La Frutta

OK this is going to be a short one, because it’s midterms (yay!) and I have to be writing a half dozen different papers and stronzo right now. Anyways, I was reflecting on dinner tonight and thought I’d share this.

First of all, tonight at dinner we actually had a pretty significant discussion, apart from the usual dinner table talk about things I’ve done in Italy, and things I want to do, and things Anna and Claudio have done, and all of our life stories… Of course, it started that way… Anna asked what we had done in school today, which included a 2-hour lecture covering all of Italian history from 1944 to today. For those of you who have not attempted such a summary of 60 years in two hours, it’s not really possible. Anyways, I included my editorial comment that I found it all very interesting because it was so different from American history of the same time period. Claudio asked why it was different, and we ended up discussing two of (what seem to me to be) the three most important reasons: communism, Catholicism, and combat…ism. In a nutshell, Italy had the proportionally largest communist party in Europe, and in the US “communism” was practically a swear. Combat, because world war two took place IN Italy, while (for the most part) American territory was left alone.

What we spent the most time on, however, was the influence of the church. Obviously, the catholic church has a huge influence in Rome, and in all of Italy. Much moreso than in the US. Until 1870, all of Rome (and really, a much larger region around it) was actually the Papal state. Imagine a hulked-out version of the Vatican. In 1870, when Italy was united, the pope locked himself up in St. Peter’s and didn’t come out for 50 years (obviously there were a few pope changes during that time), and didn’t emerge from the Vatican until 1920-something to sign a pact with Mussolini.

Obviously this really does interest me because I keep digressing. The point of this was that Anna said that she was a “believer, but not a practicer”. Claudio immediately jumped in, saying that such a thing was not possible. There followed a 10 minute discussion (that I’m not going to try to transcribe here) of what exactly it means to be a “believer”, and whether it’s possible to be religious without following what the church says. Italians have a habit of making it very hard to get a word in edgewise when they get fired up, so I ended up just listening for a while, before mentioning that in the Protestant tradition (at least, as far as I’ve been exposed) it is much more acceptable to be a believer without doing everything the church says. Rather, I have always appreciated leaving church without feeling like I have to “do this or go to hell”. Italy, however, is catholic by culture, and as Claudio so succinctly put it, “If the church tells you to walk left, you walk left!”. There is no difference between “believers” and practicing Catholics – if you are a “believer”, than you will do exactly what the church says. (Sorry for my repetition of “believer”… the Italian word is “credente”, which literally translates as such, and my English is too rusty to think of any synonyms right now.) For me, it was another illuminating cultural difference, and it made me even gladder to not be catholic.

Anticlimactic ending: the title of this post comes from the fact that this discussion took place at the end of dinner, so we were eating fruit. It was another thing I wanted to note. Every significant meal (weekend lunches at home, usually of 4 courses, and dinners) ends with fruit. If we have something sweet (sweet apple bread last week…) it comes before the fruit. Italians, however, never eat apples the way we usually do in the states: rather, they’re always cut and peeled. Usually when we’re done with dinner, the three of us sit at the table cutting apples and peeling clementines and passing around the pieces. These are the little things that I’m going to miss when I come back home… I feel like cutting up fruit by myself won’t quite be the same. Maybe I’ll try to spread the tradition a bit…

Back to my important writing. This didn’t end up being that short. Oh well.

Here’s to midterms!

Baci,
B