Ahhh, Life in Italy

By The Malibu Times · Thu Oct 10 2002

From the publisherArnold G. York

Karen and I have been in Tuscany for about a week now, and I'm handwriting this column sitting under a grape arbor, sipping a glass of wine, looking out over rolling green Tuscan hills, watching the grapes grow. It's astounding how easily you can adapt to the Tuscan way of life.

We're staying in a Tuscan Villa, which is really a 300-year-old, five-bedroom stone farmhouse with modern conveniences inside, surrounded by hillsides of vineyards and olive groves. I suspect these hills look pretty much like they did 2,000 years ago, when the Romans were here.

The genius of the Italians appears to be that they have managed to seamlessly mix the ancient and the modern, keeping the feel of old without losing modern comforts.

I watched a local family from down the hill harvesting grapes, cutting off big clusters of them with clippers, which they carried out in plastic buckets and then dumped into garbage-sized plastic barrels sitting in the back of a pickup truck. Papa then climbed onto the bed of the truck and used a wooden stick that looked like a piston to squeeze the grapes.

They were all there. Grandma and Grandpa, the grown children and their children, and their dog, which eyed me suspiciously every time I got too close.

And while they worked they talked and laughed. Italians don't seem to separate work and social life as we Americans tend to do. It's not just in families. You walk into any shop, whether in a hill town or in Florence, and ask a question, and immediately you're enmeshed in conversation. Anyone within earshot just joins in. It doesn't seem to matter that no one speaks English, as is more often the case in the mountain towns. With a combination of sign language, my very bad French and Karen's much better Spanish, we make ourselves understood.

After a completely nonscientific week, a few passing observations:

• The Italians eat everything, but you seldom see fat people. As the failed veteran of 100 different diets, I must say this was of some particular interest. They eat bread, drink wine, order pastas and desserts. It's clear that denial is not part of their lifestyle. But one thing you do notice is that all the portions are smaller. And everything is made with olive oil. If you order a Coke, it's an 8-ounce bottle with a glass and ice, not 26 ounces. No 18-ounce steaks here either. I was surprised at how quickly we adapted. One seldom rolls out of a restaurant with that bloated feeling.

• Italians walk everywhere, no matter how old they are. They also seem to retain their sense of style-again at any age. It's not just the women. The little, old Italian men are also very au courant. An average American guy like me doesn't consider a sports jacket broken in until it's at least five or six years old. Not so the Italians-even little 80-year-old Italian men wear this year's style. You can always spot the Americans. We're the worst dressed people in the crowd.

• The Italians talk. They talk to each other. They talk to their children. They talk to their dogs. They talk to their neighbors, their shopkeepers, their friends, strangers, tourists, they talk to everyone all the time and they set up their world so that it's easy to do so. And their physical space accommodates their friendly way of life.

The Italians create public spaces, some big, most small, with benches, trees, shade art, fountains and running water. Restaurants all have outside spaces, even if they have to take away a parking space and put tables on the street. They appear to worry less about how many parking spaces per seat there are than how you have a good time, where people can sit and see each other, and have places to mix. If there is less parking close by, then you just park farther away and walk.

• They mix things up. They mix generations so you see children, parents and grandparents. Commercial is mixed with residential, so people live near where they shop and work. There is not the sense of any area turning into a dead space after work. No empty business parks for them. They've been clustering development and mixing uses for several thousand years and their towns still work. They're human and human scaled.

Perhaps we should spend less time worrying about floor area ratios and imposing silly, arbitrary numbers like 1.5 and start thinking about our town and how it should look and feel. But I'm on vacation and I promised myself I wouldn't get political, so Ciao for now. I'll write from Rome.