Local Italian markets (Sagre)

Life in Italy somehow would not be complete without the odd visit to a local sagra, which translates as festival, feast or patron saint’s day. There are so many in every province, let alone every region or the country as a whole, that it is impossible to list them all. There are the obvious ones, which the majority of travellers to Italy will have heard of if not actually been to, such as the now world famous Siena Palio and the barrel rolling in Montepulciano. The latter is quite a spectacle, where teams of 2, dressed in medieval costume and each representing one part of the town, roll huge empty barrels of wine from the bottom of the town to the top square in front of the Duomo. I was not surprised to see a series of Croce Rossa ambulances waiting at the finish line; probably to cart off any young stud who thought himself macho enough complete the course without training and with a 20-a-day habit.

However, there are a myriad of local festivals practically unknown to anyone but the local communities where they have been conceived, brought up and removed from the closet to be brushed off to much applause and gaiety once a year. When I was young I once read that there were more than 15,000 islands in the Indonesian archipelago, which I dutifully agreed to visit all of. I imagined myself cruising from one to the other in hollowed out logs and living on coconut and papaya, oblivious to the logistics, the sharks and the general impossibility of the task in hand (I have only managed 6 of them to date). I now believe that this undertaking would still be more easily achievable in one man’s lifetime than to visit all of the sagre on the Italian mainland (I don’t even want to imagine how many they have on the islands).

As you can probably imagine, the majority of these events revolve around food, with each one having a specific delicacy as centre stage. Whether or not all these dishes are considered a speciality in their area is never quite certain, though one suspects that one Umbrian sagra dedicated to Spaghetti Carbonara may have come about because the next door village got the monopoly on the real local recipe. There are many events in Cortona throughout the year, but the main foodie event is undoubtedly the Sagra di Bistecca, which occurs each year at Ferragosto. A huge barbecue, the size of a snooker table, is constructed in the public gardens, tents are erected and steaks, wine and chefs are drafted in in obscene quantities. The aftermath of the festival is usually a large hangover and a place for dogs to lick the gravel under the barbecue for weeks ahead. I did not make it to the Sagra della Ranocchia (feast of the frog) this summer, but I am assured that it was tasty beyond my wildest dreams…

What Cortona lacks however, and what most of the smaller festivals have in common, is a serata danzante (evening of dancing), which follows the lengthy eating session during summer events. The exponents of the music itself usually fall into one of two categories: male, with shiny gold or leopard print shirt and shaggy hair reminiscent of early 80s footballers or female, with shiny gold or leopard print shirt and shaggy hair reminiscent of early 80s footballers, only prettier. The last one I went to had both varieties playing together as a duet. What I really admired was the degree to which the captive audience, from the teens to the octogenarians, appeared to know the songs, the lyrics and the moves to anything that is played. Aside from the waltz and the tango, there is an aptitude for line and formation dancing throughout the generations that I only ever witnessed in the UK during the heady days of Whigfield’s “Saturday Night” back in the early 90s. We attempted to join in at a couple of points, but rushed off the floor without raising a sweat, for fear of being arrested for ineptitude. You also have the plain medieval stuff; things that you still find in the far corners the UK as well. Racing disobedient donkeys around an oval circuit, bobbing for apples in water and then flour alternately, is one of my local favourites. At the same festa you can indulge in a bit of old fashioned animal tormenting; betting on which direction a rabbit will run after being placed under a metal bucket which is tapped repeatedly with a stick; heady stuff indeed. Overall the local sagra is a great excuse to get dressed up, eat and drink lots, dance if you feel up to it, gossip with friends and is generally a life-affirming event for any local community. Go to one if you have the chance.

Queuing

When taking the inaugural flight from Perugia to Stansted last December, I was struck by one of the more interesting forms of Italian group behaviour: the queue. Obviously this was not the first time I had noted the apparent inability to form a coherent line, but it seemed a particularly good case in point. Being with the then 7 month old Cecily Grace, we were able to pre-board (these days you have to pay for the privilege, nothing comes free with our favourite airline anymore of course). Having fought our way to the front of what I can only describe as a rugby scrum to hand in our boarding cards, we were one of the first half a dozen people onto the Tarmac, along with the other people with young children, short tempers and bags under their eyes. Looking back at the glass front of the boarding gate, I half expected to see a couple of less able folks with their faces pressed to the glass and a look of abject terror as they were slowly crushed by the advancing mob of passengers. Once at the foot of the stairs to the plane we had to wait, though, and in the interim the other passengers were let loose from the bulging doors of the passenger lounge. At this point any ideas of pre-boarding privileges went out of the window, as we sharpened our elbows to fight off the hoard of fur-wielding matrons and able-bodied rabble that began to muscle their way to the front. I felt like crying out “trample the weak, trample the weak!” as I locked arms with a like-minded young dad and drove them firmly back into their own half. We eventually made it onto the plane, but not without a fight and a couple of black eyes…

To queue or not to queue? That is the question you must ask yourself the next time you find yourself waiting for something with more than about two other people in the same place. Obviously there are times when a natural order will impose itself upon a situation, such as at the supermarket check-out, but that is about the only place you will find it happening. You see, queuing is about as anathema to the Italians as tea with UHT milk is to the average Brit. Getting one ahead is simply de rigueur and, quite frankly, it does become quite a satisfying art form once you have had time enough to practice a while. One of the best places to practice is at the Posta (Post Office), where only the foolhardy would consider giving precedence to someone who might have been in the room before them. Turn your back for a second to check the weather outside and you risk someone jumping into the spot you had earmarked for yourself amongst the fray. It is a bit like witnessing the confluence of waters at a narrow point in a river, where the tumult of waters presses together for a split second before being forcibly thrust out into the wider world beyond. God forbid that you try and buy a stamp on pensions day.

There are wider connotations to the queue of course, one of which is the exhibition of another very Italian trait, the lack of personal space. Most Brits find the idea of having to squeeze together in a small space with lots of other people decidedly unpleasant, hence why the orderly queue is such a staple of life; nobody wants to be too close to the person in front or behind them. Trying to get into a sport stadium in Italy, for instance, is like one big, communal hug-in; turn around too quickly and you might find yourself accidentally snogging the bloke behind you. This nonchalance about proximity to one’s fellow human beings has other side-effects, such as the chance for young men to nuzzle up behind unsuspecting foreign girls on the train platform (witnessed at Termini station!) If you find yourself alone on a bus, don’t be surprised if the next person to get on ends up sitting thigh-to-thigh with you. This is perhaps just an example of the ease with which the Italians socialise with one another and particularly their ability to speak with total strangers as openly as they might do with their own mothers. Whilst most Brits might loath a journey on the London Underground because of the confined space, so most Italians would probably find the impersonal nature of the other passengers more disconcerting. After all, why sit in silence when you could be discussing football, health and Formula One? This is a manifestation of the openness that often sets the Italians apart from their Northern European neighbours and goes a long way to making Italy such a pleasant place to live.

Italian builders

Working with builders when I first arrived in the Cortona area seven years ago proved to be a real eye-opener, especially language wise, as well as a sharp cultural learning curve. Nothing prepared me for the complexities of the Italian cantiere, or for the laughs that were to be had therein. Having first learnt Italian over in the western half of Tuscany, and grown used to certain inflexions, I found myself thrown mercilessly into the world of Umbrian builders who, to put it delicately, did not speak quite the same language that I was used to. Particularly difficult to get used to were phone calls to builders, where at first much of the content passed over my head in a blur of Umbrian drawl and local dialectic. Once I discovered that there were at least half a dozen words for any one thing on a building site, depending on where the builder hailed from, I was able to get to grips somewhat more quickly. On the opposite end of the linguistic spectrum was the technical jargon that made up the Computo Metrico Estimativo (building quote), that made me come over quite faint when I was first presented with one for translation. Any readers who have ever had occasion to read through one of these tomes will hopefully empathise. Certain of the riper phrases that I picked up on building sites, and later tried out on unsuspecting neighbours and colleagues, were normally greeted with the Italian equivalent of “one does not say that in polite company”. So I soon learnt to store these tit bits of rudeness into my mental Italian thesaurus, saving them gleefully for occasions when dismay and/or irritation needed to be fully aired in one’s best colloquial vocabulary.

In my experience both British and Italian building sites tend to be similar in terms of the language one expects to hear, although I don’t think you would find your local bricky bringing every animal under the sun (and the Madonna’s virtue) into question with the quite the same regularity that his Italian counterparts do. There is, however, one factor that very definitely sets apart the two cultures and that is: LUNCH. By and large the Italians take as much pride and care when eating on a building site as they might do at home for Sunday lunch with the family. I have seen all manner of makeshift kitchens cobbled together from ancient fridges and gas stoves, tables made simply from building blocks and scaffold planking. Depending on the state of the house they are working on, the building crew might even be lucky enough to set up camp in a room with a fireplace, ensuring even more salubrious surroundings than usual. No matter that there might not be a roof on the house, or that Arctic winds are blasting through the windowless openings, making any work a misery; as long as there is a sealable room on the premises, it will become the canteen.

Not a cheese and pickle sandwich in sight, or a mug of hot tea or a can of Coke. These guys do the whole show, the full monty; antipasti, primi and secondi, local wine and freshly brewed coffee to wrap up, as well as a grappa, obviously. One of my best memories from my years of restoring houses was a particularly whopper lunch that took place one day in the old kitchen of a house undergoing a full restoration. As I recall it was the only room on the first floor that actually had a floor at the time, so some care needed to be taken to avoid walking through the wrong doorways. Taking pride of place on the makeshift table was a whole spit-roasted piglet, ordered the previous day from a chap with a local monopoly on such things. Bruschetta with home-grown olive oil to start; spaghetti with aglio, olio e peperoncino to follow; rounded off with the fennel and rosemary stuffed porchetta with a side dish of spinach. All washed down with copious quantities of that hairs-on-your-chest type of local red wine, sipped from plastic cups, seated on dusty building blocks or bags of cement, enjoying the sun through the window and generally wondering if I would achieve any more work for the rest of the day. How could you beat that? One did have to wonder how accurately the walls and floors could possibly be constructed after such an indulgent feast at this hour, as well as hoping the builders had the nimble footing necessary for the dizzying heights of the four storey roof construction, but somehow they always did manage it. With this in mind, I wandered off to nurse my full stomach in peace and leave the experts to get on with the real work.