Category: life

Friday Thoughts in Bra

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I think after you live somewhere for awhile you become wholly unaware of your surroundings.  You can forget the beauty of a place, the value it has.  Bra has become this and at times, languishes in my mind as any other place.  To live here is to be wholly involved in Italy and Italian life.  For as long as I’ve lived here, a bit over a year now, I have forgot the essential parts of living that make this a place of amusement.
Today is Friday, and it is on Friday that you realize that a town perceived as sleepy or boring in fact comes alive with activity.  It is the beginning of September and my most favorite period of the year.  Cool mornings now.  Warm and sunny afternoons and evenings.  It’s during this time that the earth is it’s most generous giving forth all it has to offer for every person.  Reminded of this today at the local Friday market which was so busy you could barely pass.  To see each farmer with the result of their labor is the actual fulfillment of what a farmer’s market is.  Except here it isn’t a farmer’s market, it’s just normal.  The prices, fair and reasonable for the quality and beauty of these fruits and vegetables.  A complete picture of seasonality and locality in one place.  A trout from the fisherman, peaches, plums and the best are the late summer tomatoes which are still turning red in the heat of the afternoon.

Red/Green Tomatoes

His Fruit

Bra Market

Bra Market
 

Bra, yes, is a unique place.  One that surprises some Italians by it’s complete lack of chain restaurants, it’s hidden wealth, it’s Provencal-ness without the stuffiness.

Friday’s give me energy and encouragement here.  The bustling in the street makes me feel as if it were just a small neighborhood part of a larger city.  Filled with a host of faces from abroad.  As I sit here at the café with my pen and notebook, happy at the complete absence of computers and wi-fi, the atmospheric music coming from satellites, I’m reminded of the reason for café’s and that is conversation and a respite from the day.  Of all things that are present here to remind you of this, the most apparent is the name of the café; Converso.  It rings in an English speaker’s ears like conversation.  So, I am surrounded by conversation at Café Converso.  How appropriate.

These are the ideas of civility that we have lost in the U.S.  Simply concepts really, replaced by over stimulation and the need to always rush around town — the concept of a fair price (here, a cappuccino with table service is €1.30, no tip necessary), or for people to frequent the small stores that sustain a town such as this.

Of all the talk of a loss of our roots or heritage, these places till exist.  Places like Bra, all across Europe.  Unattractive perhaps for the general tourist, but ideal for the ones who live there.  No wonder people idealize these places – people who, like I, have abandoned their own country for a life a bit less hectic, a bit less crazy.  I find it realistic, and yet at the same time, completely un-real.  For now, it works.  It isn’t a permanent solution to our wanderlust, no place is, but giving this small town some of my time has been, for all intensive purposes, worth it.  It’s not perfect, but it at least tries.

Globe-Trotter

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Where are we going? What is our plan?As a person who sometimes feels at home in airports, on planes and in transiting types of places, I wonder what those of the past thought about this idea of “in-between”?  The airports of the past don’t really exist now, at least not in many of the modern cities of the world.  The time of being able to smoke inside is gone, as well as on an airplane — as well as the days of steak and champagne in the air.  Those of us, myself included, that long or at least think about this type of existence are lost in travel thought.  I once had the experience of going to one of the oldest, and perhaps the most interesting airport I’ve been to in Beira, Mozambique.  A relic of the past, complete with smoking lounge and the airplane that parks, just outside the waiting area with the stairs on wheels to allow the passengers to embark and disembark.  Upstairs in the lounge that overlooked the airfield, a small bar that served “drinks” and bad, albeit the only, coffee in the building.  What is it that attracts so many people to bad coffee in airports?  Or, what attracts bad coffee companies to airports?  This was not a company, but alas, and old many with a tea kettle and some instant coffee in a glass jar, or at least this is how I remember it.

Maybe my memory of this event is muddled, or maybe I am trying to over romanticize something that happened a few years ago.  Travel is easy to romanticize, even in this day and age where travel is never, or usually not, comfortable, reliable or convenient.  Those days too, have passed without much thought.

I think boat travel is perhaps the last refuge of the romantic traveller, giving way to long thoughtful periods of time spent in the open sea air, sunsets over the vast ocean, dinner in a formal dining room, pool drinks during the day.  This is what might be considered, civilized.  But when one fills these civilized ideas of travel with screaming children and tourists, you loose your mind and idea of comfort easily.

Globe Trotter

So what is travel now?  What is the state of moving around the world, country, state, city, block, house, room?  Why do we keep accepting the many challenging aspects of long distance movement?  I don’t know to be honest.  The reasons are different for each of us, from business to family to a need to escape from whatever kind of life you are in, to the absolute craving of a good bowl of spicy noodle soup.  These are all valid reasons, as many many others are as well.

It is a strange beast, traveling.

Meditation 11

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Gourmandism is an impassioned, considered, and habitual preference for whatever pleases the taste.It is the enemy of overindulgence; any man who eats too much or grows drunk risks being expelled from its army of disciples.
Gourmandism includes the love of delicacies, which is nothing more than a ramification of this passion for light elegant dishes of little real sustenance, such as jams, pastries, and so on.  This is a modification introduced into the scheme of things for the benefit of the ladies, and of such men as are like them.

No matter how gourmandism is considered, it deserves praise and encouragement.
Physically, it is the result as well as the proof of the perfect state of health of our digestive organs.
Moreally, it is an implicit obedience of the rules of the Creator, who, having ordered us to eat in order to live, invites us to do so with appetite, encourages us with flavor, and rewards us with pleasure.

If gourmandism, according to the late great Brillant-Savarin is the perfect state of health of our digestive organs, he apparently never spent a week in Emilia-Romagna.

But his view on gourmet eating is one that is unique and also one that we seem to rarely think about any more.  Because food has become such a commodified subject of talk, politics, passion, power, money, etc. we tend to just forget about pleasure in eating.  Having been back here in the US for about a week now, I realize a few things that I have taken for granted in Italy, but which I am happy to return to in a few weeks.  First, when we talk about right to good food, which it truly is in Italy, we do not speak of America.  For in America, the right to good food does not exist, at least not in the Italian way.  For here in Vermont, I’ve come to see that good food is a privilege.  It is not a right that all should eat good, clean and fair, but actually a result of ones own personal choices: income, sacrifices, adaptability.  Here I’ve learned that market forces are at work, even in the world of hippie-dom.  Why else would the local diner offer organic grass-fed beef for their hamburger, and proudly advertise it on the front of the door?  Each person has to make choices about what to eat, and we do so with sometimes very little in mind, or in our pockets.  Eating like a student in Italy is something like eating as if I work on Wall Street in America.
So, when I ask myself if people here have access to good food, I say maybe not.  People in Italy, mostly, yes.  In a local supermarket in Bra, I can find local vegetables, dairy and wine.  At a local supermarket here in Vermont, I can find local apples, dairy and wine, but at a cost that is more than I am willing to pay all the time.  Access is denied to many.  Italy, access is given to more people because of several things, not the least of which is government subsidies, but that isn’t all.  A drive for more money isn’t on the mind of my local greens seller at the Saturday market in Bra.  She tells us how she barely makes any money at selling winter lettuce, and can’t afford to have any other employees because of labour laws and the smaller scale she works on.  But still, she sells her greens, almost organic, for 1Euro/kg.

I sometimes feel deceived by the lack of access in America.  By the perceived pretentious attitude that looms over all of the good, clean and fair food, and requires one to either buy into that, or, be excluded from it.  I’m not up on the newest, best place for sushi in NYC, I’m not inclined to be fastidious on my purchases, but I am a person who respects quality and the hard work of producers.  Here and in Italy.  I only wish attitudes could be more similar, and that I could, at some point, feel like myself in the US, eating these things without being put into a box, or identified with certain ideals, groups or personal beliefs.

Thus, the distinctive quality of food consists in its ability to submit to animal assimilation.