Italy!

Previously: Morocco!

Since we would happen to be within the Mediterranean neighborhood, we also decided to visit the land where half of my wife originates from. This is probably going to be yet another jumbled travelogue with lots of pictures!

[Musical accompaniment will be Bob Sinclar’s remix of Raffaella Carrà - Far l'Amore, which was put to amazing use in the opening scene of the highly highly recommended 2013 movie The Great Beauty.]

Look, I want to start by saying my wife & I were fully, absolutely, completely, and thoroughly enamored by Italy. I’ll get the necessary disclaimer out that we stayed at an apartment for only a couple of weeks, and that we still ultimately experienced a rosy and superficial impression as tourists on vacation.

I don’t care. Shut up. Italy was the best.

Holy Fucking Shit, the Food

I need a preamble about how much I adore the food in Morocco. Apologies to all the chefs within my extended family, I also know that a significant edge that Moroccan cuisine has isn’t just the recipes, but the ingredients. Beef in Morocco straight up tastes way better than anything I could ever acquire in America, regardless of how you prepare it. The closest I ever got to rekindling a close surrogate is when I first discovered 100% grassfed beef years ago. That gets really close to replicating Moroccan beef quality, but not quite all the way there.

Similarly, Moroccan bread just tastes way better than any bread I could ever find in America. Part of it is simply that Moroccans fully embraced the French boulangeries from their former colonial masters. There’s now a bevy of bakeries on every block, pumping out fresh baked bread (and croissants) every single morning. I live in the US near a French bakery that gets really close to replicating Moroccan carbohydrate quality, but again, it’s just not quite all the way there.

There’s an amusing mirror parallel to my visits, where I yearn for nothing more than simple Moroccan bread with Moroccan butter, while my Moroccan cousins extoll the quality of McDonald’s.

So there we were, chowing down on delicious food and talking about our upcoming Italy leg, when my buddy tells me that the food is way better in Italy than in Morocco.

I refused to blindly accept the hype, but my skepticism was dead wrong. The food in Italy is unparalleled.

I didn’t understand the big deal over truffles before, and now I want to put them on everything. Also this documentary about old Italian truffle hunters and their truffle-hunting dogs was so good, watch it! Wife literally cried after tasting truffle pasta:

And melted after tasting tiramisu:

One of us broke down crying at the culinary abundance:

I Seriously Love Narrow Streets So Much

Everything that I adored about old-school Moroccan urbanism was also available in ancient quarters of Italian cities (except it was much cleaner, there were zero stray cats with debilitating health conditions, and my wife could walk alone without worrying about street harassment).

Monuments to a Dying Religion

Every chapel, church, and cathedral we walked into was stunning in its architectural displays. As silly as I find all religions to be, I’m happy to give divine delusions credit when it directs human endeavor towards a useful purpose.

We were in Venice for Easter, and I had never before attended Mass so I figured what better opportunity? The acoustics were immaculate but overall the spectacle was quite boring; a few stern-looking old dudes speaking in Latin for almost two hours. I ate the communion wafer for the first time and it was the blandest thing I’ve ever tasted.

The audience also reflected the elderly demographic, and my wife & I were probably the youngest people there. A few in attendance seemed so pleased to see us there, but little did they know…

For what it’s worth, we’ve been lighting a candle at every place for our dearly departed Layla.

As we walked out of the chapel one attendee ran after a young couple leaving, and screamed “Maledetta!” (Cursed!) as she pointed at them. I wish I knew what that was about.

My wife used to work as a funeral director, and it’s a profession that is viewed with decreasing utility as no-frills-cremation continues to get more popular. Italy provided an interesting glimpse into what how important memorializing the dead used to be. The cemetery we visited was very elaborate and extremely well-maintained.

Speaking of which, one of my favorite movies is the 1994 Cemetery Man (also known by its Italian title: Dellamorte Dellamore). It’s a silly horror-comedy about a cemetery where every burial gets reanimated as a zombie a week later.

It Has Become Impossible to Avoid the Jews

I tried and failed, but there was no escaping the Jews. After the Easter service, we were walking around the Venetian Jewish ghetto minding our own damn business when a rabbi spotted us reading a flyer and insisted that we join them for Seder dinner, to commemorate the end of Passover. Who can say no?

Whereas Catholic Easter Mass that morning was demure and solemn, Jewish Seder with this crowd was a drunken cacophony of unrestrained joy. It was non-stop singing of wordless songs (nigun) and constant blessings and cheers. I didn’t know why we were invited to this tiny crowded restaurant, but we were happy to be included.

Another rabbi stood and gave a speech for the day. Although we all were in Venice, I was struck by how he started by saying “Our Nation is surrounded by enemies…” and then relayed a version of this story from Exodus:

Moses and the Israelites sang a triumphant song of gratitude to God for annihilating their enemies…On seeing the drowning Egyptians the angels were about to break into song when God silenced them declaring, “How dare you sing for joy when My creatures are dying” (Talmud, Megillah 10b and Sanhedrin 39b)

Anytime I introduce myself as being from Morocco within these circles, I wonder how many assume I’m Jewish. Sometimes they start telling how many Moroccan Jews they know. I always wonder when to interject, without the undue haste you might expect from a straight guy at a gay club reminding everyone that he’s not gay.

So in a conversation with a very French Jew, I happen to mention that I used to be Muslim. He then asked me what I was now, and I said athée (atheist in French).

There was a long pause, during which I wondered whether I had mistranslated.

Then he said: On vous aime, comme un frere (We love you, like a brother) and gave me a big hug. 🥺

But then again, a few days later, I was barred from visiting a historic synagogue in Florence because my shorts were too short.

2 sexy 4 joos

Curiously, the only time I ever saw a rifle brandished by Italian law enforcement was a lone soldier stationed right outside the synagogue. Could be a coincidence!

Unrelated, but did you know that Jesus was a Palestinian?

Call Me Giuseppe

People were so fucking hospitable. We showed up to a popular restaurant that was completely full. No tables free. The waiter responded to this insolence by shaking my hand, apologizing profusely, and then offering us free wine while we waited for our table to clear.

I have never before in my life ever attempted to speak or read Italian, and yet. I’ll give credit to my fluency in French which allowed me to triangulate and discern a surprising chunk of unfamiliar Italian vocabulary. Italian is spoken almost exactly as written, so that part also allowed smooth paving.

This stage the stage for our camouflage operation. Everyone around us was criminally attractive and fashionable and so we felt we needed to step it up. Wife accomplished this by dolling up. I accomplished this by buying one hat for €10.

Giuseppe was born.

Staying at a single apartment allowed us to cosplay the fantasy that we were residents. We’d get up in the morning, walk through the narrow streets, buy a baguette, and stop by a cafe.

Eggs fried in truffle oil

Shopkeepers started to recognize us, thanking us for coming again. One day I stopped by this cafe to buy four cookies for the road. The criminally attractive barista paused, gave me a sly look, then said in a marinated accent: All of them for you?

My affirmation apex was walking through a plaza in my Giuseppe hat while eating some gelato. A woman approached and immediately started speaking to me in Italian. I put my broken linguistics to use: Non parlo Italiano, parli Francese? Inglese?

Turns out she was a native resident of Florence, asking me (moi!) to recommend a good place to eat around the area. I was flummoxed to pass so well, and asked her and her friends if it had anything to do with the chest hair waterfall from unbuttoning the top 3 buttons of my shirt. They cackled, and then spent 15 minutes asking me what the fuck is wrong with Trump.

We also used teamwork and figured out how to eat gelato while holding an umbrella:

Criminally Weak Weed

We got all excited when we encountered a weed vending machine!

Except we then realized that the “legal” weed in Italy has THC capped at a laughable 0.2% (for reference, the norm nowadays in US dispensaries is 25%-30%). The teenage-looking boys in the basement looked really proud of their grow operation though.

Overwhelming History

Everyone knows this already. Blah blah blah Roman Empire blah blah Renaissance blah blah Pasta.

Even in April, the crowds in Venice were abysmal. The problem, of course, is all the other tourists, not us! I can understand why the locals would be pissed. The city is just such a bizarre and unique place, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how the fuck it managed to function as the capital of a massive maritime empire. Anyone who played Civ 5 understands.

Also we went to a model train museum. It was the work of largely one dude, and I couldn’t believe the grave seriousness by which they talked about this project. These are model trains!

As a kid in Morocco, I fantasized about having my own model train set going around the circumference of our apartment, mounted near the ceiling. As an adult, I settled for video games. I couldn’t stop thinking about the hours I spent optimizing signals in Transport Tycoon.

Amalfi Coast Of Course

We ate lots of lemons, and hung out by the water. Giuseppe’s power meter was maxed out at this point.

Wife modeled by the water and I pretended to take pictures instead of a video:

Randomly ran into multiple parades. By sundown the parades had morphed into a bevy of ominous figures wearing white hoods. Perhaps they heard I was in town.

Cats Limited

Unlike the feline overpopulation carnage we saw in Morocco, we did not see a single stray cat in Italy. Not one! The cats in Venice didn’t count as strays, since literally every neighborhood was an island.

The seagulls in Venice did not fuck around. They’d perch on top of very tall statues and then swoop in to violently snatch snacks from the hands of oblivious British women. I finally understood why they are considered such a menace, and why they should stop it now.

Our apartment had a statue in honor of our cat Ozzy.

Here’s how my wife looks at goofy cat prints:

A Broken Country

It’s not all good news, a surprising number of things are outright broken and we saw this within an hour of our arrival to the country.

We had to take a shuttle train from the airport to get to another train station. No problem, we can just use a VISA credit card like we had been everywhere else. Nope, card declined. No problem, we can just get ripped off at the nearby currency exchange bureau. I put in €20 into the vending machine and it just outright ate it due to some error or whatever.

Instead of just spitting the money back out, it printed detailed instructions for the office we had to visit to get our money back. Oh fuck off.

I thought fuck it, let’s just get on the train anyways without a ticket, and if we get caught we just pull the “I’m just a dumb American tourist card!” but nope! As soon as we got to the gate, there’s a notice that the shuttle is now out of order. The Italian dude in front of us literally did the stereotypical Italian thing with his hand — you know, fingers bunched together pointing up, shaking his wrist at nobody. We solved our problem by just hailing a taxi.

Uber is not a thing here. You can’t just magically and reliably summon private transportation at any hour of the day, driven by a third-world immigrant with no concept of the Circadian schedule.

In Italy, if you want a taxi you generally have to physically hail one.

OR

YOU

CAN

TRY

THE OFFICIAL FLORENCE TAXI APP (creatively named appTaxi)

I thought ok, don’t diss this too early, give it a chance. For our departure out of the country, I scheduled a taxi to take us to the airport at 4:30AM and triple confirmed the details. We packed up all our luggage and showed up at the rendezvous point 10 minutes early. We waited. At exactly 4:30AM, I get a notification that my ride was canceled because fuck you that’s why.

This had to be a mistake, maybe the guy was just late! The tension got too high and so I dragged 80 lbs of my wife’s shoes across Florentinian cobblestone, screaming TAXI at any vehicle that vaguely resembled one.

[Side note: The early morning time meant the streets were nearly deserted. Across my entire stay, this was the only time I ever saw homeless people camped out or sleeping rough. Elsewhere, I saw one or two people rummaging through trashcans. If Italy has homeless people, they hide them extremely well.]

No joke but approximately a dozen EMPTY bona fide taxis flat out refused our desperate hails, shaking their head no and vaguely pointing as if I was supposed to know what the fuck they meant. The driver who finally picked us up got a €40 tip. I had no further use of that fake money anyways.

But in fairness, the most self-conscious I felt as an American was the awe on my face when I recorded a video of their underground garbage collection. Everything is dumped into giant underground bins, that are then collected by a truck crane. Such an elegant and obvious solution. It’s probably why, despite the lack of street cats, we never saw a single rat during our stay.

A proper country

Whatever infrastructure failings they might have, at least they know how to properly take out the trash. Mamma Mia.

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Overall Rating: 11/10

Who knows, we might move there.