Tag Archives: living in Italy

living in Italy

An American Thanksgiving in Italy

Leave a comment

Our Thanksgiving dinner was, if I say so myself, epic. I printed out the menu in that fancy font that restaurants always use, so people wouldn’t have to ask me what they were eating; here, of course, I’ve added extensive notes.

Antipasti Vari (various antipasti) – Paola brought mini breads, we supplied salame. I didn’t do much on antipasti because so much other food was coming.

Tacchino al Forno (oven-roasted turkey) – The guests were mostly Italian, many of whom had never seen a whole turkey cooked American style. By American standards, this was a very titchy turkey – less than 13 pounds. In the US you can select from a whole range of turkey sizes; here in Italy, you either take the small female (which I did) or the humungous male. The smaller one turned out to fit all right in the 40 cm roasting pan I had bought.

I used some American technology, a Reynolds oven bag that I bought in the US two years ago on Sue’s recommendation. I filled the turkey cavity with mandarin oranges, onions, and herbes de Provence; we didn’t eat this filling, but it helped produce marvellous gravy.

Ripieno di Pane al Mais con Marroni (cornbread stuffing with chestnuts) – A Martha Stewart recipe, bless her. Martha expected me to have canned or frozen chestnuts. Here in Italy, in season, you can find fresh chestnuts in the woods yourself (difficult – everyone else wants them, too!) or buy them at the supermarket, which I did. I then roasted them in the oven and peeled them. Labor-intensive, but worth it. In my opinion, roast chestnuts by themselves smell a lot better than they taste, but when you cook them with meat or in a stuffing like this, they’re heavenly. Stuffing is unknown in Italy, and turned out to be very popular.

Insalata di Finocchio e Mela (salad of fennel and apples) – Another thanks to Martha. Everyone loved the unusual combination.

Puré di Broccoletti e Spinaci (broccoli and spinach puree) – Recipe from The New Basics Cookbook by Rosso and Lukins. Not the most popular dish on the table, especially with my family since I had made a test batch last week and we’d already had enough of it, though we liked it a lot the first time around. I’ve frozen the leftovers to eat when we’re no longer sick of it.

Fagiolini con Gorgonzola e Noci (green beans with gorgonzola and walnuts) – New Basics again, easy and tasty.

Puré di Patate (mashed potatoes) – Everyone loves €˜em. Fortunately, I had help with peeling and chopping 4 kilos of potatoes.

Selezione di Formaggi con Salse (selection of cheeses with chutneys and honey) – One of the guests brought cheeses, and I had also bought some, plus I had made two chutneys, tomato and dried apricot. Don’t be overly impressed – chutney is very easy to make. These recipes were from Madhur Jaffrey. We also had dark honey (from chestnut flowers), which goes well with many cheeses.

Dolci (sweets) – Maryellen brought a wonderful pumpkin pie which she made completely from scratch (canned pumpkin is not widely available here), Elisabetta made a scrumptious chocolate cake with pears – You’ve never had that? It’s an Italian tradition. You put thin slices of fresh pear into a fairly standard chocolate cake (it may be necessary to correct for moisture; I have not actually done this myself) – it’s a wonderful combination. Rossella had made chocolate chip cookies and brownies, but we never even got to the brownies. Her classmates have been happy to polish those off for us.

Recipe Links

Martha Stewart (and many others)

Other Madhur Jaffrey recipe books

You might also like:

Default ThumbnailYou Know You’re a Third-Culture Kid When… Default ThumbnailWhy Italians Have Stopped Eating Out Born into It: Why You Can’t Become Italian Italian Winter Weather
living in Italy

Making Room: Italian Stratagems for Living in Small Spaces

Leave a comment

^ top cameretta a ponte in Ross’ room in Milan. Where the chair is at right, a desktop slides out, though Ross never used it that way. (This fuzzygraph is Ross’ early work when we got our first digital camera.)

Living space is tight in Italian cities, which are often geographically constrained because built into, on top of, or between mountains – the kind of urban sprawl you see in America simply can’t occur in most parts of Italy.

Even where there is room to spread out, historically Italians tended not to. This may be due to centuries of history: until recently, Italy was a collection of separate city-states which were often at war with their neighbors; people huddled into fortress towns and cities for safety, and many Italians have never lost this preference for living close together.

Urban Italians have been living in apartments, condos, and townhouses since Roman times. The apartment building was invented in ancient Rome, and even in those days single-family dwellings were only for very rich families. Italian cities today are almost entirely apartment buildings, four to five stories tall in mid-sized towns, eight to ten in larger cities. In many buildings, the lowest floor sare reserved for commercial use. Where we lived in Milan, we had a greengrocer, bar/gelateria, baker, and butcher right downstairs – extremely convenient, since I was always forgetting something in my shopping.

The primo piano (first floor above ground level) is undesirable to live on, partly because of pollution, partly because it’s more vulnerable to housebreaking (that’s why you often see bars on the lower windows of older buildings); first floor apartments are often used as offices.

The higher up you go, the higher the value of the real estate, because the higher floors get more light and air and less pollution, and are less susceptible to being robbed. But the floor space remains the same – usually small. So how do you fit, say, three people, with all their possessions, into 70 square meters (~750 square feet)?

One way is to go vertical. Ceilings in Italy are higher than the American average, (although they’ve gotten lower in modern buildings). You build your bookcases go all the way to the ceiling. Closets are divided vertically into two sections: use the top sections for out-of-season clothing, lifting the clothes on hangers up to the high rod with a long-handled hook.

In some old buildings, the ceilings are so high that apartment owners are able to build in a loft. If you don’t want to go to that much trouble or expense, you can buy a loft bed from Ikea, which leaves a nice workspace underneath. I’ve been tempted by those, but I’m scared of heights, I get up a lot at night, and getting sheets onto such a bed looks like a hassle.

Bunkbeds and loft beds are quite common for kids’ rooms, often built into closet/desk/bed units called camerette (little rooms). A cameretta a ponte (“with a bridge”) has part of the closet built over the bed. There are entire furniture stores devoted to camerette in every conceivable style, some of them the kind of fun furniture kids dream about, with playspace under the bed, a miniature staircase going up to a loft bed (the steps lift up to provide storage space) and/or a slide for disembunking.

  • also see: Housing: How Italians Live

    • You might also like:

    Italian Seasons Default ThumbnailScenes from Italian Politics Raising the Roof: Expanding Housing Space Vertically The Patented Woman
    living in Italy

    My Attitude Towards Italy

    Leave a comment

    I received email from someone who had visited my website, read a few articles, and concluded that I don’t like Italy much. I am confused by this, especially since the articles she cited (Babies, Homes, and one other, I forget which) didn’t strike me as negative. I see my articles as statements of fact, though written in a wryly ironic tone that might confuse some people, especially if they come looking for “Under the Tuscan Sun”-style warm fuzzies about Italy.

    So, in case it needs clarifying, let me clarify: I do love Italy, and am very happy to live here. It’s probably the best place in the world for me to live, and, even if it wasn’t, my family is there, and that pretty much settles the question.

    But I don’t love Italy blindly. I didn’t move here because I had always dreamed of living here*. So I don’t have particular dreams about Italy to keep alive, and can allow myself to see the bad as well as the good. And I’m not trying to make money out of writing about Italy (well, it would be nice…), so I don’t have to write the kind of sunshine-and-red-wine stuff that most people seem to want to read. The Italy I live in has much to recommend it, but it’s not the Italy you see in glossy coffee-table books. The Italian families I know are not the warm, boisterous, suffocating crowds you see in American sit-coms and movies. My family, friends, and neighbors are real, modern Italians, who rarely conform to Italian-American stereotypes.

    I’m beginning to think that I should write a book about real life in Italy. Not to scare people off, but to point out that daily life in Italy has its own stresses and pains, just as daily life anywhere does. A good bottle of wine with a good meal is a lovely thing to have (even better when combined with a marvelous view), but it doesn’t cure all ills.

    You know what’s really ironic? The average Italian on the street is astonished that I would rather live in Italy than America, or that anyone would (I have had this conversation with many taxi drivers). Like much of the rest of the world, Italians see America as the land of opportunity and riches, of wide open spaces and huge houses. Most of them would not willingly leave Italy permanently, yet they seem to wish that they could participate in the American dream. And they are absolutely floored to be told that many Americans dream – of living in Italy.

    *If you’re wondering why I did move here… go here.

    You might also like:

    Italy Changing: La Dolce Vita Ain’t What It Used to Be Default ThumbnailIl Popolo della Rete – Italy’s Internet People Trainwriting Default ThumbnailExact Change Required
    bio

    How My Italian Adventure Began

    Leave a comment

    Strangely enough, my Italian adventure began in India. In June, 1986, I finished up my study abroad year in Benares. It had been a fun but intense time, and I looked forward to a vacation in Mussoorie, my “home town,” site of Woodstock School. My dad was supposed to join me, having just finished a contract in Indonesia, and we would travel back to the States together. When I got to Mussoorie, I used most of my remaining rupees to rent a house on the Landour hillside. I was just settling in, organizing food deliveries with the various wallahs, getting scorpions out of the sink, etc., when a telegram arrived from Dad: “Not coming to India. I’m broke. Make your own way back to the US.”

    Umm. This presented difficulties. I did have a return ticket, but we were now in the airlines’ peak season, so I’d have to pay a $100 premium to leave right away. Which was a lot of money in India then, and I didn’t have it. There was no prospect of getting the rent money back from the landlord, nor did I have enough cash to stick it out in Mussoorie til the end of peak season. So I went to Delhi, sold my beloved Nikon, and booked a flight out. I used more of my scarce cash to call my friend Julia at Yale. (We had seen each other the summer before, when she was just returning from her own study abroad year, in Italy, and I was just leaving for Benares.)

    “I’m arriving in the States flat broke,” I said. “Please rescue me.”

    “Of course,” she said. What are friends for?

    I flew into New York on July 6th with $32 in my jeans pocket. Julia’s dad picked me up at Kennedy airport and took me to his home, where I stayed for two weeks, doing odd jobs at his printing company in Darien, CT. I figured I should earn enough to get back to Austin, where most of my stuff was, and I could live with my aunt Rosie til I figured out what to do next.

    Julia was spending the summer in New Haven, so I took the train up from Darien to visit her. My return to the US had been so abrupt that she already had a full social schedule for the weekend, and all I could do was fall in with that.

    “We have to have a picnic with this Italian guy,” she said, “because I told him I would. I think he likes me, but I’m not interested.”

    I shrugged. Whatever. But I had time on my hands, Julia being off at an audition, so I baked banana bread. I had missed cooking in Benares.

    When Enrico arrived, Julia introduced us, and I was careful to pronounce his name precisely, rolled R and all; it was oddly important to me to get it right. I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me; something exotic, no doubt: my hands were decorated with henna, a parting gift to myself in Delhi. The three of us picnicked in East Rock Park; Enrico loved the banana bread. After lunch he climbed a tall pine tree.

    “Do you think he’s doing this to impress me?” asked Julia.

    “No, I think he’s doing it because it’s fun,” I replied.

    We parted in the afternoon knowing that we’d meet again in the evening; Enrico and Julia had both been invited to a party by a mutual friend. But Julia received a last-minute invitation to a classical music concert that she couldn’t bear to miss.

    “Do you mind if I go? You can go to the party with Enrico.”

    No, I didn’t mind.

    I met other people at the party, but don’t remember them. Susan, now a family friend, years later said about that evening: “I had just broken up with someone, and had my eye on Enrico, but when I saw you two together, I knew there was no chance.”

    We left the party for a concert on the New Haven Green, where we ran into Gabriel and Inger, friends of Enrico’s. The four of us went to a disco in Gabriel’s car, and stayed very late – the club provided a breakfast buffet. I kept trying to call Julia to let her know I wouldn’t be back that night, finally reached her around 3. “I’ll just crash at Enrico’s,” I said.

    We did more than just crash. I guess I’ll never be able to lecture my daughter about not kissing on the first date. Oh, well. I never did play by The Rules, and look where it’s got me.

    The next day I went back to work in Darien, not sure how to regard the events of the weekend. Just a fun fling, I first thought. Then Enrico began calling: “When are you coming back?”

    It took several months. I first returned to Austin, where I realized that I actually had enough credits to graduate from the University of Texas with a degree in Asian Studies and Oriental & African Languages & Literatures (double major). I didn’t need to stay in Texas, and the economy was in a slump, so there didn’t seem much point. I might as well be… somewhere on the east coast?

    My next port of refuge was with family friend Donna and her teenage daughter, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. I stayed with them for several months, working temp jobs to stay afloat. I looked for the cheapest possible way to get to New Haven, and found a ride board in one of the Congressional office buildings. A Federal employee with a large car drove every weekend to his other home in New York state, to tend his garden on the Hudson River. For a share of the gas costs, he’d get me as far as NYC, where I could catch a commuter train into Connecticut.

    Also riding in the car that Friday was a woman with a wild history that she was eager to share with us. She was an anthropologist who had studied the Coptic Christians in Egypt, and for years had been the mistress of the prince of all the Copts. She told us lots of interesting things. The poor, mild-mannered Federal employee shrank into the leather seat of his Lincoln, turning various shades of crimson.

    “So why are you going to New York?” she finally asked me. I explained that I was going to visit a graduate student at Yale with whom I might be starting a relationship.

    “Oh, you can do better than that,” she said. “Let me fix you up with a rich man.” I declined, and continued on my way to New Haven.

    Some weeks after this, I landed a “permanent” job as an administrative assistant in the political department of the American Consulting Engineers Council. (Which was an instructive look into the workings of K Street, but that’s another story.) The office overlooked a green square, diagonally across from a Washington Metro stop. So, when Enrico came to visit, he took the train to Penn Station, and then the Metro to meet me at the office. I waited eagerly, looking down from our 5th-floor window, and recognized him across the square by his walk. The thought floated into my mind: “That’s the man I’m going to marry.”

    And I was right, though it took him another 18 months to figure it out.

    You might also like:

    Default ThumbnailThe Twitter Diaries: 2009-10-25: San Francisco, CO MBA: Collecting My Dues from the Open University Default ThumbnailThe Bride’s Bouquet Default ThumbnailThe Italian Proposal
    bio

    How I Became an Italian Journalist

    1 Comment

    Soon after we moved to Italy in December, 1990, I read an article in Italia Publishers, a magazine about desktop publishing, in which the writer described his difficulties in finding a font for Hindi. Although he had never been to India, he had been studying the language in Milan for fun, and wanted to write the world’s first Hindi-Italian dictionary. “Well,” I thought, “I’m one of the few people in the world qualified to help him: I speak Hindi and Italian, and I know a lot about desktop publishing.” So I wrote him a letter, care of the magazine, proposing to collaborate on the project.

    After a few weeks, the writer called me. The dictionary project had never taken off; he couldn’t find a publisher. “But the magazine editor wants to speak with you,” he said. There was a shortage of journalists who could write about computers, and they were willing to try me out. My first piece was a small review of a piece of Macintosh software, I don’t remember the name, it was an organizer/calendar with “personalities” that would talk to you. The editor of Applicando, then the leading Italian Mac magazine, liked this piece, and more work flowed in from him and other magazines in the same publishing stable.

    Another early piece was about “The Manhole,” kids’ software for the Macintosh which was more a world to explore than a game. We tested it on Rossella, then only two years old, who had no trouble picking up the concepts of the mouse and pointer. The review included a photo of her in front of the Mac, intent on the screen, with the mouse in one hand and her bottle in the other. NB: The guys who did “The Manhole” later on went on to do Myst.

    The writing didn’t pay well, but there were perks. I got to go to Edinburgh on a junket paid by Aldus (the company that created PageMaker desktop publishing software). All I had to do was write an article about their new product announcements. I helped pay a couple of trips to Boston by writing articles about the Seybold Conference, to which I got free entrance as an accredited journalist (though I was badly snubbed by a “real” computer journalist I had idolized, Denise Caruso). And I got into the Microsoft CD-ROM Conference in San Jose the same way; by then, Fabrizio and I were going to the conference for other reasons as well.

    One of the CD-ROM conferences I attended took place in the “porno year.” This was when conference organizers in the US finally decided to admit that pornography was a driving force in software and CD-ROM publishing (as it would later be for the Internet), and to allow the porn merchants to attend on almost the same footing as other publishers. There was a whole floor devoted to porn at the big Comdex show in Las Vegas, but I didn’t go to that. The situation at the CD-ROM conference was funny. The pornies had a section of the floor to themselves, carefully draped off with black curtains. There was also a conference session on pornography, held at 9:00 in the evening, well apart from every other session.

    Fabrizio was amused by all this. His first big foray into CD-ROM publishing had been “The CD-ROM Unabashed History of Photographic Erotica,” co-edited with a photo archive in Milan, which he had tried to advertise at the conference several years before. He’d been forced to take down his posters, but word got around anyway – back in Milan, Microsoft ordered two copies for somebody high up in the company.

    I looked at some of the porno stuff at the conference, brought back lots of samples, and wrote a wry, amused piece about the American reaction to it all. Nino, the magazine editor, was thrilled to include pictures of the products: “Finally, we have tits – just like Panorama and L’Espresso!” (Two Italian news weeklies which often find ways to work naked women into their covers.)

    My article also reported on the results of a “test” I had run at the office, where I got the engineering staff and my husband to watch a porn movie on CD with me. The engineers were intrigued by the fact that the disc was “hybrid” – it would run on both Macintosh and PC systems, a technological trick which the porn publishers pioneered. Everyone commented wisely on the jerkiness of the video, although, given the subject matter, perhaps some jerkiness was to be expected.

    The American press had noticed the sudden “legitimization” of digital porn, and had a lot to say about it. Stephen Levy, author of “Hackers,” published in MacWorld an interview with a young porn CD publisher, which I happened to read while on a visit to the US.

    Levy asked the publisher what his parents thought of his business. “My dad’s okay with it, but my mom’s not too thrilled,” was the reply. “Well, so-and-so,” concluded Levy sententiously, “you should have listened to your mother.” I was infuriated by Levy’s condescending tone towards his interviewee, especially in light of “Hackers,” where he notes that many computer geeks are lonely young men unable to get dates. It seems to me that digital porn is a sevice to those guys.

    Not having a computer available, I scrawled off a furious note in my terrible handwriting, and sent it to MacWorld. Months later, at the SMAU computer show in Milan, I ran into a magazine editor I knew. “Hey, I saw your piece in MacWorld!” he said excitedly. They had published the letter, but since I was not a regular reader of MacWorld I hadn’t noticed. I’ll have to go dig that up someday to remember what exactly I wrote to Stephen Levy. I don’t know whether he ever replied.

    You might also like:

    Developers Rule, OK? Default ThumbnailThe Bi-Professional Couple: A Conundrum Close to the Bone Italian Complaints Default ThumbnailEMail Encounters: Anecdotes of a Professional Life Online