A HOBBLING TOUR OF FLORENCE AND ROME
Observations of an Unapologetic Tourist
Part One
FLORENCE
In June of 2006 my wife Patsy and I went to Italy, partly on business, partly as tourists, but also to practice the Italian we’d been studying for more than five years. Although we have no Italian heritage and haven’t been frequent travelers to the country, we decided to learn the language because Patsy is an art gallery director, and is often involved with Italian clients and dealers. She’d spent a year in Rome as an art student some thirty-five years earlier, and she realized she needed to spiff up the slangy, crude street-Italian she’d learned from her fellow art students. And I decided to join her because an Italian couple we know in New York, knowing of my interest in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, had begun sending me issues of the Italian magazines Medeoevo and Rinascimento, and I was tired of just looking at the pictures and turning the pages. I also felt, back in 2000, that learning a new language in my late fifties might fend off brain-melt for awhile.
We’d started from scratch – Elementario Uno – in a fine little school on Manhattan’s East 65th Street, and by the time we booked our trip we’d moved through the Intermediate levels and were in an advanced class. But we’d only been to Italy once since we’d started learning the language seriously, and we needed some total immersion.
We took Alitalia, against the advice of our Italian friends, because our travel agent said it was cheapest. It was JFK to Leonardo da Vinci, and she had booked us onto a connecting flight to Florence, with our big bag checked through. My wife can sleep on airplanes; I can’t. The flight was unpleasant, as predicted: the gorgeous, preening flight attendants of all four sexes made contemptuous remarks about the passengers in Italian, acting as if actually attending was beneath their dignity. I staved off my cigarette craving, barely, with Nicorette gum, obtained from one of Patsy’s art gallery colleagues, who warned me that it “tasted like dirt”, which it did. But I was still feeling nicotine-deprived, irritable and thoroughly time-sick when we landed in Rome, and the long walk to the gate for the Florence connection hurt. My legs and feet don’t work very well these days. It’s a combination of arthritis and gout, and of course all the Good People in my life counsel me to give up smoking and drinking, which is very sound advice, to be sure, and any proper man would have taken it years ago. But I haven’t, and when Patsy first proposed the trip to Italy, my dread of walking long distances over narrow cobblestoned streets and up and down endless flights of stairs almost outweighed my pleasure at the prospect of finally seeing Florence.
I’ve been to Rome four times, because our friend Sandro – the man, who with his wife Fiamma, had sent me all those art magazines I couldn’t read – divides his time between a private art dealership in New York and a public gallery in Rome. Patsy’s own gallery has a close association with Sandro’s so whenever he has an important opening at his Galleria d’Arte il Gabbiano, Patsy can write off at least some of the expenses of the trip. This time she asked me to pick another Italian city to visit for a few days before we were due in Rome for the opening of new work by Piero Guccione, an extraordinary Sicilian artist. I chose Florence, tourist town though it is, because a civilized person really does have to wallow in that artistic treasure chest at least once in his life.
But Alitalia disagreed. We arrived at Leonardo da Vinci on schedule and made our way to the gate for the connecting flight in plenty of time. The lovely young lady behind the desk (like the airline’s flight attendants, all Alitalia agents are required to be lovely, though not necessarily competent) looked mildly bored as the boarding time came and went, followed by the time of departure, with no airplane in evidence. Finally her phone rang. She answered, listened, said, “Beh,” hung up and announced that the flight was delayed for two hours, meaning that eventually it would be cancelled altogether, which it was, forty-five minutes later. No explanations, of course, although most likely Alitalia hadn’t found enough butts to fill all the seats and didn’t want to fly a half-empty plane, given the cost of jet-fuel.
“Ahimé” is a useful, if somewhat antiquated, Italian expression which comes in handy at such times. It means, “Oy, veh,” and it’s more despairing than “Uffa”, which means “Oops,” and less crude than “Porco Dio,” which means “Pig God” and is very serious cussing in Italian, or “Porca Madonna,” which is even worse, because the Cult of the Madonna, or at least of the Mamma, is still thriving in Italy even though few Italians under 60 go to daily mass any more, and only enter their glorious churches to get married, attend christenings, confirmations and funerals, put in dutiful appearances for Christmas, Easter and Epiphany, or guide tours. Porco literally means “pig,” but it’s been used as an insult for so many centuries that maiale, which means “pork,” has become the only polite way to refer to the amiable living animal, even if you raise pigs. The devolution of “pig” from the simple term for an animal to a complicated curse-word might be understandable in Arabic or Hebrew, whose speakers are religiously enjoined to consider pigs unclean, but in Italian it’s a puzzle, since pig-meat, in all its varieties, is one of the mainstays of Italian cuisine. But being able to hold two contradictory notions at the same time is essential to the Italian cultural mind-set.
Also, using the name of the Lord or His Son or His Immaculate Girlfriend in vain by comparing any of them to a pig, is literally illegal in Italy. The 1929 Lateran Pact, the treaty signed by Pope Pius XI and Mussolini which confirmed the Vatican as an independent country and established the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church as the state religion, contains an article which makes it a crime punishable by a fine or even jail-time to cuss out God, the Holy Family, the Pope, or any of the Saints. And the Lateran Pact between the Fascists and the Holy See is still part of the law of the land. Every government office and court of law has a crucifix on display next to the Italian flag, and although today the article banning “Porco Dio!” and so forth is hardly ever enforced, it certainly was during the Fascist period, when it was used as an excuse to arrest rowdy troublemakers who hadn’t yet joined the Blackshirts, as possible subversives or even Communists. In addition, another article in the Lateran Pact which requires every Italian citizen to acknowledge Roman Catholicism as the only true religion, and accept the Pope as God’s intermediary between Heaven and Earth, proved very useful to Mussolini when it came to identifying Jews, after his later alliance with Hitler forced him to adopt an Italian version of the Nazi racial laws. I hasten to add that the Fascists didn’t massacre their Jews themselves – no death camps in Sunny Italy (any more than there were in Vichy France). They just bundled the Jews onto northbound freight trains.
But the religious clauses of the Lateran Pact are still on the books, and they can be enforced again at any time, at the whim of the government in power. Right now nobody’s picking on the Jews, but there’s a great uproar over Muslim immigrants, brought in to do the jobs Italians no longer want to do, but resented because they won’t learn the language and don’t like wine or pig-meat. The late Orianna Falacci, succumbing to reactionary ranting in her old age after a brilliant earlier career as a progressive journalist, more or less called for the carabinieri to machine-gun the dirty Arabs who had set up a tent-city on the steps of the Duomo in her native city of Florence to protest their low wages and terrible living conditions. Falacci’s book-length diatribe found plenty of readers in Italy, although nobody pointed out that she wrote it in New York, because she hadn’t lived fulltime in Florence for twenty-five years. Never mind: the piece was a call to arms for the neofascist theorizers in Silvio Berlusconi’s government, and you bet Falacci mentioned the religious clauses in the Lateran Pact. The filthy Arabs were even planning to build a mosque bigger that the Duomo! Che schifo! The term means “How disgusting!”, but it also means “What a crime!” Falacci uses it in her rant in both senses, the first to describe the Muslim immigrant workers’ filthy habits during their protest on the Duomo steps and the second to point out that the religion they followed was and still is subject to criminal prosecution in Italy.
Italian, then, is a tricksy language, especially when it comes to insults, exclamations and curses. Saying “shit!” (merda) is mild to the point of silliness as a curse, rather like saying, “Oh, dung!” But “Accidenti!” has nothing to do with what happens when the kid on the motorino runs over you (that’s an incidente). It’s used the way “Damn!” is used in English, an expletive, certainly, but without the force of actually wishing someone sent to Hell, because Hell is still taken seriously in Dante’s native land, even by the people who don’t attend Mass.
So when the connecting flight was canceled I said “Ahimé¬!” and “Accidenti!” aloud, so as not to offend the Italians within earshot, while in my mind I ran god damn shit fuck in my mind, and to keep up my Italian, Pig-God and Pig-Madonna as well as some curses in Roman dialect which Patsy picked up more than thirty years ago as an art student. They generally have to do with wishing death on your enemy and all his relatives, and saying them aloud can get you in a fight, or at least persuade any Italian that you are maleducato, a thuggish piece of street-trash, although it literally means your mamma didn’t raise you right.
Patsy got out the European cell phone we’d borrowed from a friend and tried to call our travel agent, but she got only a wee robot voice announcing in Italian that the call couldn’t go through because static garble beep beep beep. The other stranded passengers surrounded the Alitalia check-in lady, who said something about a mysterious “Window 55,” where we could pick up vouchers for a bus that would take us, free, to the Roma Termini railroad station, where trains left for Florence hourly (although we’d have to buy our own tickets), and Alitalia might recompense us for our Rome-Florence air-fare some time after the Second Coming of Christ. Meanwhile it made her very unhappy to suggest the possibility, but our checked baggage might already be on its way back to New York. Not her fault, of course. It’s tourist season, there are hundreds of flights, these things happen. Chi lo sa? Che cosa si può fare? Which means, “Who knows? What can you do?” but in context was a form of “Vaffaculo! (Go fuck yourself!”).
We didn’t like the sound of “Window 55”. It had the ominous ring of “Area 51,” where the UFOs crashed, and since Alitalia had vanished an airplane flight with such stylish insouciance, they’d have no trouble disappearing a bus ride. Elegance married to unapologetic incompetence: Benvenuto in Italia!
Patsy managed to find an Alitalia Passenger Service office hidden cleverly behind some temporary panels closing off what appeared to be either a major plumbing excavation or an archaeological dig, near the Baggage Claim carousels. Behind a sleekly-designed desk was another stunning Italian woman in the chic, figure-hugging green Alitalia jacket-and-miniskirt ensemble, but this one, perhaps because nobody else from the cancelled flight had been able to find her and yell at her so far, was actually helpful, her attitude encouraged because both Patsy and I spoke voluble, if by then somewhat disjointed Italian. I’d heard a rumor from a gaggle of American college kids on our flight that our baggage had actually been seen being unloaded, so I left Patsy and the Passenger Service lady trying to figure out the trouble with the cell phone, and went to the carousel with a faint stirring of hope.
And sure enough, the big bag we’d bought for the trip swung into view. Patsy’d arranged a car and driver through her gallery to take us to JFK, so I really hadn’t had to deal with the bag much. I bent to swing it off the carousel and when I almost dislocated my shoulder I realized that perhaps we might have done better not to have put all our eggs in one basket. The thing had wheels and a retractable handle, but it couldn’t stand up on end, and it weighed about sixty pounds, which works out to a less scary number in kilos, so I concentrated on kilos as I dragged it semi-triumphantly back to the Passenger Servicer’s office.
She had helped Patsy figure out what might be wrong with the cell phone, but she’d put through the call to our travel agent on her own landline. The agent said her computer listed our flight to Florence as on time, and wondered why we weren’t on it. Porca l’agente di viaggio.
The Passenger Servicer made a pretty little moue when we said mille grazie but we really didn’t want to go to “Window 55” and get our vouchers for the bus. I guess when you work for an airline so disorganized that it has allied itself with Delta, which is bankrupt, you spend your days in constant fear of being cancelled yourself without warning or explanation, like one of your flights, and you might be momentarily cheered when you can fob off your furious passengers with a plausible fantasy of actually getting them where they were going. But she was kind enough to point out that we didn’t have to spend 45 Euros on a taxi to get to Roma Termini. There was a railroad station right at Leonardo da Vinci, something we both would have remembered if we hadn’t been mildly insane by then. She gave us directions, and I said, cheerily, “Tutto va bene che fine bene!” (all’s well that ends well.) She gave me a dazzling smile and said, “Tutto va bene se si finisce bene!” I was delighted: I’ve always had trouble with the congiuntivo, and the fact that the lady had corrected me, in the most charming way, was a compliment of sorts: we’d been speaking Italian with her, she realized we were earnest about her language, and she was just spiffing up my usage.
I was reminded of my first trip to Paris, many years before, when my French was still fluent, but touched with a French-Canadian accent because I’d been living in Québec. I was rapping away to a gendarme, trying to get directions to a certain address and asking if it was within walking distance or would I have to take the Métro or a bus, and if so which one. The Paris flics still wore the képis and the little blue capes with the red silk linings back then, and most of them had those pencil moustaches which may even have been part of their dress-code, left over from pre-war movies. As I rambled, on the cop’s moustache sneered upward until it almost disappeared into his noble Gallic nose, and he finally said, “Eiscuse mi, M’sieur, bat do eou spayke Eenglish?” “Well, sure, “ sez I. “I’m an Amurcun.” “Évidemment,” he said, “so plaize spayke Eenglish. Een Frainsh eou sond laik a Norman peeg-farmaire.”
Of course the French, especially the Parisians, regard their language as the one God speaks when he’s home. In Italy, where God actually lives (or at least where he maintains his human press secretary), it’s generally understood that God speaks Latin, and although formal Italian, not surprisingly, is closer to the tongue of the ancient Romans than French, Italians still speak so many dialects that it can be tough for people from different regions to understand one another (although all Italians learn formal Italian in school). So they tend to treat a well-meaning American’s mangling of verb-forms with a degree of tolerance unknown in France.
Patsy and I exchanged tender goodbyes with the Alitalia lady, and the walking began. Leonardo da Vinci does indeed have a railroad station, and it is approximately five thousand kilometers away from the bit with the airplanes. There were a few of those moving walkways, and some of them even worked, but mostly it was plain humping, me dragging Monster Bag and wearing my shoulder-satchel (heavy with guidebooks, notebook, toilet kit with the array of pills that are supposed to keep me from dropping dead suddenly, and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, which I’d brought because I knew I couldn’t possibly finish it during the trip and be left with nothing to read, it being the size of the “A-Markworthy” volume of the Shorter OED), and Patsy with her equally heavy carry-on bag and purse. By the time the endless corridor debouched onto the railway platforms my feet and knees were warning me that if I’d done this to them before they had even gotten to Florence, I’d need a wheelchair to visit the Uffizi.
The US doesn’t do passenger trains to speak of, these days, especially since the oil lobby shoehorned Smirk Bush into the White House twice. Italian trains, therefore, are an almost holy revelation to the American traveler: fast, reliable, on-time, comfortable, with automated ticket-machines stationed at the head of the platforms, which swallow your Euros and spit out an assigned seat. We had a little trouble figuring out the ticket-machine, and another absolutely gorgeous Italian woman came to our rescue and showed us how to key the screen. Out popped our tickets, and there was a train already loading for Roma Termini, so we set off down the binario. But the woman suddenly ran up to us and said that she’d made a mistake – she could have saved us trouble by showing us how to book a through-ticket to Florence. There was still some time before the train for Roma Termini departed, so Patsy dispatched me back down the platform to the ticket-machines to change our tickets, with the woman’s instructions (in Italian) buzzing in my head. But another flight must have landed, for when I got to the machines I was behind 83 Germans, 567 Japanese, 125 Brits, 478 Americans, and a few impatient Italians who were just trying to get to work. So I gimped back down the platform muttering “Accidenti…”, just as the train emitted the silly little “peep-peep” which meant it was about to leave me behind.
Getting Monster Bag aboard was interesting, a one-handed clean-and-jerk weight-lifter’s maneuver up the steps which left me too weak to heft the damn thing into one of the overhead luggage racks, even if it could have fit. But the train wasn’t crowded, and in fact the Italians pay absolutely no attention to the assigned seats on their tickets, which was just as well because we boarded about five cars away from ours. In fact nobody checked our tickets at all on the train, and the platforms are wide open. I’m still wondering about that: is the automatic ticket-machine in electronic communication with some computer on the train which registers you somehow? But you don’t have to pass your ticket through a slot on the platform at your destination, as you do on the Paris Métro, for example. I’m told that conductors do perform spot-checks at random, and that the penalty for sneaking aboard trains is a massive fine and sometimes even jail-time. But I prefer to think that there are so many tourists visiting Italy these days, from countries where the concept of buying train tickets is taken seriously, that the rail system gets by on the punctilious foreigners and the Italians ride free. Maybe that’s why the helpful Italian lady gave us such detailed instructions about operating the ticket-machine – as I thought back, I couldn’t remember her actually buying a ticket. Never mind: we collapsed into a set of facing seats with Monster Bag as our third passenger, and the train moved off almost silently. We arrived soon at Roma Termini, and after a lot more walking we bought more tickets, this time at a ticket-window, from an actual ticket clerk (who did look mildly amused that we were bothering to pay for the ride) and boarded an express for Florence. More struggles with Monster Bag, but finally we were headed in the right direction.
These Euro-Star expresses don’t clickety-clack. They sigh. And they go like stink. Patsy fell asleep – yes, she can sleep on trains and in cars as well as on planes, bless her – but I was in an almost hypogogic state as we whispered out of Rome’s ugly periferie and headed through Lazio into the Tuscan countryside. It’s the landscape in the background of Florentine Renaissance paintings, brown hills overlooking lush plains still cultivated intensely, each surmounted by cypresses and plane-trees around the ochre walls and terracotta roof-tiles of its village, every one with its church and campanile, and the richest land in Italy rolling out below them. Tuscany was ancient Rome’s breadbasket, once the early Republic had whipped the Etruscans, and it’s no wonder that countless waves of invaders have tried to gobble it up ever since.
Graziella del Giudice, one of our teachers at Parliamo Italiano, our school in New York, introduced us to Iris Origo’s extraordinary World War Two diary, La Guerra in Val d’Orcia. Iris was part American, part Anglo-Irish, married to an Italian whose Tuscan farm, La Foce, was actually an immense barony comprised of a central manor-house surrounded by a number of outlying farmsteads and small villages which housed the contadini who worked the extensive fields. It was a self-sustaining estate, run according to a feudal system largely unchanged since the middle ages, in which the contadini were allotted some acreage for their own needs, but were expected to work together to bring in La Foce’s crops. Money was almost irrelevant at La Foce: Antonio Origo, the barone, sold the estate’s crops – olive oil, wine, wheat, cheese, wool, ham and mutton – for money, of course, and used it to keep the place going; and some of the money found its way down to the farm-workers. But they weren’t salaried in any modern sense. If they needed hard cash, for medical problems, for example, or for repair to their tractors and trucks, it was available, but mostly, as late as the outbreak of the Second World War, La Foce largely operated, like most big estates in Tuscany, in a way Dante would have recognized. Goods were bartered for goods on market-days in the tiny hilltop villages. Nobody but the barone was rich, but nobody loyal to him went hungry, unshod or unclothed. Of course there wasn’t much scope for personal ambition.
But Italy being Italy, the story of La Foce was a bit more complicated. Antonio Origo was not a hereditary barone, but a smart, ambitious guy who married a very rich foreign woman at the height of the Fascist regime. The two of them, using Iris’s money, bought La Foce, which was then almost a wasteland, its fields overgrown and its buildings falling apart. Antonio used then-modern agricultural techniques to restore La Foce’s fields to productivity. He repaired the houses of the contadini and got the farmers working again. He was aided substantially by the Fascist Government’s dream of reviving ancient Roman glory, which imagined large agricultural estates feeding the cities and providing rations for Mussolini’s new edition of the Roman legions. In the diary Antonio is an interesting pancake: Iris never says outright that her husband held any official Fascist position, but he certainly went along to get along, and during the darkest days of the war his flexible connections made it possible for him to save the lives of his wife and children, most of his farmers, a good number of escaped British and American POWs, some members of partisan bands, and the several dozen displaced children Iris took in during 1942 and ’43.
Iris Origo’s diary, written in English first during the war, translated later into Italian by her closest Italian friend, Elsa D’Allolio, who helped her safeguard the children at La Foce, is a stunning account of the effect of total war on the civilian population of Italy. Our teacher Graziella, born in the late thirties, had strong childhood memories of the war, and she knew Iris’s daughter Benedetta quite well. In fact during our semester with Graziella, Benedetta paid a visit to New York, and Graziella invited Patsy and me and some other students to meet her. Benedetta was close to seventy, but utterly beautiful. For that matter, so is Graziella. What is it about Italian women? Sure, some of them get plump as they age, but never obese, and they still look wonderful. Perhaps the secret’s in never taking food for granted.
In my tine-sick stupor, I watched the glorious, difficult Tuscan countryside whip by and thought about Origo’s book. American popular histories of World War Two tend to concentrate on the Normandy landings and the push over France into Germany, neglecting the war in Italy, because it was considerably less straightforward. Origo’s diary describes the shifts and counter-shifts in the Fascist Government in Rome, the ousting of Mussolini, followed by his reinstatement by the Germans, King Vittorio Emmanuele II’s abandonment of his people, the divided loyalties of the middle-class and the quiet, resigned heroism of the small farmers, but only as background to her account of trying to keep her war-displaced children safe and fed and clothed and housed. Initially her book was not widely read in England or the US, although it was first published in Britain. The reason may be because she states bluntly that the vast majority of Italian civilians who died during the Allied invasion of Italy were killed by American and British heavy bombers blowing up cities, and later by Allied fighter planes machine-gunning anyone on the roads after Anzio fell and the Germans began to retreat northward. As I write this, Israel’s push into southern Lebanon, in their offensive against Hezbollah, involves exactly the same sort of “collateral damage” inflicted on Lebanese civilians. And let’s not bring up the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan. Porca guerra.
The countryside’s ranks of hills and ridges hemming in the river-valley explained why the fighting in Italy, even with planes and tanks and mobile artillery, lasted so long. Tuscany is a peaceful, lovely countryside today, but it only takes a bit of time-sickness for the minimally informed traveler to half-close his eyes and see a tank battalion crushing the crops in the valleys and getting blown away by the massed artillery concealed on the hilltops. In her diary Origo writes about the anguish caused by the Allies’ slow advances and frequent setbacks, during a time when La Foce’s manor-house had been commandeered by the retreating Germans, who set up an artillery unit in the farmyard. Antonio, partly educated in Switzerland, spoke fluent German, and he would converse amiably with the artillery commander while Iris snuck out the back door of the house to take food and medical supplies to the partisan units, augmented by escaped British and American POWS, who were hiding in La Foce’s woods. The Tuscan terrain has always hidden more than it shows.
A last note on Origo’s diary: eventually War in Val D’Orcia attracted some British and American readers, but when the Italian translation was published in Italy in 1949, the Italians ignored it. I don’t know why. But cultivated Italians whom I count as friends have never heard of it. Perhaps it got bad reviews in the Italian press by critics who resented the fact that the most powerful account of the war’s effect on Italy and its ordinary citizens was written by a foreigner.
Italians are a little conflicted about foreigners who comment on their culture and history. On the one hand, they welcome the interest, but only to a point. When a foreigner challenges certain received opinions – Iris Origo’s description of the Italian partisans as disorganized bands of thugs more interested in looting than in risking their lives to kill Germans and Fascists, for example – a line is crossed.
I ran into trouble with another teacher at our New York Italian school when, after we’d read about half of the stories in Moravia’s “Racconti romani,” the teacher herself said that perhaps it was too much of a good thing, and invited us to write our own impressions, in Italian, of Moravia’s Roman tales. Instead of a respectful review, I wrote a broad parody of Moravia, and the teacher was furious. Well, I should have known better: just as it’s OK in the U.S. for black folks to call each other niggers, but whites can’t use the word, it’s OK for Italians to joke that Moravia basically wrote the same sad story over and over again, but woe betide the foreigner who disses him. Italians have had their asses kicked by so many invaders over the centuries, who always tried to impose their own cultural values when they weren’t busy with rapine and pillage, that they have adapted by smiling delightfully and ripping off the invaders. But there’s a hard core of pride and and painful memory which flares into rage when a foreigner presumes to probe too deeply into the sensitive underbelly of the culture.
Silvio Berlusconi, down but by no means out as I write, is excoriated routinely by our Italian friends as a maleducato neo-Fascist, at least at the beginning of an evening’s conversation. But as the wine flows their attitude mutates into something approaching respect: he’s a hustler, a con-artist, a man who came from nowhere, made a ton of money in various shady ways (the only way you can make money in Italy) and wound up running the country to suit himself. In short, he’s the prototypical Italian Strong Man: Machiavelli’s Principe, Mario Puzo’s Don Corleone, Mussolini himself (whose memory still enjoys a measure of largely unreported popularity among Italians of a certain class); and even our highly-cultivated friends, who spend more than half their time in New York and grumble loudly about Italian inefficiency and corruption, turn slightly cold and distant when we diss the man. “You don’t understand,” they’ll say. “Berlusco is an Italian problem.” It’s no wonder that the Mafia calls itself “La Cosa Nostra (Our Thing).” Butt out if you ain’t Italian.
As we passed through the Florence borghetti (suburbs – the word’s the source of English “ghetto”) I was surprised to see Italian flags hanging from windows and balconies everywhere, and I’d noticed the same thing on the briefer trip into Roma Termini. I was baffled: only the United States and the worst of petty Third World dictatorships impose the Cult of the Flag, or so I’d noticed on past trips to Europe. Had the Berlusco years managed to awaken a spirit of jingoistic Italian nationalism that had lain dormant since the war? Patsy gently reminded me that the World Cup was on, and Italy had a strong team. Not neo-Fascism, then, just calcio. Whew.
On the other hand, my mistake betrayed my American indifference to the world’s most popular sport, and my ignorance of the fact that the only truly global sports championship (the Olympics barely compare) was already in progress in Germany. Even the US had a dog in the fight, but hardly a pit-bull – the team had been trounced by the Czechs in the first round, and was expected to lose to the Italians that very evening. In every World Cup year, American pundits blow a lot of hot air about why we Yanks don’t yet have a world-class professional soccer league, despite the fact that it’s played by millions of white suburban kids and Hispanic ghetto kids (tricky word, ghetto: in America, and in the bad old days of European anti-Semitism, it’s usually signified urban racist poverty; in contemporary Europe it signifies suburban racist poverty). I submit a simple answer: tv advertising. Baseball and American football have built-in pauses in the action, almost as if the games had been designed originally for commercials. Soccer – calcio, futbol, British football – is nonstop. No advertising revenues = no major American tv coverage = no fan base. Let’s hear it for American exceptionalism and free-market capitalism!
To be sure, there are cracks in the wall of complacency shutting us off from soccer, just as there is creeping seepage in the foundation of Pax Americana. With a Hispanic population which has quadrupled since 1980, the rise of cable and satellite tv stations which do cover soccer, and Smirk Bush’s disastrous Seventh Crusade finally beginning to persuade all but the holy rollers that America isn’t all that exceptional, it may well be that we’ll finally have to start negotiating with the rest of the world instead of trying to kick its ass, and soccer will finally have its day in America. Especially if diminishing oil supplies and higher prices at the pump kill NASCAR…Nah, never happen. We’re winning hearts and minds in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there’s no such thing as global warming.