America, Fuck No

Florence (tour­ists not pictured).

My trip to the Venice Film Festival was, as it hap­pens, my first time in Italy. It was dif­fi­cult, in a way, not to see it as some­how tying in with the part­ing from this world of my moth­er earli­er this year. My mom was Italian—maiden name Petrosino, out of Naples—and had done a not-insubstantial bit of trav­el­ing in Italy late in life, and had always wished for me to vis­it the coun­try some day. When she died, I took the goofy Tower of Pisa key­chain she had bought on one of her trips and made it my own. So the offer of a trip to Venice com­ing when it did held some portent/significance for me. 

My Lovely Wife joined me in the mid-point of my work in Venice, and after that was done, we traveled to Florence. We were already half-overwhelmed by what we had seen in Venice—the Tintorettos at San Rocco, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, St. Mark’s Square, all that—and were fur­ther awed by the gor­geous­ness of Florence. Both places were spec­tac­u­lar enough that one could easily—okay, almost easily—ignore or at least see past their being clot­ted with tour­ists. The tour­ists in Venice were actu­ally mildly amus­ing, act­ing as if the place were a giant theme park with art sub­sti­tut­ing for rides; hence, the Guggenheim Collection was received by most with a detached respect, as in, “Okay, so this is the ‘mod­ern’ part I guess.” In Florence they were a bit more chal­len­ging because they made it dif­fi­cult to get around. Our hotel was so cent­rally loc­ated it was like, “Leave the court­yard and turn left” and boom, you’re on the Ponte Vecchio. Convenient but a little daunt­ing. A cab driver later told us things were even worse, crowding-wise, in July, and we just could­n’t see it. 

Getting around and observing loc­al pro­tocol in a suit­ably respect­ful way were sources of some anxi­ety for the both of us, but noth­ing crip­pling. On our first morn­ing there, on our way to a guided tour of the once-secret Medici cab­in­ets in the Palazzo Vecchio, Claire stopped at a cash machine, and as she fin­ished with it, a little old Italian lady, white-haired and short, but still rel­at­ively upright in pos­ture, in her late sev­en­ties maybe, just said to Claire our of nowhere, “I don’t like those machines.” She was smil­ing as she said this, so Claire asked her, “No?” The little old lady said, “I don’t a‑trust them. When I need money, I go to a bank!” And she smiled and we all laughed and Claire and I wished her a good day. 

The next day, we were get­ting gelato at a place almost next to our hotel—and good God did we eat a LOT of gelato on this trip—and who comes down the nar­row side­walk but, what do you know, that same little old lady. She says hello, and we say hello, and she points to a build­ing across the street. “I used to live there,” she says, and we ask her how long, and she answers, and we ask where she lives now, and she points fur­ther up the street, and we say so nice to hear that, and have a good day, and so on, and off she goes and off we go. 

Later in the after­noon Claire remarked on how it was kind of funny that we ran into and had words with the same woman two after­noons in a row. “It’s kind of like some­thing out of a movie,” she said. 

“Yeah,” I said. And I smirked. “You ever notice in Mario Bava movies, he fre­quently uses old ladies as portents of some hor­rible doom…?”

“I don’t know as many Mario Bava movies as you do,” Claire said, elbow­ing me in the ribs. “I was think­ing some­thing more like a Nora Ephron picture.”

“Well, we’ll see,” I said. 

The next day we saw the Boboli Gardens and did a little shop­ping. In years of old, when shop­ping in Europe, I would go for the obscure-music and unavailable-in-the‑U.S. DVD options; dur­ing this jaunt, at lunch, Claire and I dis­cussed wheth­er I ought to buy a (Jesus) 400-Euro pair of shoes. It was determined…wait for it…that I would. But I would do it alone, so that Claire might not be fur­ther temp­ted by a far more expens­ive hand­bag in that same shop. Instead, Claire would go to a more mod­est dress shop around the corner while I pro­cured the foot­wear, and we’d meet in the book­shop between the two places. 

I got the shoes. It was excit­ing. I learned that when you spend that much money on a pair of shoes, you get a free shoe­horn. I think that’s what I learned, any­way. I wore the shoes out—aside from being strik­ing, they are remark­ably comfortable—and went to the book­store, and was kind of not too excited by it right off the bat. (I’ll admit it: my main interest in the place was in see­ing wheth­er it had a DVD sec­tion, and it did­n’t.) So I thought I’d just go and join Claire at the dress shop. 

As I came out of the book­store, I saw some flurry of activ­ity on the nar­row side­walk. An American man, a little older than me, short, with white hair—imagine Dustin Hoffman por­tray­ing Bernie Madoff dur­ing Madoff’s “up” years—was bran­dish­ing a selfie stick with a phone on it, not try­ing to take a pic­ture of him­self but of someone else. And he was laugh­ing, not very nicely, and shout­ing, as Americans do at for­eign­ers when they believe that say­ing words more loudly will make the per­son who does­n’t speak their lan­guage mira­cu­lously under­stand those words. He was say­ing, “Come on! Why won’t you let me take your pic­ture?! Mamma mia!!!!?” And he said those last words with a ges­tic­u­la­tion of his free hand, a ste­reo­typ­ic­al “mangia!” ges­ture com­monly employed on ’60s sit­coms and such to con­note Dago-ness. And run­ning away from him with a ter­ri­fied look on her face  was, yes, “our” little old lady. 

She was gone before I could catch her eye, as if there would have been any­thing for me to do had I caught her eye. The American’s friend, a dumpy fel­low of the same age in a purple polo shirt, pos­sibly put off by his com­pan­ion’s beha­vi­or, said to him, “You know, it’s prob­ably some reli­gious objec­tion,” and sure, why not, because it was Saturday. I stood there and seethed. I likely don’t need to tell you all the things I would have liked to have done, or said, or done and said. But I kept my mouth shut and went over to the dress store and met Claire, who’d got­ten two nice dresses.

I did­n’t want to tell her the story but I kind of had to. “That makes me really sad,” she said, as I knew she would. We got to the inter­sec­tion where the book­store was and there were our two American friends still, prob­ably dis­cuss­ing how it would be great to privat­ize the Boboli Gardens and maybe turn it into a golf course. We hoped that we might find our little old lady one last time and maybe buy her a gelato as a means of apo­lo­giz­ing for our boor­ish coun­try­men. But we did not. And that was the end of the movie, a movie by neither Mario Bava nor Nora Ephron.