Month: December 2015

But it was just before Christmas, I had overspent my monthly (self-imposed) allowance, and prices would drop after Epiphany. So, I’d wait. Two days later I had second thoughts, and went back to the corner window. The sweater was gone. Oh, well. Not meant to be.

About a week later in a window across the street and a bit towards Piazza della Reppublica, the sweater appeared again. The previous window had displayed it under a jacket, but this time it was alone in all its splendor. One look convinced me that I should buy it, and buy it now. But it was riposa, the afternoon closing. I promised myself to check back later that evening. The evening came, something else caught my attention, and I forgot.

A couple of days ago, during riposa, I was on my way up to the “supermarket” at the end of my daily walk, and in a window across the street and a little ways down, was the sweater, displayed as the first time, under a jacket. The tag on it said €36. That’s a good price, I thought. Epiphany has passed, the prices are as low as they’re likely to be, I’m going to buy it. But it was riposa, so I did my grocery shopping and vowed to come back later. The evening came, something else caught my attention, and I forgot.

“Buona sera.”

The young lady replies. I describe the sweater and mention that I think I saw it in this display window the day before. Does she remember?

“Oh, we have sweaters here with zippers, and there with zippers.” “No, you see, I don’t absolutely need a sweater, I just liked this sweater,” I explain.

She laughs.

“Have you changed the display recently?”

“No.”

“So this sweater I’m describing doesn’t ring any bells?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“Oh.  I must have the wrong shop.

I walked all the way back down Corso Cavour to Piazza Cahen. No sweater. I walked all the way up Corso Cavour until I had nowhere to go except over the cliff. No sweater.

I decided I would walk down, ask the young woman again. On the way, close to where I first sighted the sweater (and while I was gazing over the cliff edge contemplating the faltering state of my sanity) two young men had planted themselves and were singing. They had the voices of angels, a perfect blend, and were presenting an impromptu concert of mostly-American acoustic pop. I couldn’t figure out what their native language was. The lyrics seemed to be in English, but I couldn’t say for sure. When I applauded, one of them said “Gracias” instead of “Grazie.” Maybe they were Spanish? I reached into my pocket for some change. All I had was a penny. I couldn’t give them a penny, they deserved at least a euro.

I had forgotten to buy milk when I was at the “supermarket” earlier, so I went back down. I’d buy the milk, get change, and return. The milk was bought, the change was had. While I was there, I looked again at the display window across the street. Of course, nothing had appeared in my absence.  You never know.

I walked back up, and gave the young men two euro. They sang “Hallelujah.”

I’ve seen evidence of bad taste.  At the open market in Piazza del Popolo, for example, there are items for sale that take your breath away.  But I don’t encounter the real thing very often. Apartments I’ve been invited into, or have glimpsed from the street, are unusually pleasant in their design and décor. The thirteenth century arch that leads to the dining room with the nineteenth century furniture is balanced by the canny placement of a twenty-first century lamp. That easy spontaneity shows up everywhere once your eye grows used to looking for it.

What really impresses me, though — maybe because it’s all over town, all of the time — is the design of shops and window displays.

 Orvieto’s window and shop art seems to be homegrown, not the product of professionals from Rome.  The variety is too great, the attention to detail, too specific.  That idea was reinforced by the shop owners who smiled at the Outsider pointing a camera at their stores.  They nodded in that way that says “we did that.” There’s a different nod for “I bought that.” I’m pretty sure it was the “we did that” nod, most of the time.

Displays range from the practical setups in the open markets to shop interiors that are sometimes so detailed they become environmental installations.  That approach is so prevalent, that even walking into a pharmacy can feel like a designed immersive experience.

But the shop windows are scenographic gems, and you don’t have to step inside to appreciate them.  They exist all over town, not just in the heavily trafficked thoroughfares. The front window of a shop tucked away in a narrow residential street can be as spectacularly attractive as one on Corso Cavour.

However visible a window is, most change more or less constantly.  Some keep a personal style going while shifting detail to reflect the season, or the owner’s mood, or new products.  Others undergo full transformations on a regular basis. The creativity, time, thought, and care invested in all this is staggering.

Then again, so much energy here is devoted to making everyday life, beautiful.  The displays are a vibrant public expression of that.  They are about more than advertizing product or trade, or boosting sales.  They show pride of place, delight in culture, personality, a shared aesthetic, and a rich sense of humor.  I find myself stopping at some windows like I do frescos in Firenze.

These photos capture a little of that, but don’t really do the subjects justice. The light is odd, I didn’t know how to handle the reflections, and the streets were so full there was no place to stand. They strain in the way that panorama shots often do. It’s hard to capture vibrance with pixels — or at least my pixels seem to be not quite up to the task.

Oh, well.

I suspect it’s like this when learning any language on the hoof, but Italian requires a whole lot more than memorizing words and complicated grammar. Meaning is attached to all kinds of non-verbal elements too: tonal structures, gestures, expectations, social status, the color of your sweater, educational achievements, and a host of other barely perceivable signals, none of which are written down so you can study them.

When signals are awkwardly employed by the eager-to-please outsider, they often carry wholly different meanings from what the outsider intended, ones that could put said outsider into some serious trouble. It’s not just what you say that counts, it’s when, how, where, to whom, and within which context.

Here’s a handy example. I was waiting to order cheese. There were two elderly ladies behind me who I could not convince to step in front of me, so when the gentleman with the cheese knife nodded in my direction, I leapt. “Si! Vorrei un peccorino… blah, blah, blah.”

Terrible mistake.

In my country, as I wait in line for service I often rehearse ways of taking as little time as possible to conduct the business at hand. When my turn comes, I leap. It’s meant as a courtesy. The people behind me in line advance more quickly. The person taking care of my business, who is assumed to be wishing she were somewhere else, needs to spend less energy on me. It is a civilized if not exactly pleasant way of doing things. Thus I have been trained, and such is my belief.

There are adjustments to be made in Orvieto.  (What follows is my conjecture based on semi-informed observation.)  Say you’re thinking of buying a jacket at the haberdasher down the street, you may just find it convenient to ask someone behind a counter for their opinion. That’s okay.  Maybe he wants to know about your experience at a certain hotel in Prague. Fill him in, all the details, find it on your phone so he has the web address. If anyone else in line feels the need to be served, they will interrupt and tell you as much. It’s all very sensible. But whatever you do, show good form. To be polite is more than manners, it’s patrimony. To be unnecessarily efficient may come off as maleducato, that is, rude.

Every encounter, commercial or otherwise, begins with buon giorno up until a mysterious point mid-afternoon when everyone somehow knows to change to buona sera, which means good afternoon, good evening, good night, and if it’s still dark (and the parties in question have not yet been asleep) maybe even good morning. If you are not greeted by the cheese man, or by whomever it is you’re doing business with, it does not matter. Greet anyway. A reciprocal greeting will almost certainly follow.

I failed in this, and the nice cheese man never forgave me. I immediately caught what I had omitted, and did everything linguistically possible to make up for it – except of course to apologize. I gave him per favore, perfetto, prego and esato as often as I could fit them in, even when they were not really called for. When I left, I wished him buona giornata AND arrivaderci. He replied, buon giorno just to make sure I understood that saying goodbye was of no use when I had not yet said hello.

Underlying the ceremony, there is a serious point to this. The proprietor and the client are equals. There should be nothing in either the trade of goods or of words to suggest otherwise. The money is exchanged for a product, yes, but the more significant exchange is one of comfort, information, inclusion, communication, and approval. The greeting expresses both parties’ readiness to enter into the dance, and to leave the greeting out puts everything out of balance.

Another thing I find interesting is that it has been mostly people under the age of thirty-five or so who have been upset when I forget to greet. I find it hopeful that younger people seem to care so much. The guy at the outdoor market with the creased face and calloused hands nods when I greet him and waits for me to make a choice so he can get on with his day. (I suspect this is especially true when serving outsiders who have no useful information to share, anyway.) But the line between the cares and the care-nots is vague. Greet. It don’t cost nothin’, and the avenues it opens up can be quite pleasant.

Until about a week ago – or in other words, for the first five or six weeks of this stay – going into centro to shop or seek information was always tinged with terror. Invisible rules are in effect, and not only am I ignorant, but I unknowingly break them more or less without pause. Then something changed. My purpose on this journey (or in life, as far as that goes) is not to prove that I know stuff. I’m going to make mistakes. So long as I say buon giorno or buona sera at the top of an interaction, no one really seems to care about the rest. They’re too busy making their own mistakes. This language and this culture are built on such ancient foundations, that nobody can navigate them perfectly.

So, hey! I wanna know what it’s like to live here? I’m living it just like an Italian, only my grammar really, really sucks.  Buona serata!

The Sunnyvale I knew as a child was rural and agricultural. It rests in the heart of the Santa Clara Valley, which enjoyed (and probably, in a highly theoretical sense, still enjoys) some of the best conditions for year-round sustainable horticulture in the world. This was conveniently ignored when Lockheed began hiring in the thousands and real estate values shot up to previously inconceivable levels. The Sunnyvale I left when I was 19 was the aging core of a what had managed to survive the blitz, surrounded by tacked-on “subdivisions”.

My parents continued to live in the house they raised me in through retirement, old age, and decline. They both died in that house.  It was recently taken down, along with the one next to it, so that a not-terribly-unattractive office building could be erected. There are pockets of the town I knew as a kid that still remain, but many of the older homes have either been replaced with more impressive ones, or enlarged to be less incompatible with the rational use of such expensive land.

The downtown I walked to almost every day when I was young was torn down in 1980, replaced by a Town Centre, which in turn was torn down about 25 years later, long after it had proven itself unsustainable.  It is being replaced by an as-yet-to-be-completed “planned downtown.” The single block from before the devastation of 1980 that was allowed to remain is the only part of the downtown area that continued to flourish.

I can’t go home, almost none of it exists anymore.

But I enjoyed growing up there.

I walked to school from the age of six. I walked to church. I walked to hang out in stores and admire their goods, and no one ever questioned me about it. There were shops run by people who owned, loved, and created them. There where department stores like Penny’s and Hart’s, manned by the same sales staff for years on end who knew my evolving tastes and helped to inform them. When I started high school, the walk was longer but still possible. Part of it took me through a cherry orchard, then Mathilda Avenue was pushed through, and I followed the same path on a sidewalk still surrounded by trees.

My mother died in 2007 and with her passing my Sunnyvale walks ended. That was okay, they had become exercise. There weren’t many places left to walk to, or when you could, the walk had grown so unpleasant by proximity to roaring lines of traffic that it hardly seemed worth the effort. But unless I move, regularly, I want to jump out of my skin, so in my mother’s final years I walked in S and U curves, up and down blocks, identifying changes, recalling friends and family and friends of family and where they used to live and work.

Now, until late spring, I’m living in Orvieto, Italy. It’s a hill town on a volcanic outcropping surrounded on all sides by cliffs that drop away into a green valley.

My days are a luxury. I can write without distraction, settled into an pleasant rhythm made possible by retirement income. I don’t need a car because I never have to leave town. Should that change, I can catch a train. I live on a fringe, only gently touched by the daily struggles that people here, as anywhere, are faced with. The thrum of modern life attracts with a similar pull as in other less insular towns, but I can ignore it.

I walk often. Every walk has a destination, or can be made to have one. I’m getting to know the people who own the shops and restaurants and coffee bars, and whose personalities they reflect. Everywhere, I see people I’ve met; on the street, at the bakery, the wine shop, the chocolate shop, in the piazzas. A little longer walk will take me into the countryside where there are orchards and gardens that help to feed the town. There is an ease to life here that has been so familiar, but I’ve not been able to identify why.

Today, I suddenly saw the connection between Orvieto and the Sunnyvale of my childhood.  It isn’t so strange that it took me two months to find it, because visually the two places could not be more different. Sunnyvale was founded in what may have been, conservatively speaking, Orvieto’s twenty-fourth century. Its houses have always been separated by yards with lawns and fences and trees. In Orvieto, all that gardening is modestly concealed behind stone walls.

Sunnyvale grew out of a tradition rooted in places like Orvieto.  In Sunnyvale, the tradition was abandoned in the rush towards growth – perhaps hardly even noticed – whereas Orvieto seems acutely aware of how fragile its genre of community is within the larger scope of modern city life.  While many people here express some pride in the vast Coop Supermercato in the lower part of the city called Orvieto Scalo, there’s also (thankfully) an awareness that such enterprise can suck the life out of an old-style town, dry it up before anyone knows what happened.

I hope that awareness is more than a product of my eager imagination, because what Orvieto, and places like it, have managed to sustain encourages human dignity in ways that Sunnyvale, impressive as its growth and expansiveness have been, neglects. The ready ease that still exists in these towns is difficult to find, let alone maintain, in the Sunnyvales of the world.

Ever since my first experience of the Italian city forty years ago, I’ve been trying to incorporate the ease that draws me here into my life in the States – or at least simulate it – with mixed results. I’m not sure it can be done at all, but it’s worth a try. Much to their credit, a few of the communities surrounding Sunnyvale have preserved their downtowns.  That helps.  But ease cowers from traffic and institutionalized commercialism, and urban spread depends on those.  In such environments it takes deliberate effort to lure ease into daily life; an interesting conundrum.

As years click away, and the scope of opportunity narrows simply because the time left to accomplish things has narrowed, the impulse to return home grows stronger.  Orvieto, echoing the quiet melodies that kept Sunnyvale local in the 1950’s, feels like home. Half a world away, I relax back into a pace so familiar that it almost flows in my bloodstream.  I’m grateful to be here.  Come visit for more than a week or two, and you may find something similar.