More lessons from southern Italy

I did tell you it was a lifetime's worth of experience. And that much experience doesn't fit in one post. So here's some more:


1) WHERE ARE THE STATUES?

The cathedral had a series of statues of saints lined up along the top.

“They’re all made of plaster,” I was told. “A few years ago, the building was in a state of disrepair, so it was renovated. They pulled a whole lot of stuff down, and they looked at these statues, with their missing arms and missing heads, and said, ‘This is trash’ and threw them all away. Then when the renovations were finished, the bishop came to look and said, ‘Where the **** are the statues?’ So they had to make new ones out of plaster.”

(Author's note: I don't use language like that. I'm just telling you what I heard.)

2) WARM TODAY, EH?

The weather was beautiful, and it would have been stifling to wear winter clothes. So I wore short sleeves. Well, I may as well have been walking around with a sign above my head saying "Foreigner". No Italian would dream of switching to summer apparel until the day spring officially starts, no matter how sunny it is. 

One day, it was fairly warm, if not actually hot, and I was in short sleeves and perfectly comfortable.  I was out walking, and in the course of half an hour, the following things happened:

1)     As a car drove past me, it slowed down and the driver shouted something at me.

2)     Another car actually stopped as it passed me. The guy in the passenger seat lowered the window and shouted out, “Hot today, isn't it?”

3)   As I passed a parked car with its windows open, a guy sitting inside it called out, “You're not Italian, are you?”

4)  Outside the train station, the taxi drivers were sitting on a bench waiting for business. As I walked past them, one of them called out, “France?”

5)     I passed a group of old men standing on the pavement chatting. They broke off their conversation, and one turned to stare at me.

“Good morning!” he cried out.

“Warm today, eh?” boomed his friend.

All of this in the space of no more than half an hour.

3) THE PRAWN

My colleague and I were taken out to dinner one evening at a seafront restaurant.

“When I know the restaurant,” our host announced, “I never even look at the menu. I ask the manager straight away what he recommends.”

And so saying, he summoned the manager and demanded to know what he recommended. We were then treated to a positive banquet, a spectacular array of seafood. (And for me, since I didn’t eat seafood, they did a spectacular array of vegetarian dishes.)

Course 17 (or possibly 18 - I lost track after the first ten courses or so) was fresh tiger prawns. Very fresh tiger prawns. So fresh, in fact, that as my colleague dished one up onto his plate, it waved its thorny legs at him. I gasped and pointed at his plate. Senses slightly dulled by numerous glasses of red wine, he just smiled languidly at his plate.

“It's very fresh,” he commented. He poked at the prawn then looked up at me.

“Their nervous system is different from ours,” he said, and he tore its joints apart with his fork.  Its legs were still waving on its severed bottom half as he devoured the flesh from the top half.

“I can’t believe you ate it!” I said afterwards. He shrugged.

“It's a temporal difference,” he remarked, unconcerned.

4) FIFTY EUROS

As my colleague and I walked past a fountain in the town centre, we were surprised to see a €50 note sitting at the bottom of it.

“Take it out!” he said.

“You take it out,” I said.

“No, I’m wearing long sleeves,” he complained. “You’re wearing short sleeves. You take it out.”

It just didn’t feel right to me to take €50 that didn’t belong to me. Fair enough, at this point it didn’t seem to belong to anyone, but even so, there were so many people who could have made better use of the money than we could, such as the beggars we had just passed on the pavement. And anyway, why would €50 just be sitting at the bottom of a fountain?

I couldn’t justify my unwillingness any further than, “It’s not our money,” and this was highly unsatisfactory to my colleague.

“It’s fifty euros!” he groaned.

“Listen,” I told him, “you didn’t have fifty euros before, and you don’t have fifty euros now. You’re no worse off than before. You haven’t lost anything.”

“Hmm,” he mused. “It’s probably a trick anyway. If it were real money, it would float.”

An hour or so later, he turned to me and smiled.

“I’ve understood about the €50 note!” he announced. “It was a fake – there was an advert printed on the other side! I’ve just seen someone walking around with one.”

5) POLICE CHECK

I went to a nearby townone afternoon, to meet up with some former students of mine. As we were standing around outside the station, going through greetings, two policemen bustled up.

“Documents, documents!” the one barked out.

“Three documents for every four people!” barked the other one.

The others all pulled out their ID cards. Not being Italian, I didn’t have one, and I didn’t have any other ID on me. (Having lost my passport once and my driving licence twice in the  space of six months, I have stopped carrying important things around with me.) But that didn’t matter. After all, the policemen only needed three IDs for every four people. They took the cards, wrote down the details in a tatty notebook, and bustled off.

“What was that about?” I asked. The others shrugged.

“Sometimes they check people. Especially around the station,” they replied.