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Courgetti

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I laughed when I noticed the name on this packet I had picked up in Tesco. The spirally courgettes (ridiculously cut up and ready for me to cook, when I could of course have done it myself, but they were on the cheapo shelf) had already gone into that evening’s stir-fry.

Who’s ever heard of Courgetti? I chuckled to my family. They must have made that up. Mixing up their courgettes and their zucchini. Or, actually they mixed up courgettes and spaghetti – and that is a thing now. Tesco did not mess up, or invent the name. Courgetti – courgettes cut up into spirals – have become a standard alternative for many to wheat-based noodles.

Best of all, in the US – where they eat zucchini, not courgettes – they’re called Zoodles!

I buy courgettes in the supermarket here in Ireland, though in Tuscany I would have asked for zucchine and in Canada they’re zucchini. Why the difference?

This thin-skinned summer squash, a younger version of a marrow, the courgette actually originated in the Americas – along with the other members of the Squash family (known as cucurbits) which includes melon, pumpkins and cucumbers. These were all a staple in central and south American for centuries and started making their way to European kitchens from the 16th century on.

The Italian name – Zucchini – is the diminutive form of Zucca (the name for squash or pumpkin). In many parts of Italy a single one is called a zucchina (plural zucchine) and in others (Tuscany, Piedmont and Sardinia), it’s more typically masculine, zucchino (plural zucchini). It became a popular vegetable to cultivate in northern Italy in the 19th century, coinciding with the immigration of many Italians to the US and so the name stuck there. A lovely example of culinary re-introduction. (Note that zucchini is always plural in English, you don’t say I’ll cut up a zucchino. But then, we don’t throw a single spaghetto onto the wall to see if it will stick. Not something you’d see in an Italian kitchen.)

The French word – Courgette – is standard in other English-speaking countries: the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Malaysia and South Africa. (Australians stuck with zucchini for some reason). Obviously it’s a key ingredient in many French dishes, but it’s actually quite a recent entry into the language, only first appearing in the OED in 1931.

Squash is also used in some countries, that’s what we would be buying in a Norwegian supermarket for example.

The marrow is a trope of English gardening, with weird competitions of marrow-growing featuring heavily in my memories of 1970s sitcoms. I like to think Roald Dahl had fun with this, when his BFG eats his disgusting snozzcumbers (cucumbers being a cousin of squash).

Living for many years with a Canadian the two of us still switch back and forth between the two main names for this bitter but buoyant vegetable, confusing our kids (who don’t even like it). I like to use both names: I’ll fry up thick diagonal slices of courgette (a la Toscana) for my pizza, but one of my favourite things to bake is Chocolate Zucchini Loaf. I could never bring myself to call it Chocolate Courgette Loaf. Yuk!

Tune in another time and we’ll have a look at eggplants… I mean, aubergines… or melanzani.

Jaywalking

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I stood at a pedestrian crossing in Dublin during the week and, like all the other Irish people around me, I walked across the road when no cars were coming. A young student, clearly not a local, was waiting to cross on the other side. He looked confused, as if the rest of us had all seen an invisible green man to tell us we could cross.

“Haven’t you learned to Jaywalk yet?” I wanted to ask him as I rushed past.

A standard practice in Ireland, #jaywalking seems not to be so common in the UK and the word is barely known there. It actually comes from the US, where jaywalking has been an annoyance for years. The word “jay” first referred not to a traffic-weaving pedestrian but to horse-drawn carts (“jays”) and automobiles that were not straying off the correct side of the street. As roads became taken over by cars and walkers pushed to sidewalks, the “jay” began to refer to the foolish person who got in the way of the cars.

Having crossed roads myself in all sorts of places, from Copenhagen to Mumbai, I think we have a fairly sensible attitude to it here in Ireland.

Only 10 countries have made jaywalking illegal, and other countries have varying rules about it. The UK doesn’t have any law about it, whereas in China they’re apparently using facial-recognition to spot jaywalkers.

The lesson? Do it at your own peril, depending on where you are.

(This cool poster was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) program, by Isadore Posoff.)

Ancient Palermo

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I spotted a few of these trilingual signs last week when we were in Palermo. Written in Italian, Hebrew and Arabic you can find them on some of the streets in the old Jewish area of this fascinating city.

In April 2017 the signs were defaced by vandals who blacked out the non-Italian names. It didn’t take long for some civic groups – and the mayor himself – to get involved in cleaning them up and ensure this bit of local heritage was not muddied. Apparently the Hebrew isn’t even really correct, just a quick transliteration of the Italian name. An indication that the signs (and the idea behind them) are a modern, and public, labelling of the area’s heritage.

Palermo is really ancient, founded by Phoenicians – that is, the guys who came before the Greeks. Jews were part of the huge mix of people and they lived just fine under the various rulers of Sicily, like the Normans and the Arabs. At one point Palermo had 300 mosques. But it all changed in 1492 when the Jews of Sicily were forced (by the new Spanish rulers) to go into exile or convert to Catholicism. The population never really recovered.

Here’s a link to an Italian story about the signs if you’re interested.

And a link to an interesting NYTimes story.

Besotted by Bassets

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It’s becoming a saga – this business of our family not yet having a dog. My elder daughter and I spend a lot of time discussing breeds and looking at other people’s dogs. Like this little fella we saw last week in Sicily while out for a passeggiata with friends in Catania.

I would call this dog Dachshund, or a sausage dog. Dachshund meaning Badger Dog in German. I guess there’s a reason for that.

“Che bel Bassotto” my friend called him.

“A Bassotto?” I asked. “Then what do you call a Basset Hound?” He didn’t know but I went home and looked it up. In Italian, Bassets are also called Bassotto or just “Basset Hound”.

Bassotto comes from the French “bas”, meaning low. And Basset Hound comes from the same kind of root – Basset meaning “quite low”.

But these two breeds are not really related to each other (according to another quick Google search); the droopy eared one is English and the cute sausagey one is German.

And – for the record – neither of them is related to a Beagle. Which in Italian is called “un Beagle”.

To confuse me even more, my younger daughter points me to her Italian Donald Duck comic book (which she still reads weekly) and points out the gang of bumbling bad guys – in Italian they’re called La Banda Bassotti. Meaning, the Dachshund gang.

“Ah those guys”, says my husband, “when I was a kid and read those comics they were called the Beagle Boys“.

And sure enough, these guys have a pet/guard dog called “Ottoperotto”. Who is a Dachshund.

Never mind all these cute beagles, bassets and sausage dogs. We might just make do with something simpler, like a labrador.

(You can check out an earlier post I wrote about how Italians love their dogs, whatever the breed)

(Oh, and the word besotted? That’s not connected. It comes from to become a sot (a fool, or drunkard).

Seriously, Lads!

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“Ah come on Lads!”

So declared my 9 year old daughter to the other kids in the local playground this weekend – the bigger one that has the cool sandpit construction setup. “Lads”, she says, “let’s have the water flow a bit first and then see if it’s stuck.”

I smiled when I heard that: there’s my girl.

She’s not addressing the group as “guys” – the word I’ve been hearing all the time in Ireland since we moved back last year – as in, “guys let’s work on this together and then smash it up”. As a handy word guys is fine (and dandy) to use in Canada and the US. But I have to say I don’t like how this G-word seems to have taken over speech in Ireland, at least big chunks of the country. I get annoyed every time I hear a parent/coach/teacher shout “hey guys can you all come over here?” We had our own words before – since when did a cute fella become a cute guy?

Guys is not a strong word: even in North America it’s considered slang and not advised for professional use and has also been experiencing a gender-focussed backlash (see this Salon article) and in my own experience there it was considered a male word (unlike, say, folks, the charming y’all or even the unsubtle peeps).

The word for addressing a group of people in Ireland is lads. It’s not perfect, to be honest, it doesn’t really cover the girls but does anyone say “lads and lassies”? It’s fine, let’s just leave it.

Ah Lads!

Living abroad for most of her life, this same sandpit-managing daughter of mine had to learn a lot of her everyday English from me. All of her daytime and weekend-socialising hours were spent with other kids in a different language. So at age 4 she would be shouting “dere!” to her Norwegian playmates and by age 7 “ragazzi!” to the Italian classmates. I wouldn’t have told her to say “lads” when she was with other English-speaking kids, most of whom would be American or English anyway (and mostly girls, not boys) but she must have picked it up somehow.

If I had been a hard-core Irish-parent-abroad, I might have insisted on the family using “yous” or “yis” or “ye” when addressing a group. But I have my limits.

Sorry if I’m being a language curmudgeon, I know it’s supposed to grow and adapt. But here’s something we Irish should think about – the use of “guy” actually comes from Guy Fawkes. The very one who gets bonfired every year in the UK in that weird English (and anti-Catholic) tradition. Seriously lads!

An Old Dictionary

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Our 9 year old needs an Irish dictionary for school. She’s been in school in Dublin for a year now and has managed to catch up really well with learning Irish. All the other kids started when they were about 5. Even if you speak another language, which she does (Italian), Irish is not necessarily a no-brainer. It’s about as un-phonetic as you can get which makes it hard to pronounce, has a complex grammar, and it’s not like you hear it spoken on the streets every day.

We were out at the weekend and wandered into a charity shop in Dun Laoghaire. They had a few dictionaries in their books section and two of them were basic Irish pocket dictionaries like this. They’re meant for school use – sure where else would you be using it? This edition was dated 1993 but I figured that was recent enough, it couldn’t have changed too much since then.

I bring it to the man behind the counter, taking care not to let her start rummaging in the little baskets of plastic jewellery on the countertop. He hands the book back to me, saying there’s no charge. “I always give dictionaries to the kids for free”, he says. “You know, they need them for school, so why should they pay?”

I should have asked him if he knows what ever happened to Sean and Melissa. I wondered what happened there.

 

The Irish for Brexit

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“Brexit” is now a universally-known word and it is used as is, with no local translation.  Brexit is Brexit in every language. Every language, but one – Irish.

The word Brexit was first coined in 2012, eight months before David Cameron announced he would be holding a referendum on the UK’s exit from the EU. The word was a natural successor to the word “Grexit” – the suitably-classical sounding name used to describe one solution to Greece’s massive debt issues. It’s not a technical term:   but it’s a nickname – or actually a portmanteau – that has stuck, referring to the whole process of the UK leaving the EU.

“Brexit” won out over some weaker, and unpronounceable, alternatives, like “Ukexit” and the biscuity-flavoured “Brixit”. It was added to the OED in 2016 by which stage offshoot words were appearing: brexiteer, to brexit as well as Bregret, Bremain and remoaners. A child in Germany was even christened with it, according to the Express anyway.

Take note that the term Brexit is not fully accurate – it is not just Britain that plans to leave, but the entire UK (which consists of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), though some of those individual elements voted to stay. I won’t get into the politics here. Really I won’t.

Names for possible EU-exits by other countries have thrown out some fun word-play. Here are some of my favourites:

  • Nullgaria
  • Fraurevoir
  • Full (for Hungary)
  • Quitaly
  • Luxgettouttahere
  • Forsakia
  • Byerland (for Ireland)

So why haven’t other languages decided to adapt a local version of Brexit? Why didn’t, say, the French come up with their own word , as they usually do? What about languages that don’t typically use an X or where “exit” doesn’t work?

Could it be because Brexit was not meant to be a long-term thing? That it would be done and dusted quickly and easily? Or because only one country is likely to want to really pull out of the EU (even if they are still figuring out how, when, and even why)?

So how about the Irish – why did we bother to translate Brexit? First, some background:

The Irish language is spoken across the island of Ireland, north and south, and the Republic of Ireland is officially a bilingual country. I am far from being a fluent speaker, but I paid my dues and did the 14-odd years of it at school, (and yes I did do honours for the Leaving, to my credit).

As a race, we’re known to be contrary – and as our own language was suppressed for several centuries by the English invader it’s no surprise that we like to adapt concepts to our own linguistic viewpoint. (You could say it’s making a statement, but who would actually notice, except us?)

So in the Irish language, there are in fact two words in use for Brexit.

The main media outlets in Ireland (which are English-speaking) of course use Brexit – and you should be aware that it’s probably more in the news in this country than even Britain, and more Irish people know what’s going on with the latest negotiations (or lack of) than many people in Britain. Why? Because no other country, even the UK itself, will be as directly affected by the exit when/if it happens. (A quick recap: trade, citizens’ rights, education, banking services, and the small matter of the Northern Irish border.)

As a bilingual country, Ireland has a thriving Irish-language media: one dedicated TV station, several radio stations, plenty of print and online publications.

And the Irish-language media chose not to use Brexit but came up with their own word: Breatimeacht.

“Breatimeacht” is the official Irish word used on the Nuacht (News). It’s a clever portmanteau that works well:

“na Breataine” = Britain

“imeacht” = leaving.

Irish-language guru Darach Ó Séaghdha, author of Motherfocloir and founder of the podcast, has written:

“some critics have pointed out that translation offers the opportunity for correction – it’s the UK that’s leaving, not the geographical entity of Britain. This has led to Sasamach being more popular in some quarters (Sasana, England, amach, out).”

This secondary word – Sasamach – is now being used (first coined by @tuigim) and I think it’s quite brilliant. Sasana (which stems from the word Saxon) refers to England, not Britain.

If you’re getting confused at this stage about UK/England/Britain/British Isles, here’s a handy quick guide:

Source: Wikipedia/Terminology of the British Isles

The Irish word for an English person is “sasanach” and it’s a word that has appeared in many songs and poems over hundreds of years, often referring to how said Englishmen should best be booted out of Ireland.

Songs that evoke this kind of carry-on:

So – Sasamach is now doing the rounds to mean Brexit, as “amach” means out, so roughly speaking it’s a more forceful “Brits out”.

(Now, technically speaking “amach” means the process of moving out. Once you’re outside the word is “amuigh”. Maybe the word will need to change, in English too, but at this rate there’s no sign that they ever will be fully out.)

Language problems have started to plague other elements of Brexit in the last couple of weeks: the White Paper published in July was translated by the Foreign Office into 23 languages (including Irish) and the quality of translations was widely criticised, causing more British bemoaning about their level of language learning.

And for the Irish? Does our deliberate transliteration of Brexit mean we want it to happen, or not? Or are we just continuing our centuries-old habit of pushing around the confines of language?

The Child of Prague – Patron Saint of Climate Change?

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Ireland has been going through a heatwave these few couple of weeks. This is, of course, not natural. There have been lots of internet jokes and chatter but the oddest one is people asking the Child of Prague to make the heat stop. I’ll try to explain.

The Infant Child of Prague is a little statue of the infant Jesus holding an orb and it’s a staple of the traditional Irish mantelpiece or wall – placed close to a picture of the Sacred Heart (Christ pulling back his cloak to show his heart) and a photo of JFK (beloved Irish-American president). 

This image of the Christ child has obscure origins but is definitely linked to the Carmelite church in Prague in the 16th century. You can read the whole story on its Wikipedia here. It was hugely popular in Ireland during the Great Famine (1840s) and that tradition might have come from the Spanish Armada washing up (16th century) on Irish shores, mixing it up with their own saint who was the target of food-related prayers, Santo Nino de Atocha.

Whatever its history, nowadays it’s still often the target for Irish prayers for good weather, especially the night before a wedding when the family will stick it out in the garden. If its head falls off that’s good luck. According to this BBC story, even Protestants in the north are partial to hedging their pre-nuptial bets on it.

One Dublin woman made the news with a cake in the shape of the statue, almost as creepy as the original.

So this week on Twitter, people are venting that they’ve had enough of this heatwave and the Child should surely make it stop, ideally before it starts to melt in the heat (its outer coating is of wax).

The Truth about the British Isles

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It’s a bit of sport for Irish people to watch how a successful Irish person – like Saoirse Ronan – is called British by the media. Over the years I’ve had to explain many times (even to English people), that we are not British, or part of Britain, or the UK. But we are in the British Isles, though not the British Islands. More complicated is Northern Ireland which is part of the UK, but not part of Britain. But it’s also in Ireland but it also depends on your point of view…

This week, the best female chef in the world award went to Clare Smyth. Born in N.Ireland she lives in London, where she got the job to cater the royal wedding (their royals, not ours, though I am also technically Canadian so they are mine too…)

The Guardian, 20 June 2018

In most papers (Irish Times, the Telegraph, Northern papers) she’s “Northern Irish”.
In the Irish Independent she “Irish”.
In the Guardian she’s “a Briton”.
And in other local papers she’s just “Antrim-born”.

(Quick tip – you’ll only offend Irish people if you get things mixed up. Though the Scots might not like it, or the Welsh, or some Manx, or whatever people from Guernsey are called…)

If you’re still confused, here’s a nifty diagram I think is excellent.

And you can read a really detailed explanation on the British Isles in Wikipedia.

Two girls in a tree

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Two old friends climb a tree in an Oslo wood. They’re only 8 years old but these girls are fierce; in their minds anything is possible.

They haven’t seen each since two years ago, when we moved away from Norway to Italy. My girl has moulded herself into a new life and a new language. She has mostly forgotten how to speak Norwegian but she remembers her life here and her best friend from the nature kindergarten that got them out in the woods (and up trees) several times a week, all year round.

They have often talked about each other during the two years, which is a long time at this age: “Mummy when are we going back to Oslo and when can I see her and overnight and watch films on their big screen in the basement?”

And on this visit, (only our second since we left), they’ll see each other. The two mums have made a plan to spend a few hours out in the woods around Oslo, a huge element of Norwegian life that our whole family has missed.

It’s October and the sky is clear but also crisp, so we remember to bring hats and scarves but we don’t need boots. There are big grins and hugs as they see each other in person – a little taller, two years of school behind them but otherwise they’re no different.

We drive a short distance. The car doors open and like a pair of retrievers they jump out and bound off into the woods, just as they were trained to do. Within two minutes, when the rest of us get out, we’ve lost them.

We find them again, yapping away in some language between Norwegian and English. They’ve found part of a swinging rope dangling off a tree at the lake edge. My Norwegian-mother-mode kicks in, overriding my Irish-mother-mode (and well past the nervous Italian-mode that never really took hold) and I stop myself from telling them to “be careful!… forskitig!” They’ve done this more than I have, they’ll know what to do.

Moving countries and travelling with children, I’ve seen many times how children can settle quickly into a mode of play even when they can’t speak to each other.

This Norwegian friend has been learning some English – from travelling with her parents and from school – and it’s fun for her to have a friend she can speak it with.

And my girl? Who lived here from birth until six, who spoke Norwegian every day and yet is today puzzled when I use regular family words like barnehage (kindergarten) or even pølse (hotdog)?

I know her Norwegian is lodged deep inside that powerful little brain – the powers of communication, the memories and associations and feelings that come with speaking certain words, phrasing things in a particular way. When she does say something she remembers – like the phrasebook-like question she pulled out of thin air to impress the passport officer at the airport yesterday, hvem spiser brød? (who eats bread?) – even then, she says it with that perfect pronunciation I never managed after seven years living in this country.

Here up in the tree, she responds to her friend with any scraps of Norwegian that come out – some fundamental phrases like se her (look here) or nei, ikke sånn (no, not like that). But she’s also using English words, and she’s actually doing something I’ve never seen before, something remarkable. She’s speaking English to her really slowly and carefully, like an older person might use with a little child who they think understands no English. “Can… we… go… over… there…and… try… that?” and “This…bit…here…look”.

Where did she get this from? I don’t think she’s ever seen me speak like that to someone on our travels. Did her teachers in Italy speak to her like that after we had just moved there, in a way to help her clearly hear the words? I think not, as they were fast talkers.

By slowing down her English speech, it’s as if a part of her subconscious has kicked in to rationalise and slow down her words, to watch carefully her friend’s face and make sure her point gets across, when the Norwegian words have failed her.

The swing no longer provides amusement – they can’t agree on who does what – and we move on to a treehouse a local kindergarten has made in another part of the forest. Within another hour it’s starting to get darker and colder and we have to say goodbye. But just that small amount of time, and inventive communication, has been sufficient to add a little more glue to this long-distance friendship. That’s good enough for now.

 

 

 

 

These Crazy Celts!

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I’m Irish, which means I’m a Celt. I’m strong and bold and proud of… all the things we’re supposed to be proud of. I don’t have red hair and only drink moderately but I love the music and art and language of my homeland, all of which are widely considered to be “Celtic”. And I am charged with carrying forward all this legacy, this Celtic-ness, to my own two daughters, to teach them to stand up proud and be counted as Celtic women!

But it looks like they have their own ideas as to what that word might mean. And I might need to revise some of my own thinking – as I found out last weekend.

Celts in Italy?

We took a few days off to go skiing a few hours northwest of Florence, in the Apennine mountains along the border of Tuscany and Emilia Romagna. We discovered that the cheap self-catering place we had booked online was not only remote and hard to find but was actually a intact, restored “celtic” medieval mini-village (called a borgo in Italy) at the otherwise-uninhabited base of Monte Cimone.

Near to our lodgings there were various Celtic remains, which included a stone and thatch hut that was rebuilt to show the typical home of the assorted Celtic tribes that were living (well actually hiding) in the area around the 4th century. They were being slowly driven north by those determined Romans – who eventually succeeded in their task, pushing whatever was left of the Celts to cling on at the edges of Europe (my own homeland included). There were Celtic tribes were all over Europe and you can find traces of them in most central European countries and where the Romans didn’t push them out, they were eventually converted to Christianity and mostly disappeared.

“You know, the Celts weren’t as organised as the Romans” says our 10 year old as we climb along the interpretative path to reach the hut. “They were a bit all over the place, quite violent. And they had a thing about heads”.  She’s been studying this at school – the Celts get about 4 pages in her history book, unlike the 50 pages of Roman history she’ll be slogging through for the rest of the term.

The steps along the hut’s side were for yearly maintenance of the thatch, a tradition still going in Ireland, where similar huts were found.

Celts, Kelts or Chelts?

The hut was called a Capanna Celtica – if you pronounce Celtica the Italian way it’s with a Ch. The 8 year old in the back seat tries out the pronunciation – Cheltica – and it sounds strange to my ears. “How do you say it in English?”, she asks. My hard-wired Irish-educated reaction is to firmly tell the kids in the that in this family we use the hard C like a K, “Celtic”. Unless it’s for a football club in Glasgow. “Or the Boston Celtics”, chips in their dad.

But if you dig around a bit, on the internet no less, you quickly discover that this is a complicated issue.

The pronunciation of the word is a modern invention. Julius Caesar would have pronounced it Keltic (apparently) but in Britian it was taken up with an S back in the middle ages. The romantic Celtic revivalist movement of the 19th century, in Ireland and Britain, brought the hard C back into fashion and it has stuck.

Here’s a fantastic, and deliciously mean, quote from a piece published during the 1850s by the Celtic Union in Ireland.

“Of all the nations that have hitherto lived on the face of the earth, the English have the worst mode of pronouncing learned languages. This is admitted by the whole human race […] This poor meagre sordid language resembles nothing so much as the hissing of serpents or geese. […] If we follow the unwritten law of the English we shall pronounce (Celt) Selt but Cæsar would pronounce it, Kaylt. Thus the reader may take which pronunciation he pleases. He may follow the rule of the Latin or the rule of the English language, and in either case be right…”

A Celtic Chip

I think my sense of being Celtic was drummed into me over many years and I carried it around like a chip on my shoulder. At school we learned that the Celtic artwork of Ireland was the highest point of our artistic heritage, revered around the world. Last summer I dragged the family around the “Treasures” room of the National Museum in Dublin, to be awed by the Tara Brooch and Cross of Cong. To my eye they’re still astonishing, to theirs a little less so – as attested by my not being able to take a photo of them standing still in front of one of these receptacles of national pride.

Gobsmacked husband

I studied the History of Art at college and during a year of study in Florence in the 1990s there was a huge blockbuster exhibition on about the Celts, one of the first big comprehensive exhibitions about them. I never got to see it but I got my hands on the enormous catalogue and was horrified – on behalf of my entire nation – to see how little Irish art had been included. How could they? What wonders they were missing out on! The exhibition, I realise now, was focused on the earlier origins of these peoples – the likes of those building huts with thatched roofs to be discovered years later by tourists stopping by on their way to the ski slopes.

The golden age of “Celtic art” on show at the Dublin museum (between the 600s and 800s) really uses the term as a romantic name for a style, to call it something in contrast to the artistic void that was the dark ages in the rest of Europe. Those soft-accented, bald-headed monks who laboured for years over illuminated manuscripts and the artisans who pressed precious stones into mitres left amazing prizes behind them before the Vikings arrived and started messed things up.

Cartoon Celts

What the kids know about the Celts is a bit broader and more up to date. Apart from those history classes, this Horrible Histories book is one of a series which recently appeared in the house. It includes plenty of discussion about what they did with heads, sanitary customs and other yucky details.

Asterix books are also popular in the house, and with Italians. These long-loved stories of the plucky little Gauls (what the Romans called Celts) up in their corner of Brittany with their secret strength potion, and appetite for dancing and wild boar, were constantly beating up the Romans.

Indeed Obelix’s famous catchphrase – These Romans are Crazy! – works beautifully in Italian.

“Sono Pazzi Questi Romani”

– which nicely echoes the SPQR, the official title of Rome (Senātus Populusque Rōmānus: The Roman Senate and People). They were crazy alright, but in the world of Asterix they never quite got the better of them.

So here we are, a family of Celts in Tuscany, battling against the stereotypes and trying to make sense of it all. At this stage of my life, having lived in several places, I can claim many other identities that just the ancient Celtic – Canadian, New Yorker, Londoner, Norwegian, even a little Tuscan. And my kids even more so, with their feet in several homelands.

Maybe I shouldn’t mention to them the fact that being a Dubliner by birth I’m probably more Viking than anything else.

Finding Hitchcock

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The time has come for us to start weaning our children off the films that only they want to watch. In the age of Netflix it’s so easy to leave them to their  own devices, literally, and we have to make an effort to sit together and watch a film as a family: their dad and I are reliving our own glowing memories from childhood of enjoying films as a family together on the couch (including hiding behind it as Indy battles with the snakes).

So to start our plan to watch more interesting films, together, we started with Star Wars (it took a couple of goes but then they really took to the fantastical element of it and have now seen every film), Singin in the Rain (who doesn’t love Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds?) and then Back to the Future (lots of swearing and we had to explain what a Walkman is).

But we needed a good adventure film, with spies and suspense and action. My own favourite is North by Northwest – so we thought we’d start with that. We’re unapologetically old-school and we like watching a physical movie on the TV screen, so before going jumping onto Amazon to buy a copy I thought I’d try the library. Yes, very old-school.

Over our years of living in foreign countries, we’ve become experts on making the most of the library system wherever we are, especially for browsing films. This goes back to our time in New York (around 1999-2002) when we lived close to the fabulous Brooklyn Public Library. We would indulge in raiding their film catalogue, scanning each shelf at a time and carting home our tote bag laden down with a few brick-like VHS tapes, many of which then refused to work that Saturday night. But we enjoyed catching up on some random choices like Powell & Pressburger and Kurosawa, and watching anything with music by Michel Legrand or hair by Veronica Lake. We were also lucky during our 7 years in Oslo to live close to the central library there (the grandly named Deichmanske Bibliotek) and had lots of cinema to choose from, though the foreign-language films often had no English subtitles so we no doubt missed out on a few years’s worth of Brazilian and Hong Kong blockbusters.

So here I am now looking for the 1959 Hitchcock classic to watch with our kids and I head to our local library in Fiesole – it’s a small town and we’re lucky to have a library. It actually has a decent selection of classic and modern films on DVD, and still some VHS. Because there are surely some Tuscan households that still use one.

I start to browse through the DVDs for North by Northwest. I look for the letter N in the titles. No joy, the titles are all a bit jumbled and not shelved according to any alphabet I know. I look to see if they might be organised by genre, or then by country – Italian vs non-Italian. Still no luck.

I interrupt the librarian at her desk, she looks up and smiles (as they do the world over). “How are your DVDs organised?” And she answers, “Oh they’re shelved according to director”.

Of course they are. This is after all the nation of cinema lovers: Italians take their cinema extremely seriously and worship their filmmakers as much as their Renaissance artists. Who wouldn’t know their Pasolini from their Fellini, or even their Spielberg from their Scorsese? Fair enough, I’ve actually studied some of this stuff myself and I can find them on these shelves.

But when it comes to more popular movies, what do you do? What about all those mindless action movies, sequels, random 1970s family movies? Could you name the director of any Bond movie or the auteur behind Frozen?

Still, I have an easy one and I find the Hitchcock selection.  Here’s a nice range of his titles, but they’ve changed all the names! (I’m sure they didn’t do that in Norway.) But these do sound quite nice in Italian: “I 39 Scalini” (The 39 Steps) and “Rebecca, La Prima Moglie” (the first wife). But no sign of Cary Grant in his immaculate suit. I do take home the Man who Knew Too Much (which proved to be a bit spookier than I’d remembered, Hitch uses lack of music to great effect).

With no luck at this library I check the central library in Florence next time I’m in the centre of town. It’s a relatively-recent library, in a lovely renovated old convent. But the contents are a different story. Their cinema section proves to be less organised than our own up here and it’s clear they get a lot more customers, or at least ones who have DVD-players equipped with steel teeth. The films are here organised differently: by title. Heimat sits between Harold & Maude and Heat. Who makes these decisions? Who knows?

The DVDs are shoved downwards into pull-out shelves and you have to make an effort to look through them. Still, I stumble on some fun titles I wouldn’t otherwise see, like this collection of four Jacques Tati films (which has about half the contents intact):

But still no North by Northwest and then I realise – of course they’ve changed the name of that one too! Taking out my phone I cobble onto the sickly Wi-Fi offered by the library and discover online that I should actually be looking for “Intrigo Internazionale” – International Intrigue. (Which is odd, as the film doesn’t go much further than South Dakota.) They don’t have it, but at least now I’m armed with more information.

In the end I find the movie in the Feltrinelli bookshop near the Duomo – they have a cheap DVD section upstairs. For 8 euros we can keep it all to ourselves and build up our own little library at home. And sort them however we like.

P.S. The kids really enjoyed it and had loads of questions about it afterwards, mostly about guns and kisses.

P.P.S Here’s a list of all the Hitchcock titles in Italian if you’re interested.

Women of Christmas

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Christmas has some pretty larger than life figures – Santa Claus/St Nicholas, the baby Jesus, the three Kings, and the shepherds and angels, all of whom were undoubtedly all male. But apart from the central – and rather busy – figure of Mary, we don’t associate many women with the Christmas season. When I stop to think about it though, I can say that my own little family of four has adopted a few as we have been absorbing traditions from the countries we’ve been living in over the last decade.

Living for seven years in Oslo our girls basically grew up as Norwegians. From December 1st they would open presents every day  on our homemade advent calendar, listen to Norwegian songs (some okay, some bad), bake all the right things. And every year they somehow managed to ignore the fact that all their school friends expected Santa to arrive at their door on Christmas Eve while our version of Santa showed up later that night, popping down the chimney into our chimney-less third-floor apartment to drop off his gifts. But of all the Norwegian traditions, we loved most celebrating Santa Lucia on December 13th.

Dear old Saint Lucy is, coincidentally for us, an Italian saint but arguably just as popular in Scandinavia than in the parts of Italy that still commemorate her today. In Norway every year, kindergarten children take part in a procession at daybreak (not really so early, about 8:45 am), each child is dressed in a white dress tied up with silver tinsel, and one lucky girl is chosen to wear the crown of candles (usually battery-operated though we did know of one hair-fire). The children walk around, singing the lovely Santa Lucia song and maybe afterwards eat some of the special Lucia biscuits a generous mum might have baked.

It’s a beautiful ritual of light in the midst of darkness and our two daughters just loved it. After moving to Italy I thought it would be nice to keep up the tradition. Which is how this photo came to come about.

This is me and my two Irish-Canadian daughters dressed for a Santa Lucia procession at the local Ikea store outside Florence. This is organised every year by the group of local Swedish mums who on the day, roped me in to also wearing a white dress, placing me at the front of the procession which paraded its way through the store, against the usual shopping flow and shunting the goggle-eyed Italian shoppers (and their camera-phones) into the sides as we passed. It was not an experience I would have pictured 20 years ago, nor do I plan to repeat it. But our girls had a blast and felt themselves back in Norway again, even if this was a Swedish affair – that’s close enough!

Also while living in Norway, I was fortunate to fall in with the Oslo Irish women’s association, a wonderful group of kind souls, some of whom moved to be with their Norwegian sweethearts before I was even born, and others more recent economic migrants like ourselves, all of them with much great advice on surviving in Norway. This group decided to bring back to life – in Oslo – the old Irish tradition of getting the women and other domestics out of the house after the feasts of the season. Known as Little Women’s Christmas, or Nollaig na mBan, it used to be popular in certain parts of Ireland and has been going through a revival recently. It’s a lovely tradition and we did not hesitate to feast it and raise a toast to ourselves every January 6th in the main Irish pub of Oslo. Even at those prices.

Since the summer of 2015, our home is in Italy and just before Christmas, as I was packing all our bags for our trip back home to Dublin I realised I had to organise our brand new, “other” Christmas before we left. Never mind the stocking waiting to be hung up and filled by Santa in Dublin, I also needed to fill another stocking full of sweets and goodies for our girls for the morning of January 6th. We’ll be back in Italy by then (in fact they pleaded that we would be) as that is the feast day of the Befana, the Italian witch who traditionally does the present-giving in many parts of the country.

The Befana is actually a most Italian kind of story – she is a (generally nice) witch or old woman who met the three kings following the star to Bethlehem. As one version of the story goes, when she got word of the big news, she went off to organise a present for the baby Jesus but the kings weren’t going to hang around and they took off. To make up for being left out of the most famous Christmas gift-giving ever, she has been giving presents ever since to children every Epiphany – children living in Italy. Unlike Santa, she expects a glass of wine when she lands on the roof and she might still give a piece of coal to anyone naughty. (After quickly consulting with local friends on how to manage this, I’ve learned that you can buy a plastic piece of coal in the shops for the stocking).

Funnily enough our daughters didn’t mention last Christmas that they planned to celebrate Befana – probably because we had not been here so long and their Italian wasn’t yet good enough to pick up on the comments about it from their friends at school.

This year they seem to have it sussed it out, realising that we are now technically in her catchment area.

As long as Ryanair/Aer Lingus gets us back there in time!

This story was published in the Irish Times in January 2017.

Windows of Wine

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Some people say that of all Italian cities, Florence is the least interesting from the outside. That all its treasures and intrigue are to be found inside – in the churches, museums, libraries and palazzi. Walking around the historic centre it does indeed seem quite grey on the outside, its narrow streets go on for blocks as they wind around walled-in palazzi, villas and convents, offering few of the smaller squares and parks you’d find in Rome. These monumental buildings and walls are broken up by immense gates and forbidding doorways.

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Look a little closer at the elements breaking up the wall space and you will start to see – as I did only this year – a little hole next to some of the doors. It might have a pointed arch, and it might be blocked up or have a little wooden door. It’s a small window, just large enough for someone to pass a bottle of wine through it. Which is actually what these windows were built to do.

Built into the wall to allow the purchase of a glass or bottle of wine, these windows date back to the time of the grand Duchy during the 1500s and were in use mostly until the 1800s. Enterprising Florentine families who had a vineyard in the country and plenty of chianti or vernaccia to spare, would sell it directly from their home to thirsty city-dwellers. There are about 150 of these wine windows around Florence and about 30 more in a few other towns and cities nearby. But otherwise they are not found anywhere else in Italy.

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Customers would bring their empty bottle (often a traditional fiasco), hand over the money and receive a full bottle of quality wine. The wine window would be located close to the cantina (wine cellar) and so the servants could conduct the transaction easily without needing to let anyone into the fortress-home. A document from 1591 lists the price of a full bottle*: 1 lira, 6 denari and 8 soldi (the old Italian shillings and pence system).

Even though some of them are still used today – to hold a plate of doorbells or sometimes still as a window – many locals don’t even know their history. An association to study and try to preserve them, Buchette del Vino, was set up only last year and they are busy working to find and preserve them all. Just before writing this, I found one of the Fiesole ones right at the bottom of our road, having passed it hundreds of times!

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They are usually called buchette del vino – a buca or buco means a hole, and buchetta is a little hole. But this being a city of poets they have some other great names, indicating a very local history: finestrini (little windows), nicchie (niches), porticielli (little gates), tabernacoli (tabernacles) and best of all porte del paradiso (gates of paradise).

One wine window is in the wall of famous gelateria Vivoli, near Santa Croce and it was only discovered after the Florence flood of 1966 when some of the wall stucco was washed away. More on that in this article in the Florentine. And a local secret agent during the War, Rodolfo Siviero – sometimes called the James Bond of the art world – made full use of the partially-hidden wine hole in his river-front home to help save numerous, presumably smaller, works of art. The windows have been rarely depicted in images, but this 1920s painting by Florentine artist Ortone Rosai includes one.

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Ortone Rosai, Giocatori di Topa (1928)

Some windows still have their “original” wooden door or knocker, many are filled in and some are used to nice effect by the ever-enterprising local street artists of Florence. At least I think so:

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The association has a map marking all the wine windows of Florence and area and also some interesting documents, like an amazing photo of a delivery of wine bottles or the 1772 decree by the Grand Duchy to allow the sale of wine in all locations in the city. They can also organise guided tours, something new for your next trip to Florence?

These windows could surely tell a few stories and, more poignantly, they call to mind the setup these days in Naples where doors have holes cut into them to allow for easier exchange of drugs. The same concept: an anonymous, zero-miles transaction, skipping the middle man.

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* Note: Much of the info is taken from the Buchette del Vino website and an article in La Repubblica on 26 November 2016.

Sweet Halloween

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My kids are going out tonight for Halloween in our little Tuscan town. They’re joining some friends from school – and their slightly bewildered Italian parents – for dolcetto o scherzetto. Literally: little treat or little trick. It’s still a novelty in Italy, only coming into practice over the last ten years, and people feel a bit pressured into doing what they consider to be an American celebration that’s oddly similar to Carnevale but really quite foreign.

At this time of year I insist on enlightening those around me, in whatever country we’re living in, that Halloween is really an Irish festival, and a big one at that. Like so many other things, the Americans made it their own and then exported it back to us.

At a basic level I would tell you that in Ireland we (in our romantic childhood memories) would eat special food, play games, dress up and have bonfires. But my memories of it are larger than just what we did and more about how it felt, and that’s what I try to pass on to my own kids.

Trick or treat – it’s an American term, so I always tried to avoid it but it’s catchy and useful for successfully translating into other languages. As kids we would say we were “going around the houses”.

dogI like the idea of my kids declaring “dolcetto or scherzetto” at the neighbours tonight and it conjures images of charming little ghoulies jumping around with their goodie bags and spiky sticks. The houses and shops of Italian towns are noticeably empty of flashing pumpkins and witch window stickers so it is just a fun, relaxed event for kids. In Norway it is also still an imported novelty, and quite low-key, but Norwegian kids are mad keen on sweets/candy so it’s very popular. There the kids say “Knask eller Knep” (munchies or trick) – a slightly harsher and, I think, more scary-sounding phrase.

This is our second Halloween here in Italy and we’ve helped our kids enjoy it by working together on their own costumes and finding other local kids going out in a group to knock on doors for an hour or two, coming home with weekends worth of sweets. Parents have been asked to alert the neighbours in advance, to ensure no doors are slammed in faces – or, magari, that some kids might actually do a trick on them. norskWe were lucky while living in Oslo that a wonderful group of Irish mammies organised an Irish-style Halloween party every year, which gave the local half-Irish kids some frame of reference for an ancient part of our heritage.

It was a big deal that in Ireland we had Halloween and in Britain they didn’t. They had a weird (and spookily anti-Catholic) celebration of Guy Fawkes night, a week later. On our island, the kids would spend weeks setting up bonfires in each area, and people would sneak fireworks over the border from Northern Ireland (which had its own share of bonfires back then) – they were illegal in the Republic, rightly so as the hospital emergency rooms ended up busy anyway.

Halloween for me was the feeling of something being in the air, spooky and magical. My mum would prepare a special dinner including colcannon (buttery mashed potato and kale) and for dessert there’d be barmbrack, a fruit cake only eaten at Halloween and hidden inside would be a ring – won annually by my sister. Other things might be hidden inside, though not quite to the level of Mrs Doyle’s baked-in-sweater in that Father Ted episode.

The friends would come over, mixed ages and siblings all together, and we’d dress up – the girls inevtiably making more of an effort than the boys, who would have have picked up a mask down at the corner shop. One year I felt it sufficient to just pile 7 different hats on my head, just to give my mum a break from putting a costume together.

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Leaving the warm house you’d head out together into the dark streets, a sense of being together in a group, all of us dressed up strangely to scare away any spirits that are out and about. I took it seriously, perhaps because I was usually the youngest. It was always dark, often cold and you would see candles (no sign of any pumpkins back then) in some windows and know that the bigger kids were setting up a bonfire down the road, which you may or may not be allowed to go watch this year. Knocking on doors, we’d yell “d’ye have anything for the Halloween party?” and each of us would have to explain your costume – who you were meant to be, or how you made it. Some of the older residents would actually bother to ask you to sing or recite your party piece. If they approved, they’d pop a handful of monkey nuts or hazelnuts, apples, some coins and maybe some sweets into your bag. There would be tricks played on mean neighbours, eggs or worse through the letterbox and a lot of disappearing bell-ringing.

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After you had gone around enough houses and avoided the competing groups on the streets, you’d come back to the appointed house and have “the party”. You emptied out the bags of goodies and fight over sharing the sweets and getting rid of the nuts – usually to a patient parent. The apples and coins would be tossed into a bucket of water for a game of grabbing them with your teeth and almost drowning. There might be a donkey to pin, apples on a string or other once-a-year games. Many homes would hear stories told – of the devil, the púca or the banshee – but fortunately for me (always terrified of ghost stories) this did not go on in our house.

The darkness outside seemed to grow longer, the inside of the house glowing with sweet treats and fun. And security. You were home now, the door was closed to the rest of the night and to the spirits to do whatever they had to do – next day you could wake up and know that it was all done with for this year, the strange carnival happening while you were asleep, safe in your bed.  The next morning would invariably be bright and crispy. The saints were now in charge.

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In the Swing of Things

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My seven year old is sitting in the dentist’s chair. As dentists go, he’s young and charming, and he has nice ankles – he wears runners with no socks. We communicate in Italian about the child and her teeth. I understand most of what he says, but in a situation like this I find there will be a word or terms that I don’t know. I realize that, once again, I had forgotten to spend 5 minutes before leaving the house to check the dictionary for some other words that might come up, maybe molar or orthodontic surgery.

Living daily life in another language means you’re confronted all the time with new situations, new unknowns. Whether it’s going to a judo class or the climbing park, the pharmacy or the post office, there will be a word or a term that will throw you and you’ll be asking: “I need to get the what before tomorrow?” Or “there’s something wrong with the what in my engine?” (This does of course also happen to Italians especially where paperwork is involved: they don’t necessarily find it any easier to get simple tasks completed).

So when I can I try to prepare by checking some words, anticipating difficult discussions.  It took me a few confused yoga lessons before I remembered to look up the Italian words for hips, shoulder blades and twist gently but our teacher’s soothing voice made any position sound great – just try saying la posizione della montagna and you’ll feel yourself calming down.

Before arriving at the dentist my daughter and I talked about what we needed to show him. He was to check all her teeth, one loose tooth and another loose tooth that’s not supposed to be loose. I’m prepared with a few key words: denti da latte (milk teeth) and the evocative denti del giudizio (wisdom teeth). But “loose tooth” – maybe I should have checked that in the dictionary.

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This is from our amazing Quebec-made visual dictionary 

So there she is in the chair and I tell the dentist – she has a tooth that is …. aah … moving. “Ah”, he says, “it’s still growing?” “No, no, it’s moving … like this.” And the impatient child pipes up from the chair – sta dondolando! It’s swinging, or in this case, it’s wobbling! Wow, there she goes. My daughter has started translating for me. Of course she would know how to say it, it was probably one of the first things she’d hear from fellow 6-year-olds in the school yard. It’s a bit strange I haven’t heard it before, but I’m probably multi-tasking more on a daily basis. There’s my excuse.

Living daily life in Italian means you get to use fantastic words and expressions every day. The rolling r’s and the double zz’s, it actually feels good to speak it and being here as an older adult I appreciate it even more.

Un dente dondolando – a swinging tooth. Isn’t that wonderful? The word for me conjures a picture of a swaying ski lift hoisting fur-booted skiers up into the Dolomites. Or a cute toddler asked to be pushed on the swing – la dondola. A quick Google search manages to bring up the image of Michael Jackson dangling his child over the balcony (if you remember back that far).

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From the book we’re reading at bedtime – Heidi Heckelbeck Is Ready to Dance!

Dondolando – Swinging, swaying, dangling, wobbling, rocking, balancing. That’s indeed what we’ve been doing on a daily basis here, making it up as we go along, all of us balancing between friends and family and familiarities in our homes, old and new.

But now, a year in – and with routines in places, circles of friends and acquaintances set up, local knowledge and our own spaces carved out in this place inhabited by many others over many centuries – we’re mostly gotten into the swing of it ourselves.

Of mice and murder

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The mice of Fiesole have a plan.

MONDAY

I’ve been waiting three days for the local hardware shop to open. Three days since we came home from holiday and discovered our house had been done over by a gang of mice (definitely a gang). So as the bell tower in the piazza rings out four times, I’m here waiting with one other customer for the door to open. I want to buy mousetraps*.

Along comes the owner – I don’t know her name yet but she’s the young, busy, bustling, bespectacled type that makes you feel at ease and she has a Florentine accent you could spread butter with. We bustle in after in.

I love this shop, in fact I love all Italian hardware shops. It’s covered from floor to ceiling with stuff, and all of it is useful. There are wonderful things in plain sight which you didn’t know you needed, and others you desperately need and only she can find for you (and at a good price). In fact the shop is called a Utilità (meaning Usefulness, well in this case just Utility) which is one of the several cool names for a hardware shop, another being the even more lovely word, Mesticheria.

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In this, or any, Italian hardware shop, you can step in and embrace the visual jumble, browse the mugs and tablecloths, mango slicers and egg timers, Beatles mugs and non-stick pans, fresh-cut keys and shoe polish. Or you can just enjoy asking for something specific and watching the owner – who grew up in this family business – disappear into the back, under the counter, or up a ladder to where you thought only the wicker baskets were hanging.

As it turns out, many people come in just for a chat, it being right on the main street – the narrow part where the German camper vans have to squeeze through with confusion.

“Oh, that’s a real stink of someone’s bad cooking oil!” she says as she gets herself behind the counter. “Is it from the Indian restaurant across the road?” I ask. “Oh no, they use the right oils, there are always lovely smells coming out of there.”

Foolishly, I let the other waiting woman go first, she is of course a local and I become frustrated when I can’t completely follow the train of their conversation. My Italian isn’t always so awake after lunch. She passes over some cash and it disappears into an envelope, something is scribbled on a piece of paper: it must be to do with the town dinner in the piazza on Friday night.

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Not quite the Fiesole shop, but they all look like this

The shop door has been left open to let in air (and pungent oil smells). In the doorway a man has partly lodged himself, craning backwards to talk to someone further down the street or, judging by the volume, across the road. Maybe even the Indian restaurant owner. Living here in this country of talkers, I try my best to start up similar types of chats with the shopkeepers I meet everyday – about the earthquake all the way down there in southern Tuscany, the school schedule, their elderly father, or mine. The doorway man disappears after a few minutes without having come in for his full chat or his packet of nails.

I can tell right away I’m not the first person to come in looking for help with mice murder. The hardware lady’s tired expression gives her the appearance of a local miracle-worker – why do they all think I can sort out their household problems for them, why can’t they just get their houses in order? – and sure enough she tells me she’s all out of traps, the old-fashioned kind, the gluey ones and the little tent ones. In fact, she tells me – “Fiesole is full of mice”.

But she won’t have any more traps in till the end of next week. “Oh Dio!” I say, and mention that I’ll be in Florence tomorrow and may have to take my custom there; she surely understands the urgency. She digs around and shows me all she has left – a packet of terrifying poison tablets – but she isn’t really suggesting I buy them. “It’s much better you buy a trap that ensures you can see the dead mouse, not just guess that it went off and died its (horrible) death somewhere else.” I nod my head. Certo.

She keeps talking before I have the chance to tell her that we have, sort of, a cat on the case. We have in fact started brazenly inviting the neighbour’s cat in for a few ganders around the house and it’s becoming quite fond of one particular floormat and some of the Lego. But she’s already noting in her order book which traps she needs to get in and she tells me I should really get the tented one – “put them in this location at this time of day, make sure you touch them with gloves or your smell will put them off.“ Will the mice guess from my smell that I’m not Italian? I wonder to myself.

“Why do you think there are so many mice around these days?” I ask her. “It’s not really turning cold yet.”

“I don’t really know”, she answers. Then she fixes her eyes on me and states, “Si stanno organizzando”. I take this to mean they’re getting themselves organized, plotting something. She says this with seriousness. And of course she must be right.

As I run back to the car empty-handed, I look around me, imagining the mice mini-gangs of Fiesole and its neighbouring hamlets who are busy setting up a network underneath these streets, the ancient groves and crumbling walls, and the decaying old basements and ill-fitted kitchens, plotting a way to finally take over the three hills of Fiesole.

They’re organizing!

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Wood vs Metal

WEDNESDAY

I go to another hardware shop down at the bottom of the hill, in the Cure area of Florence. It’s a bigger shop and there are several people milling around the counter but I’m beckoned forward, the husband of the couple will help me. I tell him I need some mouse traps.

“Fine. Do you want them alive or dead?”

“Um, dead.” (Should I want them alive?)

“And are they small or big? Small like this?” – his hands relatively close together. “Or big, like this? Like a cat?” Oh no, I react, they’re not quite so big. “Right, those are the mice you get from the river.” I assure him we live right at the top of the hill, relieved that we decided against living down here.

He disappears into the back of the back, even though the front of the shop looks like it would have everything. He comes back a minute later with some fancy-looking metal traps, with little teeth on the edges. They’re made in Germany. Of course they are. He tells me the wooden ones are no good. I know that already.

As he rings them up,  the customer beside me who’s buying serious lengths of waterproof fabric takes notice. “How much are those?” she asks. “1 euro 80 each.” “Fine, I’ll take a couple of those too then, thanks.”

FRIDAY

So far I’ve caught one little mouse and I’m learning that different cheeses make no difference, nor does chocolate or honey as recommended by some. It must be all about the placement.

Now I’m off to Florence to the really serious hardware shop down near the market.

And a weekend of murder.

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*Note to readers: I offer no apology for my topocide. Having learned in several previous cities that I cannot live with a mouse in the house, I have found it best to do them off the quickest and surest way there is.

 

 

 

The Real Scoop on Gelato

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A Japanese friend who has lived in Italy for about 15 years remembers the oddest thing she noticed when she first moved here – a man walking down the street eating an ice cream.

When you live here for a while, you develop a different relationship with gelato from that of your tourist days. As a visitor to Italy gelato is a treat to be savoured – only here can you eat the genuine article, like an original cappuccino. But over the long-term eating gelato – especially during the hot months – becomes part of your routine, indeed your daily nourishment. I could almost use the word “diet” as our own family doctor recently “recommended it” my younger daughter’s sore tummy.

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We have a favourite gelateria in Florence, Badiani. We discovered it by chance on our very first August night in the city, staying at a cheap Airbnb flat a few blocks from the stadium. We arrived into this oven on the night of a Fiorentina/AC Milan match and the kids were as perplexed by the noise of helicopters and bright lights as we were by the civilised purple-clad fans chatting and relaxing outside the local wine bars. Good old Google maps pointed us to a gelateria at the other corner of our block and it turned out to be not only our favourite place since then but one of the best, and least- touristy, in the city.

I am not really a big ice-cream person, perhaps due to eating too much of it during the (J1) summer I spent serving ice-cream in Boston, at the well-known local spot Emack and Bolio’s: my one claim to fame was that I served Mark Wahlberg (then known as Marky Mark).

But living here now, especially with children, I enjoy the taste and flavours of gelato in a way I never did before, with so much more satisfaction. Living here as a (clueless) student I went to the same few places over and over and had no sense of good taste – though to be fair, one of them was Vivoli, still wowing customers today. But I think the scene has improved hugely during those 20 years and gelato eaters have become more demanding.

When you get to a point in the day where you’re hot or tired or in need of a pick-me-up, the smallest sized cone will be enough to completely refresh you, as well as your palate. Eating more than 3 scoops on a large cone – that’s starting to overdo it a bit. And not what the locals would always do.

So here are some tips from me on how to eat gelato like a local.

Gelato versus Ice cream
The main difference is that American-style ice cream uses more eggs and cream and is heavier. Italian gelato – which means frozen, so it can actually refer to all types of sweet cold stuff – uses more milk than cream, contains fewer preservatives (if any) so it was probably made very recently, might have a lighter colour and it has fewer and fresher ingredients. It could still have a lot of sugar, depending on the place, but as long as you know … that’s up to you.

You’ll notice the gelato is not always scooped up into a ball and it’s not hard and icy but soft and nearly melted. The best servers will churn it gently with an oblong metal spoon before being gently piling it into your cup or cone.

Scoop

Choose your gelateria
A shop devoted to selling gelato is called a gelateria (plural = gelaterie) but a cafe or bar might advertise themselves as such too, and they may serve high-quality gelato.

Look for a sign declaring Produzione Propria – which basically means “we make it ourselves”. (In some cases that might mean they made it from a packet, but you’ll learn to spot the difference.)

Avoid the gelaterie that displays their gelato piled up really high, and with bright colours – especially noticeable for pistachio and banana. If it’s from a pre-made gelato mix you might see a little sign displaying the logo of the dairy company alongside the flavours. But some days you’re desperate and you can’t really go too far wrong!

The best gelaterie keep their gelato in steel containers, even sometimes hidden away so you have to choose from the list of flavours on the board and you can always ask to taste them. Quantity of flavours is not always a marker of quality – some of the best and most local places offer just a few flavours. And that usually suits the local clientele just fine.

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Choose your price and pay
First choose what size and price you want, pay for it at the cash desk and take the receipt (lo scontrino) to the counter and start choosing from the wonderful array. So if you want a €2 cone or cup you would ask for un cono/una coppetta da due euro.

In some places it’s okay to choose your gelato first and pay after, but this system is helpful as you don’t have to worry about paying extra to sit down, if there are seats, and you don’t have to dig around for change while holding a melting ice-cream.

Cup (una coppetta) or Cone (un cono)?
Eating from a cone is a more sensory experience and can make it last longer. Good, say, if you’re really hungry or driving a car! As for a cup, you could quibble about the wastefulness of the plastic spoon and paper cup, with no obvious method of recycling nearby. But Italians seem to go for either, depending on their mood.

The smallest size (about €2 or less) will usually be enough for you and in most gelaterie you can fit two flavours (gusti) for that. You tend to order by size and then work out with the server how many flavours you want. It’s not so much about the scoops and size, it’s actually more about the marrying of the right flavours.

If they haven’t given you a little spoon (un cucchiaino) it’s polite to ask for one unless you (or your child) can easily access the dispenser.

Taste it first
It’s fine to ask for a taste while you decide, though asking for 4 or 5 might be pushing it. You can say posso assaggiare? (can I try?) or posso gustare? (can I taste?). 

Choose your flavours carefully
Flavours that go well together are usually grouped together, in Italian they’d say they marry well (questi gusti si sposono bene).

So for example you shouldn’t really mix cream-based and fruit-based. Why? Because the textures are different; the flavours might clash; one of them is more melted than the other; or just because the server says you shouldn’t really have the mango and coffee together. Indeed I was once refused my chosen combination at our favourite place – I had to bow to their sense of propriety, though they could have been a little less stern about it!

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KEY FLAVOURS
Remember, try to combine flavours that sit close together in the cabinet.

The Chocolates
It can be very dark (fondente) or more milky (cioccolato al latte or just cioccolato) or you might find it mixed with orange (arancia) or something spicy (messicano, con chilli etc).

Vanilla
I grew up with vanilla being the standard neutral ice cream you get (if you haven’t really deserved something fancier after that day’s dinner) but in Italy it’s not always on the menu. When you do find it – it’s called vaniglia – in a good gelateria, it will really taste of vanilla.

The Creams
These are the plainer, more neutral flavours, to complement a stronger chocolate or nut. But they can be magnificent in their simplicity. You have crema (often like a bakery cream), panna (more like whipping cream) and the simple Fior di latte (milk). This last is worth ordering just to be able to enunciate such a beautiful name.

A Florentine speciality is Buontalenti, named after the local lad (well, actually an architect to Grand Duke Cosimo) who, many claim, brought gelato into the modern world around 1600. It’s a lovely creamy, milky flavour and a delicious secondary choice.

Straciatella
A simple choice, this is a creamy gelato with chocolate chips. Almost as refreshing as my own favourite, menta (mint usually with chocolate chips).

Pistacchio
Be prepared for a new taste sensation. Pistacchio nuts are the pride of Sicily and they make wonderfully smooth gelato with varying degrees of nuttiness. A good gelateria will offer several styles of pistacchio and my favourite is (of course) Pistacchio da Bronte – named after the small Sicilian town, which eventually became a variant, through the father of those Yorkshire writers, of my own surname, Prunty.

Note that in Italy it’s pronounced the other way, with a hard “c” – Pistakkio.

Other Nuts
I’m not a nut person but my kids assure me you can’t go too wrong with nutty flavours as a primary or counterpoint to chocolate. Hazelnut (nocciola) is common though as it’s an expensive ingredient it’s worth looking for a good-quality and pure version. For a more chocolate-based flavour you’ll find nutella is a common ingredient, as well as Bacio – from the (acquired) taste of the Italian chocolate brand.

Flavours

The Fruits
A good gelateria follows seasonal pattern of fruits. Some wonderful words to learn here: fragola (strawberry), melone (melon), lampone (raspberry), frutti di bosco (mixed berries), anguria or cocomero (watermelon), arancia (orange), pesca (peach), ciliegia (cherry), fico (fig).

Limone (lemon) is usually year-round and almost a category on its own, with an amazing ability to bring down your temperature and a good measure of the quality of the gelateria.

Semi-freddo and others
This is your section with flavours like Tiramisu or Zuppa Inglese (trifle) which are more like semi-frozen puddingy desserts, not quite ice-cream. Nice if you’re hungry as well as hot.

Some interesting colours are produced from sesame (sesame side gelato, which is gray/purple and considered healthy), liquirizia (licorice, green/brown, let me know if you try it), and a friend swears he once had tabacco (tobacco).

You can also find flavours like riso (rice) and cheese-flavoured gelato like mascarpone, or my current favourite which is ricotta e fichi (ricotta and fig).

Gluten

Gluten-free and Vegan
Many fruit flavours actually have dairy in them (you can tell by how much the colours of each fruit seem more fruity or more creamy). But more and more gelaterie offer gluten-free or vegan flavours and will usually advertise them. Or you can just ask.

And the best gelato in Florence?
Gelato is good all over Italy though Florence (luckily for us) is considered one of the top spots.

This wasn’t meant to be a guide, but how can I not make a few suggestions?

Downtown the perennial favourites which you’ll find in many guides are Vivoli, Carabè, Perche Nò and La Carraia. I quite like the big multinationals Grom and Venchi, though I prefer the former as they’re all about freshness and have a great location beside the Duomo. Near San Marco there’s the nice Sicilian place Arà è Sicilia that does amazing granitas and on the other side of town at the bottom gate of the Boboli Gardens, at Porta Romana, there’s the friendly and health-conscious Gelateria Yoguteria Porta Romana. But in our house, the favourite by far, even if I find them a little snooty, is Badiani – close to the football stadium and well-off the tourist track but buzzing with well-heeled locals and flat-footed football fans long into the evening. My preferred option for friendliness is further back along the road to the centre, Cavini’s – cheap and fresh and friendly. (In Fiesole I previously recommended Ferro Battuto but as of June 2017 it has not reopened. Best to stick with Le Cure for a gelato nearby.)

Vivoli

How to order like a local
Similar to the art of ordering at a busy cafe, it’s an education to observe how the regulars procure their scoop of the day. Here’s how:

After greeting a few people in the door you drop your coins of exact change in the cashier’s bowl and wander over to the display. You probably already want the same thing you’ve had the last couple of weeks – and many people go for just one flavour in their cup – but maybe you go for something new. You catch the eye of the next server who scoops up your choice in 10 seconds, you’re out the door, hovering to eat it while you chat to another regular. And you’re gone, back to work or your shopping errands or your car, in less than 4 minutes. Or if this is evening-passeggiata time you might linger to chat for another hour. Just play it by ear.

Some other links:

More on gelato in Florence from Emiko Davies
A little history
More on flavours

Happy scooping!

Wash your Language is a blog about real life and language, by an Irish-Canadian exploring the change in pace in Italy after years in Norway. I offer web copyediting and proofreading as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

The Midsummer Saint

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Saint John the Baptist – what a great saint he was! Source of wonderful stories of strength and piety, meeting a dramatic ending that has fuelled many gory images and theatrical overkill for years. His feast day is June 24, tonight is the Eve and an excuse for celebrations in many countries over many centuries. It’s handy that his feast day also happens to be midsummer – the middle of the year and a marking point for many. I think of it as a magical time.

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Caravaggio – Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, NGL (Web Gallery of Art/Wikipedia)

St John – Saint Jean Baptiste – Sant Hans – San Giovanni.

These are the names that have marked each midsummer through my life, and from the earliest years they have made me feel more and more at a remove from the place I still often call home – Dublin.

Our family holidays were spent in Connemara, in the deep west of Ireland, at the unoccupied house of my aunt and uncle – a bungalow perched on a small empty lake with shelves of books, card games to play, four bedrooms to be fought over, turf for the fire (yes, in summer) and no access to drinking water anywhere west of Salthill on the edge of Galway city. As the (clueless) youngest I found myself tagging along with whatever was happening and I have memories, foggy but still there, of being at the house for at least one “St John’s” and joining the local teenagers who were going strangely crazy around a messy bonfire. They were kind to let us Dublin intruders (jackeens) enjoy the moment with them, well they seemed to through their chatting to each other in an Irish I never learned to understand. They had clearly been building up the bonfire for days in a patch well-hidden away from the road, one field through the maze of stone-walled partitioned fields we spent hours navigating in the least rainy of daytimes. Those were my first moments of seeing a parallel life to my own, a glimpse into what it could be like to grow up, to live somewhere other than my world in suburban Dublin.

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My husband is from the western folds of Canada but he’s always been a Francophone and held a candle for the romance held for Jean Baptiste in France and Quebec. Always the political type, he travelled with college friends to Quebec in 1995 to persuade the locals to vote “Non!” in the referendum about leaving Canada – over 20 years before today’s vote today in the UK. The result was very tight, and the union held. (There continues to be a sense of two solitudes in Canada, though our man Trudeau junior is doing his darndest.) The main Quebec holiday is actually on June 24 – La Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, or just La Saint-Jean. This always seemed a much more festive day in Canada, those French Canadians knowing much better how to have fun than the rest of the country on the other official holiday of July 1st – Canada Day. Indeed many Quebecois would choose that day to make their annual move from one rental apartment to another – sorry, we’re busy. During our time living together in Canada we lived in several diverse places, but never managed to set up home in Quebec (or have to deal with its separate immigration process) – so for us it keeps its mystique. Another “other” place.

Quebec

Living in Norway for seven years, we were bitten by the bug of the Scandinavian Midsummer. In different parts of the country Norwegians have their own traditions but when celebrating in Oslo we were often reminded that “it’s really a Swedish holiday” – that’s where you really want to go for the hard-core celebrations, dancing around poles, fancy costumes and all. In either country it is of course a fantastic opportunity to celebrate – the longest days of the year, a reason to stay up late, be outside, breathe the air and celebrate life. When the kids were very small, we joined a Swedish-style celebration at Oslo’s outdoor folk museum and I was amazed to find myself letting them splash around in a pond with other kids well past 11pm – this was some serious hair-letting-down going on around us. Bonfires were to be found, parties were held late into the night and there was always a sense of holiday about it. Midsummer has such a resonance there, it’s in people’s blood. But it wasn’t in mine and it felt like someone else’s celebration. It wasn’t part of my upbringing, except for those hazy memories of the stone fields in the dark.

Nikolai Astrup - Midsummer Eve Bonfire (Bergen Art Museum)
Nikolai Astrup – Midsummer Eve Bonfire (Bergen Art Museum)

So here we are in Florence – where the patron saint is none other than St John. San Giovanni. And they’ve been celebrating him since medieval times, none better to do so. In Roman times, Florence’s patron was the god Mars and early Christians figured that St John was a good enough match for him, so he became the patron saint. The wonderful Baptistry in front of the Duomo is of course named for him. But what does it means for us newcomers – we have a public holiday tomorrow, we can watch a costumed parade with church celebration which includes the showing of whatever relics Florence got of St John himself, enjoy tomorrow night’s big fireworks show and – if we had the stomach for it –  watch some of the calcio storico match/fight going on outside Santa Croce. This is Florence’s less savoury equivalent to the genteel palios of Siena and other cities, a rough, no-holds-barred form of combat where four teams representing the quarters of the city fight over a ball. Maybe we can watch some online afterwards (after enjoying further reruns of the amazing goal from last night’s Ireland-Italy victory!)

Calcio
Photo from VisitFlorence.com

June 24, our first midsummer in this place, still at a remove from all the places we have lived and loved, but full of opportunity to learn more, see and taste more.

Wash your Language is a blog about real life and language, by an Irish-Canadian exploring the change in pace in Italy after years in Norway. I offer web copyediting and proofreading as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

The Life Domestic

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There’s a sign tacked on the wall outside our local pizzeria.

“Found. Gray (domestic) rabbit. Call this number”

IMG_6095And added underneath by someone: Already eaten!

Here in Tuscany rabbits are indeed a regular, and tasty, part of the menu. But the writer of this notice knows that a pet is a pet – hence the care given to mention that the bunny hopping around his house is “domestic”.

In Italian the word for “pet” is “un animale domestico” (a domestic animal) or “un animale di compagnia” (companion animal), this latter sounding only slightly less technical, giving some indication of the emotional value and importance of this human-animal bond.

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Italy is a very public society and as no pet is a better companion than a dog, you see dogs everywhere here. They accompany their owners into shops, cafes, church services, on the bus and in the laps of car drivers.

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These dogs were left to wait outside the famous butcher’s Falorni in Greve in Chianti – maybe their cones were a foil against the amazing smells during the 15 minutes their (German) owners were inside.

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Eating out for lunch or dinner there’s often a dog – of any size – under a table or yapping close by.

And one local gelateria even offers ice cream for dogs.

Ice cream? I'd love some too!
“Ice cream? I’d love some too!”

I was at a children’s sports competition recently and along with half the parents of Florence I was crammed into the stands, indeed sitting on the concrete steps of what was probably the emergency exit. One woman left just after her daughter’s performance – she inched along the row, mobile in one manicured hand, the other holding the leash of her dog, the little yapper left to navigate his own way through the pedicured feet around him.

I can’t say much about the place of cats (or rabbits) in the family home, having come across few. A notable exception was seeing one in the supermarket once, a big furry gray thing ensconsed in the arms of its owner as he moved along the aisles.

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Beware of the cat (a sign on our road)

Dogs are treated much the way children are – you don’t see them cuddled and spoiled all the time, they’re just along for the ride, even if that includes having their photo taken against the Ponte Vecchio. I haven’t done a spot check of how many Italian dogs have social media accounts (see #puppiesofinstagram) but I suspect overall it would be odder here than in other countries – many of these animals are still more for domestic purpose than simply objects of affection.

There are lots of ideas out there about how different languages interpret the bark of a dog. Scientists believe dogs can understand each other but people have different ways of hearing their bark: but what they seem to have in common is that they speak twice – such as “hav-hav” (Hebrew) or “wan-wan” (Japanese).

My husband and I have been living too peripatetic a life over the last 20 years to justify having a pet of any kind (apparently), but my 10-year-old and I are shameless dog people and share the habit of commenting on every dog we see on the street (or restaurant), especially older dogs who we’d love to adopt. At a recent lunch with friends in the country, my ears perked up when their neighbour mentioned her dog had just had 15 pups. Marking my interest she tried to convince me it would be a good idea to take one home – “well yes”, I told her, “I do have the time to walk it every day, yes we have a garden, yes half the family would love one, but it’s a really nice rented apartment… we couldn’t possibly”. “Oh! but it’s a dog”, she cried. “This is Italy, dogs stay outside!”

And indeed they usually do, at least in the countryside. Over the last couple of decades dogs have started to live more indoors, especially as city apartment-dwellers increasingly like to keep lap dogs like pugs and poodles. But many dogs around our small Tuscan town, are clearly less considered as pets than for traditional jobs like guarding, or weekend-hunting. And they stay outdoors – making sure they let us know they’re there, with a good old barking fit at 4am or 4pm. The ever spot-on Italy observer Tim Parks thinks this Italian need to keep the dog outside might be a hangover from people’s lingering collective memories of living under the same roof as cows and chickens.

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The word “domestic” comes from the Latin word “domus” which means house, specifically the house of an upper-class Roman. It entered English as “dome”, or stately building. To me it feels like a formal word, indeed often with negative connotations. It can be associated with the mundane (domestic affairs), with servitude (domestics) and even with aggression and violence (domestic violence or abuse). This last is in fact an ongoing issue in Italy where societal norms deal badly with issues of partner violence, underreporting of abuse is low, and after some horrific high profile murders the media is currently talking of a nationwide emergency of “femicide”.

Un animale domestico – that’s how you say it in many languages. In English the term domestic animal is seen as a more technical term, referring to an animal that is not wild, but serves people and is dependant upon them. It’s even a legal term, have a look at this legal case I found about whether a camel should be considered wild or domestic.

But domestic animal just doesn’t sound as cosy as what we say in English – pet. What a lovely word that is! Just saying it makes you think of an animal that is not only domesticated but truly an emotional companion, for walks in the rain, sitting in the windowsill (tugging at the lace curtain), or just for being there to stroke/pet while you sit together (and watch the cricket on the telly).

The word pet actually came from the Scots Gaelic peata, tame animal, and its softness lends it associations of affection and caring. In Ireland, where it also came straight from the Gaelic, it’s used everyday as a charming appellation for children and friends (“ah sure listen pet, she was just chancing her arm”).

Down the road from our house is a farmhouse down off the road. We can look down over the high garden wall and say an encouraging hello to the unfortunate mutt that lives there. He’s left to himself all day long with a small scrap of garden between the wall and his owner’s house, his dirty mess left all over the ground and with little company. He can’t stop his tail from wagging sadly even as he keeps up the pretence of barking ferociously at you. A weary, empty bark.

In December we visited the cathedral of Lucca and I was taken by how many people were drawn to, (and drawing), this sculpture – the very beautiful funerary monument to the young Ilaria Caretto, carved by Jacopo della Quercia in the stunningly early date of 1406. At her feet sits a dog, not unlike a pug you’d find today in a flat in Kensington or Madrid. It may or may not be her dog, but it’s certainly intended by the artist to represent fidelity and undying love.

What more could you ask for in a pet?

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The Need to Greet

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Every country has its own culture of social politeness, often a complex system that goes beyond acknowledging another person’s presence to placing people according to their allotment on the social scale – an older teacher, a priest, the white-haired guy who gives out the parking tickets in your small Tuscan town. I’ve been very struck in Italy by how important greetings are, especially seen through the eyes of my children.

We moved here 8 months ago with our Norwegian-reared children. In Norway, one doesn’t always greet  an acquaintance when walking past and saying hello and goodbye can be brief exchanges anyway: you can get away with saying hei for either one. Or with just a nod of the head, smiling not essential. (There are also “good morning”s etc and I associate the lovely God Dag (Good day) only with our dear English friend David who, as an actor, could get away with such an extravagant term.)

In Italy, we have found ourselves at the other end of the politeness spectrum. As parents we’ve had to revert to our longer-held education in acknowledgment and greeting. And to try and gently, but firmly, encourage our children to go a bit crazier in the hellos and goodbyes department.

So here’s a little primer on Italy.

Everyone knows Ciao. It’s one word that can mean both hello and goodbye. Very handy, and cute.

However … you won’t get far by saying only that when you greet people, especially if you plan to spend more than a few days in an Italian environement. Ciao is considered casual and it’s generally fine for children to use when addressing the butcher or that white-haired parking guy. But it’s not really appropriate for many daily salutations – and this is a country that takes salutation very seriously.

Stibbert1
Photo taken at the Stibbert Museum. That’s quite the expectant look.

Salutare of course means “to greet”, both arriving and leaving. Echoing the Salute that Italians say when they give a toast, it nicely encapsulates a sense of health and of respecting the other person.

There are many ways to say hello and goodbye, most of them with the pleasurable sensation of a well-enunciated Italian word. You should try them all out, ideally after you’ve quickly ascertained what your relationship might be to the person: buongiorno (formal, universal) and its variations buonasera, buona mattina, buondì. Salve is a useful in-between for addressing the neighbour-you-haven’t-quite-met. Then there are the goodbyes (which can be long) – arriverderci, arriverderla – and the promises to see each other other again –  ci vediamo, a dopo, saluti.

To acknowledge someone’s presence and, conversely, to announce your arrival is very important here. This is a place where human contact is part of everything, and most everything is public.

This need to be acknowledged and always say hello is something I’m still getting used to. In the changing room at the doctor’s office or even the swimming pool, each person entering says Buongiorno, and Arrivederci when leaving. They’re saying it to the room in general, even if it’s full of half-naked strangers who answer dutifully back to the air. (One reason I’m slow to pick up on this habit, apart from the obvious, is that my Italian Rs are still a bit rusty to make my Buongiorno sound properly Italian).

It is impolite to not return someone’s “Buongiorno” or “Arrivederci”, especially for a child. This has been a challenge for our (as previously mentioned) Norwegian children. An entire group of people in the room might stand by the front door, expecting the appropriate response from an adult. Indeed it’s as if everyone is taking on the common cause of guiding this child on the right path to full politeness. Eyes will roll and voices might be raised – “get over there and give that strange man with the bag of sweets a hug (un abbraccio) now!“

Italian culture is renowned for its many subtle complexities of placing people on relevant levels of authority, according to profession, gender, even attitude. In his book, The Italians, John Hooper memorably describes the local barman sizing him up each day depending on his dress and demeanour, addressing him variously as dottore, professore and even capitano. And there is ongoing debate about a woman’s choice to be called a professore and not professoressa, or an avocatessa (lawyer) and not an avvocato.

The two versions of “you” are still very much in use, unlike in English where it went more democratic many years ago. One uses a different form of “you” depending on how well you know the person – lei (formal) and tu (casual) – and people will ask you ci diamo del tu? which means, “are we familiar enough at this stage to stop saying Lei?” Another potential headache, but with a smile we non-native speakers can usually get away with any mistakes.

With such an open culture of greeting amongst strangers, a greeting can quickly turn into a conversation  – to me a similar rhythm to the Irish style of chat, but with a more positive and lively feel to it. I regularly find myself in random conversations, nodding enthusiastically to the details of my locker-mate’s tango class or the fellow shopper in the pharmacy, even if I don’t really know what they’re talking about.

And it doesn’t always matter, we’re engaged in human interaction, talking about the joys of life – and in a very simple way, making each other feel more like liked, just through that moment of contact.

 

Irish – where it all began

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I’ve lived more of my life away from Ireland than in it, but of course I always think of it as home and part of my children’s identity too. Language is key to that. At school I learned Irish for many year starting at the age of 4, and it’s not an easy language to learn. But I really believe that early start got me to where I am today.

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I was lucky to go to a primary school that had a positive attitude to the language, and in later years I was one of those kids who didn’t really mind wading through the 18th century epic poems, mad grammar and spelling, and the much-maligned kitchen sink drama of Dingle housewife Peig (a book known to be ritually destroyed after completing the exam). What made it tough for people was that it was mandatory: you had to pass it to enter university and get a civil service job. But it’s a wonderful language to hear and speak and has a deep, rich heritage, very close to the traditional music that I play and love.

My parents weren’t able to help much with my Irish homework – it was not taught well in the 1940s. But my siblings and I benefitted from the first great strides made during the 1970s to standardise the teaching of the language. An early advantage I discovered when moving away from home was how useful a secret language it could be — though you might get in trouble commenting about others on the London tube.

Irish – also called Gaelic, but that’s more for foreigners – is actually the official language so the country is technically bilingual. This means that street signs and paperwork are in two languages and as an EU minority language, taxpayers’ money pays for interpreters sitting in the European Parliament. Many people still think of it as a dying language, that too much is invested in it. A begrudger might indeed think I’ve lived away for too long and am too romantic about it. In reality only about 80,000 people speak Irish  on a daily basis although this number has been growing and the many second-generation Polish and Nigerian children often famously learn it better than their peers.

Moving away from Dublin in 1995 I could not have imagined the blossoming of the language seen in the last 10 years, becoming cool enough that you’ll hear teenagers speaking it on the bus in Dublin (well, certain parts of the city). The Irish language TV station TG4 is an innovative broadcaster, full of lovely young faces, and if we were living in Ireland we might well have our children at the local gaelscoil (Irish school) to ensure they’re learning better than I ever did. You can actually study the language in most countries in the world.

I’m a strong believer that the learning of Irish from an early age – a language so structurally different to English – leads to a population naturally able to take on more languages (and indeed carry a tune). Many a smart politician during the Celtic Tiger was delighted to welcome the Dells, Googles and Facebooks who wanted to build their European headquarters in Ireland, encouraging them to take advantage of one of Europe’s most multi-lingual (and youngest) countries. And they’re still there, though the graduates have been leaving in droves since the recession – a story for another day.

After learning Irish from the age of 4, I started on school French at 10, then German for a few years and by the time I got to university (having survived all those exams about the modh coinniollach) I was all set to take on Italian or Russian. Italian won out and here I am, many years later, working on i pronomi possessivi with my 6 year old who can roll her Rs much better than I ever will.

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gaeltee.com

When my daughters were small, I would use some Irish phrases in everyday chat – Tabhair dom do lámh (give me your hand), Oíche mhaith (good night) or Tóg go bog é (calm down). I would have used more except we were living in Norway and needed to focus on getting used to Norwegian or just practising English.  So for 7 years we mixed it up a bit.

Now, in Italy, we’re living through a third language and I’m figuring out how to do the trilingual thing with them – learning Italian, speaking English everyday but also remembering their Norwegian. (We only speak English at home).

But some of those old phrases are hard-wired – they’ll respond when I say them – and this morning the older one assured me she could say a few Irish words to her classmates if they were curious: Dia Dhuit (“Hello”, or literally “God be with you”) and Dia ‘s Muire Dhuit (“I’m grand thanks”, or literally – and I kid you not – “God and Mary be with you”.)

Conas tá tú – she waved at me as I walked away.

Tá mé go hiontach – I’m grand thanks!

Watch up Trump, here is coming il Presidente!

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This story hasn’t really hit the news and I can’t think why. An Italian has been pretending to run as a presidential candidate in the US and thousands have fallen for the joke.

You couldn’t make it up. The BBC revealed last week that an Italian marketing professional Alessandro Nardone transformed himself 8 months ago into “California congressman” Alex Anderson who was running as a candidate* for the US presidency. This was for a gag, to promote a novel Nardone had written about this character, Anderson. As part of the stunt he launched a pretty comprehensive online campaign with the benign tagline of #americaisnow, and to his surprise it actually took off and after a while he was getting media requests to join campaign debates. He never even left his small town in northern Italy and friends helped him record a campaign video at the local bar: in the video he whizzes along on his moped waving an American flag to loud guitar music, up to a group of “supporters”, stopping short of kissing one man on the cheek.  He has over 20,000 twitter followers and attracted more each time he slagged off Hilary Clinton.

Fair play to him – he’s a smart guy who pulled off a crazy idea, he clearly understands social media, and indeed probably knows more about the US than many of its actual voters. He even thinks Edward Snowden should be president (or did he mean to say running mate?).

Now as a language nerd (and this is a language blog) I wonder – how could he have come this far? Reading through his website and twitter account, you should be able to see something is not quite right, but no-one realised anything was up.

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We’re talking, of course, about bad English. That’s not to say that native-speaking politicians, or their interns, displays full mastery of the language. Anderson/Nardone seems to walk the thin line – he has enough confidence to get his meaning across, it’s just all a bit wobbly in the delivery.

How did people go with his opinions – or even understand what he was talking about? Here’s his bio which reads smoothly enough, if a little odd (and hilariously fake):

Alex was born thirty-nine years ago in the heart of Los Angeles, and grew up in San Pedro with his mother Ann, his father Ron and his inseparable friends seagulls, which he used to watch at the harbor, every day at sunset. After graduating from Yale, Alex got a PhD in International law and economics and, after only a few months, passed the exam becoming the youngest District Attorney of whole California.

Then it gets stranger and harder to read:

…in this case, the young Anderson seems to have what it takes. What do I mean? Wanting to be vague we could talk about simple cursus but as the Huffington Post here love to be precise, we say Skull andBones. It tells you nothing? But of course yes, who does not know the secret society the most famous and influentialof the Globe? Okay. So happens that both Bush senior as Bush son they so proudly part, just like Anderson, starting from his grandfather, to get to the “small” Alex. Strange life, right?

Were those people who followed him actually paying attention beyond the headlines on the website?  Wonderful headlines like this one:
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Someone clearly did some decent proofreading along the way (you can still get one of these for just $6!):

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And then, as usual, it’s the status updates written on the fly that really show that something is (linguistically) very wrong.

Didn’t anyone notice the Italian accent shining through here?

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Or mixed-up possessive pronouns?

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But this guy claims to have been retweeted more than Jeb Bush and has more twitter followers than many other candidates*. Which makes us wonder how important Twitter really is at this level of “politics”. That’s something to look at in another post.

I could also look more at the general quality of English from someone like Trump or, indeed the Italian prime minister and some people even get picky about what Obama might have said wrong.

But hey, we do live in a democracy. Even – apparently – one that can cross oceans.

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*The complete list of declared candidates for the 2016 US election comes to 1,591. It includes characters like “Riff Raff”, “Luther T. The Merciless Lieutenant Ridiculous Warlord Stock”, “The Muslim Dictator Trump”, “Vladimir Putin” and the out-and-out “Antichrist”. But obviously you don’t have to be registered, or indeed real, to throw up on an online campaign.

————–

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

That’s Amore, amore

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Valentine’s Day is behind us, for this year. But in Italy words of love are everywhere, every day and in every situation. It’s there in the plaintive teenage graffiti, the songs on the radio, the kisses on the street and, I’ve really noticed, in the way people address each other. “Amore! Come va?”

And why shouldn’t everyone be addressed as “love”, especially when life is beautiful in such a beautiful place? A parent to a child, a friend to another, a shop assistant to the customer – everyone can be called “amore”.

In Norway you’ll commonly hear the lovely phrase skatten min – my treasure (or more precisely, for these days, “my taxes”.) But it’s not really relevant to strangers. Where is the love that’s so strong and all-enveloping it’s used all the time?

And I mean, all the time:

“Ah my love, this cash register is closed”

“Oh my love did you not do your homework?”

“Sorry love, did I bump your car?”

Amore
Florentines love their graffiti

An old Yorkshire greengrocer might ask “what’ll you have luv?” It’s affectionate and charming. But that’s not really love, it even needs to be spelled differently to be sure there’s no awkward reminder of the big word itself. This is no grand passion he’s echoing.

English has many words of affectionate greeting (any of which could be used to translate Amore) – darling, sweetheart, dear, baby – but they’re taking us far from the original sentiment.

In Ireland what do we say? Pet or dote. They’re both affectionate and, characteristically, a bit different (with the emphasis on the soft Irish t). But like so many expressions in that wet-and-windy/changeable country, they’re at one remove from straightforward language and simple expression of affection.

In Canada I hear “bud” used a lot (especially to kids dressed in any kind of sporting attire). I’ll admit it’s not my favourite word but it is clearly affectionate and certainly bandied about enough to cover the recipient with a sense of commonly-understood affection and kindness, with a certain jostling parental remove.

Here in Italy, as well as Amore, people might be called caro/cara, or Tesoro, something my kids get called by strangers and now (why not?) by me.

But I’m going with Amore. Simple, ancient, melodious, universal. It’s what it’s all about.

Read more about the street art of Florence in my 2017 blog post

From Norway to Italy

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In the summer of 2015 I moved with the family and all our worldly goods from Oslo to Italy, and what a change it has been! So many aspects of daily life are different, and it has been fascinating to settle into a normal life in a beautiful place. I’ll be sharing some of my observations about how people communicate in different ways, some of the interesting expressions particular to a place and the little things that can sparkle a day.

I have a degree in Italian language and literature (from many years ago) and it’s a real pleasure to be able to speak it on a daily basis – even when facing civil servants, teachers or doctors. It is also helping my kids manage the change, having a mum who can understand their homework and translate to their friends.

Firenze Boat

The initial switch from Norwegian to Italian was tricky – and still is when we have Norwegian visitors – especially when managing some of the smaller words we use everyday.

O – in Italian “o” means “or”: pizza o pasta? But in Norwegian “o” is how Oslonians pronounce “og” which means “and”. So we’d find ourselves ordering too much food at a restaurant.

(Ah, food… now there’s a subject I could devote a whole blog to, how the issue of food rocks your life when you move from Norway to Italy)

Vi – in Italian “vi” means “you, plural”: vi abbiamo visto sulla spiaggia (we saw you on the beach). This was confusing as in Norwegian it refers to “us”: vi har sett dere pa fjellet (we saw you on the mountain). Hence much confusion as to who was doing what.

Switching from “ja” to “si” took a bit of work to change as have the Scandinavian habits of head-nodding,  “umm ummming” and taking in a loud breath instead of using words – all very un-Latin.

Pulling out your hands and using them to help communicate, that’s taken some getting used to. And it goes without saying that people talk more here… much much more.

But in general I find Italian much more approachable, and don’t feel so self-conscious about trying out something and making mistakes. There are so many filler words and expressions you can use (bahs, mas and ehs) that communicating is more flowing and more visual. And just a few more smiles to help things along. You can also shout more (and be shouted at) but hey, I’ve lived in New York and can handle that fine.

Stay tuned for more stories of cultural shift.

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

The songs on the bus go round and round

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Warning: this blog post contains an ear worm.    

It’s a mid-winter Wednesday afternoon and we sit on the top deck of the 46a bus in Dublin, the bus route of my teenage years. I’m here with my two girls on one of our regular visits back to family.

The bus is quiet so my six year old decides to sing – what else but the theme song from Frozen. (You’ve heard it before.) She sings it once through. And then she sings it again, in Norwegian – a version the good people of Dun Laoghaire are strangely surprised to hear, and to be honest, not so excited about. Much as the song is hated by parents and bus-riders the world over, you have to admire the under-7 urge to belt it out in any language:

La den gå
La den gå
Perfekt er fortid så
Jeg er klar
Og jeg smiler bredt
La det storme her
Litt frost gjør meg ingenting uansett*

I was quite surprised when she came home from kindergarten last Autumn with this version in her repertoire. And then I was even more amazed to discover it was localized to 41 languages – the song (and film) is the most widely-translated yet by Disney who took pride in the mammoth task of finding local singers to tackle the wide vocal range of the original song, correct lipsynching, and transcreating the song’s admittedly rather complex lyrics to local meaning. The variations in titles alone hint at some serious cultural variations, from ”I Will Rise at Dawn” to ”I Have this Power” to ”It has Happened”.  The multi-language ”behind the scenes” version on YouTube is inspiring millions of multi-lingual divas.

MultiLingual

There has been some debate about the choice of languages – European languages being more in evidence than African or Indian. It is worth considering if 5 ”versions” for Scandinavia does balance against hundreds of sub-Saharan languages which would reach many many more viewers.

An interesting take by an Arabic scholar bemoans the strange backwards step taken by Disney in choosing Modern Standard Arabic rather than contemporary or Egyptian Arabic as used in other films. This version is actually closer to Classical Arabic and the results sound like – “I dread not all that shall be said! Discharge the storm clouds! The snow instigateth not lugubriosity within me…” 

Growing up in Norway my kids have so far learned English songs and Norwegian songs, and they don’t often overlap – some notable exceptions being Old McDonald or Fader Jakob/Freres Jacques (which for some reason we confusingly sing in French unless you grow up in North America). And here was a full-on local version of this oversung song which many children might think was the version. All over the world.

When I first moved to Norway I heard kids on the bus (not many, they tend to keep pretty quiet here) singing their own approximated versions of the song of the day, Mamma Mia – indeed that was a ”Swedish” song I learnt when I was little. And sure, I’m all for hearing good Norwegian pop songs being sung or even hits Kardemomme By.

The prevalence of English songs in other countries is a big issue, I’ll save that for another day. But for now let’s just enjoy anyone who wants to sing and sing and sing.

*I don’t pass judgement here on the Norwegian translation of the lyrics but I do detect a little smirk in the Norwegian version of ”the snow never bothered me anyway”

** 2019 update: a reader of the blog has informed me that her father was actually the Norwegian lyricist!

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

Norwenglish 3 – A Word of Welcome

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You drive your gorgeous rental Tesla out along the exit from Gardermoen airport, clear signs directing you towards Oslo or other exciting points in the Østfold. A sign looms up* with a friendly message in English:

Goodbye and Welcome Back!

You do a double-take – have you found yourself on a road heading back into the airport? How did they know you’d get lost so quickly? And are they always this friendly?

Closer inspection of the Norwegian sign above it reveals:

Ha en Fin Dag. Velkommen tilbake!

Directly translated – Have a good day and welcome back.

Velkommen tilbake: this is a charming expression – a wish that after a wonderful experience here you will choose to come back sometime, and that when you do come back you will receive a warm welcome. From whoever put up that sign.

But, my Norwegian readers, in this situation it does not translate as Welcome Back. That’s what you say when you actually arrive again, not when you’re leaving!

I’ll suggest some alternatives for this kind of scenario (leaving a place, finishing a website transaction, saying goodnight to the very last customer in the bar):

Come back soon! Come again!

Have a good trip!

Hope to see you again!

Thanks for coming/shopping/just being here! 

Or just the Goodbye is enough on its own

And here is a more correct use, where you will indeed be welcomed back in the spring to this tower on the Oslo waterfront for an amazing view.

Tjuvholmen Tower(Actually, it would sound better as “See you in the Spring”. Springtime sounds a bit Cole Porter-ish.)

To recap:

Velkommen = Welcome (that’s fine and dandy, it’s said when someone arrives)

Velkommen tilbake = See you again sometime, we really did enjoy having you even if we didn’t communicate it so well at the time.

* Disclaimer – it’s been a while since I’ve driven from the airport, and wouldn’t usually stop to photograph signs, so this particular sign might not be there, or worded differently. It’s an illustration of a scenario. And come to think of it, can you actually rent a Tesla?

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and from Italian to English. Read more.

The New Yorker and Me

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I was fortunate to live in New York city (Brooklyn, to be precise) from 1998 to 2002 and it took me only about 6 months to feel I had become a New Yorker. It was a wonderful time, so full of opportunity, experiences, people from everywhere, food from everywhere else, and I learnt so much of my career there. First producing all sorts of projects at a lively web design agency, often bumping into Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts who had an office upstairs – and then working freelance for a huge local union, many of whose members were immigrant workers, some of whom were killed on 9/11 while working as janitors and window cleaners at the World Trade Centre.

A big part of my being a New Yorker was reading the New Yorker every week. I knew the magazine from before – my aunt in Dublin would buy the odd copy – but owning my own subscription was a very concrete and grown-up achievement. I was being steeped in the grand tradition of James Thurber, Lillian Ross and our own Maeve Brennan to Philip Gourevitch, Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell. Toting my slim copy through different commutes I absorbed so much about good writing, and how to describe the world. I could read every single cinema listing as a substitute for seeing all those movies, or imagine I was up to speed on the political scene. We would all compare notes with each other on the pattern in which you read it – for me it was movie reviews, talk of the town, listings, books and then everything else. Friends of ours, a couple, had two separate subscriptions, each landing into their mailbox at the same time each week: they even had their own way of filing away the archive copies. I still have my 9/11 black cover edition.

Whenever I need a dose of excellent writing now, I’ll pick it up and read something – on iPad or from the podcast, whenever I can. (Because it’s a digital relationship, I’m always weeks behind – I’d surely be up to speed if I were to splash out on the paper edition.)

And just like listening to a good radio station, you’ll always find something to read and learn something you didn’t know when you got up that morning.

So here’s a new classic piece for your delectation. It just shows you that English is not always so easy for English speakers to write.

One word of advice, don’t read it in public…

“Sentences have been around since the dawn of paragraphs, and indeed since before that, for sentences are essentially the building blobs of a paragraph.”

How to Write a Sentence, by James Thomas (October 24, 2014)

NewYorker

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and from Italian to English. Read more.

The map of languages

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I love this hand-drawn map of Indo-European languages. Created by the Finnish-Swedish designer and author behind the web-comic StandStillStaySilent, this is a beautiful visualisation of how the languages relate to each other.

I like how the Celtic branch hangs, slightly randomly, below Albanian, but it’s a little strange that Gaelic is listed as one language, no differentiation between Scots-Gaelic and Irish (the other Scots is included close to English, being a variation of it).

Also very interesting to consider that Arabic and Hebrew, and variations thereof, are not part of this family tree but comprise their own.

Enjoy as you will! Map of Indo-European Languages

 

 

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English. Read more.