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Volume 36, Number 1 |
Richardton, ND 58652 |
January 2008 |
Italian Memories: III
by Terrence Kardong, O.S.B
Continued from the October Issue
One night like that was particularly memorable. I went out to a film with a good friend of mine, Fr. Joel Rippinger of Marmion Abbey. The plan was to have dinner afterward, but this was jeopardized by the fact that Joel started to get sick in the theatre. At that time, Italians smoked up a storm in their theatres, and he couldn’t handle it. In order to brace him up, we walked in the cold night air for a long time, but finally we entered a Chinese restaurant to eat. Once we ordered, Joel began to feel ill again and he actually lay down on a bench against the wall.
When the waiter finally brought the food, Rippinger took one look at it and lit out the door. So there I was, seated alone at the table with a huge Chinese meal for two! We were the first ones in the place, and as other people entered they observed me toiling away valiantly at the impossible task of cleaning up all that food. It may be my ascetical background, but I don’t like to leave food on the table, and the Italians didn’t use doggy bags. By the time I left, I was as sick as Rippinger.
A word on the Italian diet. I found it very healthy and I was as well as I had been in years. Never spent a day in bed. But one thing it lacks is sugar. We Americans have no idea how much sugar we ingest every day, but if you want to find out, just spend time in a country where they do not. If you are like me, you will notice that every couple of weeks, you start to get a bit prickly and jumpy. Cure: go out in the street and eat a Hershey Bar or some such thing.
Only watch out when you are buying it. Soon after my arrival I tried to buy some chocolate in a store on the Marmorata, the big boulevard that runs below Sant’ Anselmo. I carefully ordered two etti, thinking that must be a very small amount. The guy shrugged, descended into the storeroom and brought up a huge slab of chocolate. “No, no!” I pleaded. That slab would have fed the whole neighborhood for dessert for a week.
One of the greatest pleasures of living in Rome was its centrality to so many wonderful
cultural sites. My first year there, an Austrian monk-
Rudolf was an interesting fellow and he had definite rules for these outings: The passengers pay for the gas and they also chip in for the fines, should there be any. We never got stopped by the polizia when I was with him, but someone else told me that he was with him when he did. What did Rudolf do? He reached in the glove compartment, pulled out a Roman collar and went out to meet the cop. After a while he came back and announced there was no fine. Why not? Because he had told the officer that he felt so sorry for him, having to work on a Saturday when he could be home with his wife and children. Finally, the guy relented.
Fastidiousness was another trait of Rudolf: he liked his car immaculately clean.
One trip I bought a bag of potato chips and laid them unopened on the seat. When
I came back, they were gone. Where? In the trunk. But I got my revenge. I rescued
the chips from the boot and was happily munching them when we rounded a mountain
curve—and found ourselves face-
He had a way of getting other people to do things. After lunch one Saturday, he announced briskly: “O.K. boys, now for a passagiata.” That meant a brisk hike up the mountain road to stretch our legs. We hoofed it for quite a piece until we were passed by a nifty little Fiat, driven by none other than Rudolf himself. After he returned to Austria, he left the monastic life and married. I suppose his wife now gets to do the hiking, while he drives on ahead to pick her up.
Trips to rural Italy were always interesting, though they were not always so pleasant. One time a Brazilian friend named “Fr. Isaac” invited me to spend a weekend at a convent in Gubbio, up in the mountains near Assisi. It was winter and the rain was pouring down, so it was not an ideal time for touring. I don’t remember what we proposed to do if we had to stay indoors. But it turned out that the convent was ice cold and there was no relief from it except to crawl in bed.
Dinner in that place was unforgettable. I thought the arrangement was odd, since we were seated at a counter facing the wall. The food came through a turntable, as is typical in an enclosed convent, but the wall itself seemed strange. It was covered with some sort of cloth, but other than that, I could swear I heard breathing through it. Sure enough, the whole convent of nuns was watching us eat from the other side. And soon they were offering comments such as “Eat more, Father!” That wasn’t so bad but then they started reciting their troubles: “We are old, we are sick, we are few.” I convinced Isaac to leave the next morning.
When you are traveling, it helps to know the language well and to have a certain kind of personality. Once I spent a week in Naples with an English monk named “Fr. Cajetan,” who could and would talk to anybody he met on the street. We shared a hotel room, but some days we split up and went our separate ways. One evening Cajetan came home and said that he had met the nicest young college student who wanted to take us around to see some special antiquities that needed a permit. I only remember spending most of the morning in traffic jams.
But in the afternoon, this fellow took us to his home in the suburbs west of the city and cooked us a wonderful fish dinner. Cajetan then managed to develop an acute headache which the women of the family undertook to cure. This was a doctor’s family. As for me, I spent the afternoon on the floor of the parlor pouring over historical maps of Naples with this extraordinary young man. At the time I remember thinking that I had never met an American college student with that kind of maturity and depth. And how incredible that he would pick up two foreigners on the street and spend the whole day entertaining them!
Even to be invited into an Italian home wasn’t common at all. The Italians, like many Mediterraneans, spend much of their lives on the street. It is usually warm, so outdoor life is quite feasible. But the home is a sanctum where not many outsiders penetrate. They take their friends to cafés for meals, but the home is a kind of secret place for the family. In general, it seemed to me that the nuclear and extended family was still much more solid in Italy than in the U.S.A.
Although it is not wise to stereotype people, I have to say that I found the Italians
among the most civilized people I ever encountered anywhere. I remember one time
coming across a mid-
On another occasion, I found out what a real passagiata is. I was staying in Sulmona, high up in the mountains northeast of Rome. After supper, from about 8 to 10, the whole town used the main drag as a prominade. It was blocked off from cars, and so whole families, from old folks with canes to toddlers, could stroll back and forth. The lights from the shops were on, but no one was buying; they were too busy enjoying the passagiata of life. There were no tourists around. Here was unspoiled, peaceful life in a provincial Italian city. I never saw anything quite so heartening as what happened in Sulmona every evening.
