When in Rome

[UPDATE: Since this book seems to be impossible to find, I am willing to put my copy into circulation. If you're interested in getting on the list, see the comments section!]

People, I’ve found it. I didn’t think it existed, but it does. A highly readable, refreshing, humorous and inspiring book from an expat making a go of it here in Rome.

I bought “When in Rome” by Penelope Green on a whim at the Sydney airport. Most of you probably know that I don’t hold out much hope for books like this. Take the subtitle, for instance. “Chasing La Dolce Vita.” Right. This is usually my cue for a long and emphatic eye roll with a light groan of despair. I looked at it, and put it back. But the prospect of a 10+ hour flight to Hong Kong weakened my reserve and I picked it back up. Tipping the scales was the fact that if nothing else, it could be fodder for a blog post about how every expat who writes a book about Italy seems only to manage to romanticize how they sweated over choosing custom-made tiles for their “rustic” renovated country kitchen, or how stressed they were in poring over which antique vase or rug would look best in their "quaint" city apartment + view. Don't get me started! When they manage to throw in broad, inaccurate or downright offensive stereotypes about Italians, it’s just icing on the cake.

Penelope is Australian. Could this explain why I have only seen this book in the Sydney airport? Did I overlook it on the “English books about Rome written by expats” table at Feltrinelli (which I do peruse from time to time, in spite of myself)? Perhaps. But the real million dollar question is: why, oh why, have I never run across the lovely Ms. Green in person during my six years here in Rome? Especially since reading her story made me feel like I had a long lost twin who was somehow born four years before me and raised in Australia? She got here just a year after I did and I'm guessing we might have around two or three degrees of separation in Rome’s expat community, if she's still living here.

Reading Penelope’s book took me back through so many of my own moments in building a life here, but with lots of added humor, and charm without a sugar coat. This book is pretty much what I would hope for if I ever decided to write one about my adventures. But the fact that she is brave enough to add in tales and details of her love life triumphs and mishaps makes her book more courageous, and intriguing, than mine would ever be. Her self-deprecating humor makes her pretty loveable as well. At the end of one of her first nights out in Italy, after having made the rather questionable fashion choice of wearing Birkenstocks with socks, she reflects: “Staring at my Birkies at evening’s end I rue my decision. I look like I just escaped from a beer hall in Munich.”

I promise I scoured the book for glaring stereotypes, but if they are there, I missed them. When she makes a judgement or expresses an opinion about "how Italians are," she clearly credits them to some specific experience or specific person.

Now, I admit I am probably partial to this book because it reflects a lot of what I went through, so I can personally relate. But besides my obvious subjectivity on this point, I think most readers would find it hard to resist Penelope’s unflinching (first time I’ve ever gotten to use that word! Fun!) and ironic look at her trials and tribulations here in Italy. Some of the finer points?

• On page 128, although she doesn't name the place, I’m fairly sure the escapade she describes must have been an innocent wrong turn into La Parolaccia (a.k.a. "The Swear Word"), a restaurant famous here in Trastevere for the fact that you pay a hefty price for (what I've been told is) mediocre food with a generous serving of raunchy, vulgar insults in Roman dialect throughout the meal. (Tourists: the address is Vicolo del Cinque 3. You have now been officially warned.) Don't expect to be seeing any first-hand blog posts on that place by me anytime soon. After reading about what she went through there, I felt like I needed to thank her for taking one for the team. And then how about the other time when some of her soulless male co-workers asked her jokingly, “Ti piacciano i piselli?” after she put a bunch of peas on her salad? Ah, the subtleties and sheer crass of Roman attempts at verbal artistry. Poverina. Read the book to find out why.
  

• On page 201 when she describes the helpless feeling of knowing just enough Italian to understand when you're getting ripped off, but not enough to be able to defend yourself. Argh.
  

• An ENTIRE CHAPTER on the uniquely Italian phenomenon of “la febbre.” The dreaded "fever" and all its accompanying symptoms and drama, which easily merits the full chapter devoted to it. Are Italians just genetically more pre-disposed to getting fevers, I wonder? The conversation at the end of page 208, namely her boyfriend sitting in front of the TV with a thermometer under his armpit, sadly proclaiming, “Mi sento debole,” (I feel weak) is quite possibly a time-honored rite of passage for every girl who spends more than a passing moment with an Italian man. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but among all the female expats I know with Italian spouses and partners, this is not the first time I've run across this.
  

As an added bonus, you’ll walk away with a formidable vocabulary of Aussie terms. I was able to decipher most of them in context, but I still need to get around to Googling the origins of “Poms” and the exact meaning of “spruiking.” Among some of the other priceless gems are: kipping, utes, daggy, skerrick, hoon out, jim jams, gas bagging, and my personal favorite, “on my Pat Malone.”

In short, loved it. Finally an expat yarn I can put my stamp of approval on. And the happy, yet not sappy, ending makes it picture perfect for its inevitable future as a movie. Don't get Diane Lane on the phone---play yourself, Penny! You’d be great! (NYC Caribbean Ragazza, have you read this one?) Sadly, it seems as though it's out of print, or only available new in Australia. I got it on a sale table, even though it was first published recently, in 2005 (but apparently only in Australia and N. Zealand).

Read here for a much more succinct description of why this book won the 2006 Grollo Ruzzene Foundation Prize for Writing About Italians in Australia. Except I can't figure out why they call her "the imagined author" -- is this all a clever prank? If it is, I've been completely had.

Watch a video of "the imagined author, whose name is Penelope" as she introduces her book in her own words here.

Here's another description by the author of her life here in Rome.

Penny, you are more than welcome to join me and Avery anytime for a drink (right, Averina?) It's on me! Does anyone know her? Is she still in Rome?

I'm Marrying Dan Brown's Italian Cousin

That's right folks! A little shameless plug for my soon-to-be husband's book, Il Culto del Graal, which has just come off the presses and is now for sale. It's currently only in Italian but if I get around to it one of these days, I'd love to translate it into English, because whenever he talks to English speakers about the book, they get really excited and say they want to read it.

Basically, Ale has written a book based on prior historical research and facts, along with his own original research, putting things together to propose new ideas about the "cult" surrounding the holy grail during the time of the Templar Knights. You may remember when we went to Naples to get a photo for the cover.

Ale knew of a small church in a small town in the small middle of almost nowhere, called Bominaco. Don't get me wrong...it's a beautiful place. And the church, Ale discovered, just so happens to have the most symbols in one place relating to the holy grail and the Templar Knights than pretty much any other church of its kind in Europe. Intrigued by this, Ale started his research and made so many discoveries that there was enough for a book.

Strangely enough, in the period when he was writing this book, serendipitous events continued to happen one after the other. An example? We went to Paris last July to visit some friends who planned to take us on a day trip outside of the city. Turned out that the freeways were backed up and there was no way we could get to where we were supposed to go, so in last-minute desperation our hosts decided to take us to another place they knew. This place was Chartes, where there is an extremely important cathedral with symbolism that was valuable for Ale's manuscript, and there he found a piece that was missing in the overall puzzle of his work.

Another example: when Ale was called unexpectedly this summer to work on the movie set, the place they were filming, Trani, just so happened to have an important Templar Knights church with original examples of the symbolism Ale was researching for the book.

In making connections through various discoveries, Ale proposes an original theory as to the story surrounding why Pope Celestine V abdicated the papacy, conjecturing that he in fact had extremely close ties with the Templar Knights and this would have created serious problems for the Church. Celestine V is a leading figure in the book, and to this day remains an enigmatic figure within the Church. In fact, after he abdicated he was imprisoned by his successor, Boniface VII, and eventually died in prison. Ale even has a theory as to why there was a hole found in Celestine's skull, and it's not the typical historian's theory of him being murdered by Boniface.

On this note regarding the Church, Ale did try to consult the infamous "secret Vatican archives" for his work, but of course received no response. He was able to get in contact with another author who told him that it was impossible to try, that they don't grant access for research on these topics. So he instead worked like a detective, using all the original symbolism left behind by the actual Knights, to come up with his discoveries and theories.

It would be impossible here to go into everything presented in his book, which, by the way, is not a Dan Brown-style fiction novel but rather a quite readable non-fiction text that raises interesting questions surrounding the mystery of the actual Holy Grail (what was it? where was it? where is it?) but I will tell you one tantalizing tidbit he puts forth.

In very few churches do you find the symbol of a griffin drinking from a chalice. Ale found this symbol in both Bominaco and Chartes. He postulates that in the language of symbolism, this represents, in medieval Latin: CALIX (chalice) GRIFO (griffin).

If you take these two words as an anagram, mixing the letters up, you get GRAL OC FIXI, which in medieval Latin means "I buried the grail here."

Hmm...??

No, we aren't going on any renegade excavations or digs in places where he found this, but there's also the pesky question of a secret room that he believes he has discovered under the church at Bominaco...

Well, until there's an English translation I'll leave you in suspense, but if you speak Italian, by all means I invite you to read the book. It can be purchased directly from the editor at Idee Nuove.

Maybe You Shouldn't Do As the Romans Do

You may have noticed that in my sidebar this month I mentioned that I was reading As the Romans Do by Alan Epstein. Well, I was reading it. That is, until I got to page 101, at which point I was so frustrated by what I was reading, I had to contain myself in order to resist throwing the book across the room and watching it bounce off the wall.

Now, Rome may seem like a big city, but those of us who live here, especially us expats, know that its actually just a small village. That’s why my intention is not pointless book bashing. I have absolutely nothing against the author or his wife, both of whom still live and work in Rome, and I commend the author for having such incredible success with this book and his Roman life. But there are a few things that I think it’s only responsible to point out if you decide to go ahead and dive into this book, since I was half-recommending it by the fact that I had it displayed on my page.

What attracted me to this book:

• Breezy, conversational style that makes you feel like you’re getting a one-on-one peek into Rome from the author himself
• You can tell the author is truly in love with his adopted city and his joy and amazement shine through the pages

What eventually drove me away from this book:

• Blanket statements that are written as if some kind of eternal truth about Romans/Italians, without any citations or opposing viewpoints from Romans or Italians themselves

Alan Epstein and his wife, both Americans, moved to Italy from California with their sons, so the book is written through American eyes. I was hoping this wouldn’t become a Roman version of Under the Tuscan Sun, and overall it doesn’t, except a little Frances Mayes-ing on page 25, when the author describes furnishing his new Roman apartment:

The hand-painted lamps from Sicily were placed on our inlaid wooden side tables that we had picked up at a little antique shop behind Campo de’ Fiori. As we smoothed out the Caucasus Kuban rug under the wrought-iron and glass coffee table that holds our vivid yellow Peking glass vases…

Anyhoo, you get the idea. Luckily that only goes on for a short chapter and is forgiveable.

What I ultimately take issue with are statements that, despite adjusting for the six-year time span from when the book was first published, still have no place being put down as absolute truth, in my opinion.

Take, for example, this from pages 95-96:

• Italians certainly don’t come together primarily for love[…]the romantic kind[…]
• The males want to be pampered, well fed, and given free rein to play. The women expect to be the capo della casa, to run the household, to be able to express their emotions without restraint.
• A spouse is chosen because, all things considered, he or she would make a good partner for familial, rather than for personal, romantic, sentimental, or sexual reasons[…]

Following this reasoning, the author goes on to say, quoting on page 97 an uncited survey, that 70 percent of Italian males “betray” their wives, while 64 percent of Italian women do the same to their husbands. As the reader, we are unable to discern the source of these statements, and are left to assume that they must simply be built from the author’s observations, personal opinion, or perhaps something he read somewhere.

On page 98, he gives an example of an Italian female friend who informs him that when a man is found cheating (already lending credence to his claim that this is a typical occurrence), his wife “hits him on the head with a frying pan, tells him not to do it again, and domestic life continues.”

Then, for the grand finale, on page 100 he explains that "...in Italy, where men do not do housework, do not raise kids, do not get up to help with any kind of domestic chores..." the low birth rate is due to Italian women purposely refusing to have children in order to "shed the weight of domestic dependence" and "by sleeping with whomever they want, since it is clear that they never got married primarily for love..."

I find all this quite offensive. I’m not proposing to be an authority on Italians or Italian life and culture, and I’m not trying to say I am naïve enough to think that marital infidelity doesn’t exist in Italy. However, I am an American girl who came over to Rome by herself, has had several years of professional experience working with Italians, has daily contact almost exclusively with Italians, and has been in a relationship with an Italian (Roman) man for almost six years. These are the things that I feel qualify me to be surprised with such statements being presented as if they were a cultural fact.

After reading such a tirade, I couldn’t continue through the book chronologically any longer, but I started flipping through further, since it is organized in small topic-centered chapters, hoping to find one that might lure me back in. When I did, it only turned me away again, with the statement on page 214 that:

Italians are, in fact, pretty much where the Americans were in the fifties: charmed by new gizmos, earning money, and having more market choices than they ever dreamed possible. Many people are, at bottom, still bowled over by the fact that they own a car.

This came across to me as incredibly condescending. Granted, the book came out in 2000, and I am not a sociologist or economist specializing in Italy; however, I arrived in mid-2001 and my personal experience has never led me to believe that Italians are coming out of some sort of industrial or economic dark age, in which they are continually amazed by what it feels like to be a car owner. On the contrary, I feel Rome is actually a perfect example of what happens when lack of a viable public transport system actually forces most people to own a car.

What compelled me to write a sort of review of this book is the simple fact that an author who presents himself as an authority on a particular subject, even if simply through personal experience, in my opinion has a responsibility to his readers when making broad statements like the ones above. Many descriptions of Roman places and customs are accurate, such as how jogging down city streets isn’t so common, or how most everything stops for holiday in August, or what it’s like during a transport strike; however, the fact remains that statements like the ones above have the power to leave the reader with a rather one-sided and stereotypical picture of Italian lifestyle and culture, and I think that is unfortunate. My personal experience with Italian friends and family of all ages has shown me otherwise, in a most positive way.

If you’ve read this far, by all means, please leave me a comment about what you think!