the city wasn't so pestilent, like start a hospital and make sure the Venetians didn't bury their dead on Venice.  But that wasn't all.  The tides were able to keep the canals relatively clean.  And this is relative to a literal cesspool.  An odd smell still permeates the streets of Venice, and it is still a very bad idea to swim in the canals.

There is, of course, the issue of rising sea levels in Venice.  They even had to raise up the road to prevent damage, and unwalkability of the walkways during High Water.  To manage this issue, Italy brought in a bunch of Dutch guys (because who knows dams and levees better than the Dutch?) to construct a series of 4 barriers, which guard against high tides, with the ability to withstand water up to 3 m (10 ft) above normal water level.  The segments of the Mose Dam rest on the bed of the mouth of the lagoon and allow water exchange.  In the event of high water the segments empty out ballasts and revolve around a hinge to block the water from flooding the city.

While Venice is the most notable city of the Venetian Lagoon, there are several other islands that I was able to explore.  Murano is famous for it's glass.  I was able to watch some craftsmen in the process of creating a glass chandelier.  Something they would probably be able to sell for several thousand dollars.

Borano is a small island, with little of note, except for a leaning bell tower, and several small houses, none larger than 3 stories, which are painted any color you can imagine.  Lido was the last Island I visited, and that place has a beach.  I was able to dip my feat into the Adriatic and feel sand run through my fingers.  It was genuinely a good time and I had a lot of fun.  Up until the rain started.

And it rained a lot after that, and I don't really think it stopped until a few hours ago.  I climbed the bell tower in St Mark's square.  It was cold and wet and rainy, but I imagine when the weather's not aweful I would have enjoyed it more, I did go out for dinner, and I got to see something rare.  A time when St. Mark's was practically empty.  The sky was dark and the lights were on, reflecting on the puddles.  It looked something like a dream.



Goodbye Italy, you will be missed.

Retrospective: Mt. Vesuvius

In the south of Italy, near the edge of Naples there is a very famous mountain.  It isn't especially large, but it has a history.  And in case you haven't guessed by the title of this post, that mountain is none other than Mt. Vesuvius.
Vesuvius erupted, famously in 79 AD.  The Roman Empire was near its most powerful, and the Emperor Titus had just succeeded his father, Vespasian.  When he heard news of the eruption, the Emperor sent down a fleet of the Roman navy to assist evacuation of the port city of Pompeii.  The famed Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Younger witnessed the event, and Pliny the Elder met his fate trying to rescue people.  They are part of the reason that eruption was remembered so well even so many years after the fact.  But the port town of Herculaneum, referred to as Ercolono by the native population, was also hurt by the eruption.

There is an archaeological site with an excavated Roman town, that you can get a good sense of Roman life, and how the eruption of Vesuvius caused a trail of death and destruction.  People crowded near the docks to escape the pyroclastic flow, but it wasn't enough to save them.  We have no records from any survivors of Herculaneum.  The excavation sites at Pompeii and Herculaneum give us a large portion of our knowledge of life outside the city of Rome during this time, including how Roman towns were organized, and how Roman villas were decorated.

When the Greeks settled Neapolis (Naples), and later Romans founded more settlements around Vesuvius there was no indication that it was a volcano.  Geological evidence suggests that the last eruption before the one in 79 AD was 300 years prior.  The volcano entered into a period of great activity, then settled down until the 1660, where it erupted again quite violently, and since then there have been eruptions every few dozen years. The last one being in 1944, as the allies were retaking Italy in WWII.  So we might be due for another eruption soon, or that may have been the last one for another few hundred years yet.  The eruptions of volcanoes are notoriously hard to predict. Vesuvius is monitored extensively, and the Italian government had put in place economic incentives to move away from Vesuvius.  It is very much an active volcano.



This is an image of the caldera, or crater of the volcano.  Imagine those high cliffs continue around in a circle, I am taking this picture from the opposite cliff.  In certain areas of the volcano there are vents where moisture escapes and it smells of sulfur, imagine rotten eggs.  The hike itself was steep, but once you reached the rim it flattened out.

After the hike around Vesuvius our bus driver skillfully navigated the narrow and winding roads around Naples and took us to a farm to eat lunch.  We ate outdoors, and the owners of the establishment had a few cats, and several kittens, all so young they could barely walk.  What we ate was all local to the Naples area, or that farm itself, and all delicious.  The owner shared with us some olive oil, made from olives grown on his property.  And I bought a bottle of wine, grown from the owners grapes, fermented on site, and aged four years in oak barrels in a naturally formed cave on the side of Vesuvius.  Some of the best wine I've had, and it was only 8 euro. The volcanic soil makes the land very fertile, but it should be remembered that there is an ever present risk, living next to an active volcano.

Something Old, Something New

Today was another day of adventure, it was an unstructured day, yet filled with several activities done.  Starting off, well starting off was pretty late given that today was the first day in a very long time I was able to sleep in.  I relished the opportunity.  After a quick breakfast I went out with a couple of guys to go into the city to climb the Duomo.  I didn't really have too much in mind as far as what to do after that.

This adventure, like all good adventures, has more than one character.  Calvin and Quan were with me the entire day.  In fact, it was their idea to climb the Duomo in the first place.

And when you don't have a well formed plan, what plan you do have is liable to change.  Went down to the Duomo easy enough, but as it turns out you need to get tickets to climb up the tower, and we just so happened to stumble upon our chaperons in the line.  The combined ticket to go inside the church, and also climb to the top weren't much more expensive than the tickets just to climb to the top, so we got the former, and I got my first experience of the inside of a Gothic cathedral.  The columns stood like tree trunks, and the ceiling was vaulted, drawing your attention up.  All of the windows were stain glass and depicted scenes from the bible.  And behind the altar there were three walls worth of stained glass murals.

After the inside of the Church, which also included a crypt, and medieval ruin dig site, Quan, Calvin, and I climbed to the top of the building.  I wouldn't hesitate in saying the beauty of the exterior matches the beauty of the interior.  And the skyline is possibly the most interesting in all of Italy, possibly because of the modern structures in the background.
 
Those buildings, following Quan's suggestion is where we walked next.  By this time, having left around 2 in the afternoon, it was already encroaching upon the evening, and I was ready to go back.   These blog posts don't write themselves ;)  But I decided to keep going, because hey, what's a blog without things to write about?

The business district, in Porta Nuova had architecture beyond what I've ever seen.  There was a building with a tall spire which curled up like a rolled up piece of paper.  There were other buildings with trees growing all over them.  Unfortunately, by this point it had started to rain, and though it started as a light trickle, it morphed into a raging thunderstorm.  I recall saying "If this were a movie, you'd expect something bad to happen next."  And unfortunately (for the story)  nothing did.

By 7:30 the rain was still coming down hard, but we were getting pretty hungry.  We were stuck in Garibaldi train station, because that was where we took shelter from the rain, but we decided to look for dinner.  I found a cool place on TripAdvisor, and we ran there, from the train station.  By the time we got to the restaurant, only a few blocks away, we were sopping wet.  But the warm food was very welcome.  And I swear, the minute we sat down to eat, the rain stopped.

By the end of the meal it was getting pretty late by our reckoning and it was time to go home, but we didn't.  Quan really wanted to find a gelato place, that wasn't exactly nearby.  But we walked there anyways, and it was dark by the time we got there.  I was the only one with any battery on my phone, and even it was down to a few percent left.  But thanks to google maps we found the place.  I though the gelato was good, but not the best I've had, Quan would swear by it though.  It should be noted that on the walk to Porto Nuova we had gelato too, and I thought that stuff was better.

On the way back to our hotel we took a couple of trains.   The Purple train had a large window in the front and we sat right next to it, it felt like a roller coaster.  We transferred to the Green train, but took the wrong direction, it was cool because it still connected to the Red, which we took to our final destination.  Made it back to the hotel with maybe 3% left on my battery, talk about a full day.

So concludes the chapter of this trip taking place in Milan.  Possibly the least busy portion of the trip in terms of schedule, but certainly not uneventful.  Next stop, Venice!

Thoroughly Modern Italy

I had originally written a ton more for this post, but Blogger was working strangely and I lost all the work. :(

So just a small blurb of what we did after Parma.  The day we left, we went into Turin to look at a car museum and a cinema museum.  The Car museum looked at the history of cars, from Leonardo da Vinci's sketches, through the first mass produced cars, up to about the early 2000s.  I noticed car technology hasn't changed much between the 60s and the more recent cars.  Things have become more refined but they had power steering, automatic transmissions, suspension, and disk brakes.  With the notable exception of better safety features.  But today we are undergoing a modern renaissance of car design.  Cars are being computerized, with reverse cameras and on-board navigation.  Soon enough cars will be able to drive by algorithm, which brings a whole host of implications.

The other museum we visited was the Cinema Museum in a very large building in central Turin.  The Museum was filled with early concepts of projected entertainment, from shadow puppets to magic lanterns.  With the discovery of photography, and learning about the persistence of vision, moving pictures became a medium to itself.  The museum is overflowing with bits of costume from film history, there's an original script from "Casablanca", and the original alien costume from Ridley Scott's "Alien".

We also got to ride to the top of the museum in a tiny glass elevator.  From the top we could see all of Turin, and hints of the Alps behind a thick layer of fog.  In the skyline there were a few modern looking skyscrapers.  I will say these northern cities of Italy remind me more of the US in style.  They are more active and less destinations for tourists.  It's hard to say what the future of Italy is.  There is certainly value in transforming a city like Rome into a giant museum, like it seems to be doing.  But there is also value in emulating the largest economy in the world.