Some Uniquely Italian Things:

  1. The bar inside the Goodwill store.
    They don’t have a Goodwill here, but they do have lots of second-hand shops. Firstly, the shops are better than the ones in the U.S. They have items you would actually want to buy and aren’t shamelessly priced either. I read that in our relentless effort to squeeze profit from every corner of our culture, we as Americans have destroyed thrifting. Everything that would have been a good score in the thrift shop 15 years ago has now been recognized and resold to a reseller who resold it on Facebook Marketplace or ebay or their cute little fucking Etsy shop. But not here!… Not yet. I must admit that when I started visiting thrift shops here in Rome, my first thought was “I could make a fortune selling this junk in America. How could I get it there?”. It’s like a disease. In the center of one of my favorite thrift shops, built like a labyrinth with aisles just wide enough to slip through and furniture stacked to the ceiling, there is a bar accessible only by winding through the maze of stuff. The bar is decorated with items the employees decided to use as decoration instead of selling. There is a real espresso machine and lined up in a row along the glass shelf behind the labyrinth bar, there is a selection of amari, should you need a nip while browsing the racks of used clothes.
  2. Sparkling water supplied by the taxpayers.
    An 8-minute walk from our apartment, there is a small building the size of a newspaper kiosk set on the corner of a park that has just 4 benches. This windowless kiosk-esque building has a dispenser on the side with three buttons marked: glass, 1/2 liter, 1.5 liter. You put your bottle or glass under the spout and press one of the buttons to dispense cooled, filtered, sparkling water… for free. Before the discovery of this kiosk, Nik and I were buying 1.5-liter bottles of sparkling water from the bodega below our apartment. A few days ago we took those empty bottles and refilled them at the kiosk. I packed the taught, dew-covered bottles, bubbles clinging to the inside, into my backpack and felt rich.
  3. Smoking.
    Technically, smoking inside is illegal in Italy but the definition of “inside” is loose. For instance, if the restaurant has a door propped open, that seems to instantly transform inside into outside and allows one to smoke, as long as you make a show of exhaling your smoke towards the open door. Past a certain hour, also counts as outside, meaning that if it’s midnight and the restaurant is only half full, that also counts as outside and smoking near the bathroom of the restaurant is ok. Amazingly, the back of the restaurant also counts as outside. One can get glimpses of dishwashers, transferring clean dishes to shelves with a lit cigarette hanging out of their mouth, as you go to the counter to pay. Given my intolerant personality, you would think this would bother me but it’s just the opposite. I love the smell of second-hand smoke, and when the tourists all become too much and pictures of food on the menu begin to make the entire city feel like Disneyland, the smell of a burning cigarette brings me back to the Italy I fell in love with ten years ago.
  4. Being in my way all the time.
    A lot of the time our neighborhood is packed to the gills with people. I moved to the most touristed city on the planet, so when families are walking slowly with their heads tilted upwards at the vines clinging to the stone apartment building or crowded like wasps around a phone in the middle of the walkway to decipher where they made a wrong turn, I am not allowed to complain. I don’t do those things because I have basic spatial awareness and the most minimal concern for my fellow man, but I understand that not everyone is burdened in such a way. I walk fast and snake through these herds with a growing ease; therefore, these are not the people in my way. The people in my way are the Italians. At the gym, at the grocery store, standing in line at the post office, etc. At the gym, while re-racking weights, two Italian dudes stand over the reracking station loudly speaking with each other. I literally have to brush by them, my skin touching their skin, to put back my heavy plates. In the U.S., unless someone was trying to punk you, they would see your slight struggle and take a step back out of your way. In the grocery store, the cashier sees a friend walk in while I’m bagging my own groceries, and they lean over to the register to kiss one another on the cheek, their faces so close to mine I could turn my head and join in without craning my neck at all. In line at the post office, after patiently waiting for my number to be called, I approach the clerk. I pull my papers from their envelope and fan them out before her. Just then, having remembered one more thing, the person speaking with the clerk before me, the person whose turn is OVER, sidles up next to me, our shoulders touching as she loudly interrupts my pigeon Italian to ask one more question. The clerk has no problem with this and might spend another 4 minutes addressing her new concern, not just talking but relooking up information on the computer, leaving their desk to find the right form, making a phone call to double check. This all seems rude where I come from, and if I were with my mom or sister, they would scoff loudly enough to make their displeasure known, hoping that whoever was in their way would turn to argue with them. Me, though, I’m too desperate to be accepted here, to, at the very least, not be seen as American, with my classically American fussiness, indignation, and basic desire not to be taken advantage of. So instead, I let people walk all over me. I let the barista forget my order, and I thank them happily as I leave.

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