Lessons From The Italians

By J. Fontana

LESSONS FROM THE ITALIANS is a compilation and review of many things Italian, the language, food, wines, hisrory, and culture together with may vignettes and tales of history and commentary by the author with his friend Professor  Bellinzona doing most of the narrative and it is all tongue-in-cheek.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. GALLICANO
• Release date: Feb 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393811626

Book preview

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission from the Author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Copyright 1994 © by James Fontana

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER

ProLogo

Una Sera a Nuova York, (On An Evening in New York)

Two Absolutely Necessary Italian Survival Words.

Italy, The Place, Bella Italia.

Italia, Una Bella Paese, Italy, A Beautiful Place.

When Italy Saved The Three ‘Immortals’, Keats, Byron, Shelley from Obscurity.

Italy: A Brief History Lesson.

La Gente, (The People).

More about La Gente, They are Non Freudian, Non Judgmental,

National Character & Culture.

Their General Character.

Italians’ delusion of self-esteem – with good reason.

The Italian Tongue. (Hey you! Watch your language.)

Cities & Towns.

Italian Food.

Bravo! Itallian Wines.

Shopping in Italy During the Renaissance.

Italian Wine culture.

Politics and Government.

Law and Disorder.

Love and Sex.

Culture and Folklore.

Some significant Italians. (Aren’t they all?)

Passatempi and Old Traditions.

Sports and Soccer.

The World of Entertainment.

Family and Kids.

Some Categories of Italian Folk.

Lessons From the Italians

Foreword

. . . . being an odd. Totally eclectic, randomly-chosen, sometimes titillating assortment of stereotypical curiosities, delusional tales of glory, misty legends, lame explanations, dubious apologies, whimsical commentary and shameful scherio about my Italian brethren, as gleaned from my good friend and mentor, Professor Bellinzona, and other erudite and occasionally reliable sources  .  .  . as told to and passed on by

Giacomo Fontana . . . .

....

LESSONS FROM THE ITALIANS

[Everything you can humanly hope to learn and more maybe]

J. Fontana

There is no thief like a bad book!

Old Italian Proverb.

[Neither the Christian Democrats nor the Forza Italia party is sure how old the old Italian was when he said that.]

*     *     *

Italians teach, not so much by what they say, but by what they do,

and occasionally by what they won’t do and also by what they say they will do but don’t do.

[That was a small test. And if you can get your head around it

you may to enter into the Theatre of the Absurd.]

The Omniscient Author

––––––––

-1-

Prologo

Not another damned book about Italians!

Those often-muttered words forge an unbidden specter of dark realization: It’s the understandable negative reaction of the average book store denizen. So just to play it safe, I’d better think about that for a minute and put all thoughts of Pulitizer Prizes, (or Wurlitzer Prizes) and New York Times’ Awards out of my mind. Oh! How the curse of an award on the horizon is destructive of the creativity muse like the reaction of an Italian nonna when her grandson brings home his new non-Italian girlfriend to meet and have supper with the family.  Attenzione all’autore!  i.e. Author Beware!

She’s too skinny, the nonna whispers in final judgment as she spoons a second huge dollop of ravioli onto the embarassed girl’s plate.  Mangia! Mangia!  Eat! Eat! she urges, reciting the mantra of all Italian mothers and grandmothers. "It will make you robusto! Robusto, of course, being an Italian code word which, to the sage graduates of Yale, means ‘not so skinny above the waist.’  Nonna winks conspiratorially at the girl. Nothing more need be said. 

I now stand cautioned and lay down my pen.

The time has come to set inspiration and enthusiasm aside and let the vacuum be filled by cold, hard reality. After all, the topic has already been worked to death, hasn't it? Book upon book has been written about the Italians. First and foremost, except for has-beens like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and that Sage of the Stage, George Carlin, plus sundry other English scribes who have sought a place in the Italian literary firmament. But the cornerstone book, The Italians, by Professor Luigi Barzini still stands above them all, with second place going to a more recent tome, also imaginatively titled (How do they ever think up those catchy titles?) The Italians, by John Hooper. In between are countless peripheral books, each one adding another tile to the mosaic that is Italy and the Italians, like the floor of a Renaissance church, but a cracked floor. And you know what gum-chewing tourists do to priceless mosaic floors, don’t you?

Each writer strives to show the best of the Italians and their beautiful, curious peninsular country that has been analysed, assessed, compared, disassembled, re-assembled, praised, insulted, complained about, cried with, laughed at, laughed with and puzzled over more than any other of God’s creations? The Irish notwithstanding, that is. Convince me otherwise!  The computer in any Barnes and Noble, Indigo or Chapters bookstore will attest to this. Just punch in keyword Italians and watch what it spits out at you in wretched defiance, like a quarrelsome Archie Bunker when Edith is late with his supper.

So damned many books! Professor Bellinzona blurted out to me before launching into one of his sonorous dissertations. . . But more more about him later, okay? . . .’

And yet if so much has already been written about the Italians, could it be, just possibly, that there is something 'extra' about them, something other-worldly that inspires and generates such literary creativity, such an  Arno River of flowing words, such an outpouring of fascination, love and fury? Such ernest sludge!

But maybe the Arno of inspiration isn’t dry after all.

Maybe the topic continually generates new inspiration, like an anthropological breeder reactor it miltiplies itself, growing by what it feeds on, as they say.  And why not? In North America an entire entertainment industry has been built and sustains itself on a single theme — unrequited love and pickup trucks. Isn't that over-worked theme the life-blood of the Country Music industry, sustaining the Nashvillians and Okies in Cadillacs and Jack Daniels? And still the hurtin' songs keep right on a comin' and the juke boxes keep right on a hummin'. So powerful is that single theme that even Gisuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini could see it coming and successfully tapped into it decades earlier with their operatic works — Tosca, Turandot,  Traviata, La Boheme and other tear-jerkers. Obviously a case of Grand Opera meeting the Grand Ole Opry.

So listen to me, book store denizen! Don't just hide there in the stacks like a prepubescent troglodyte sneaking his first furtive peek at The Joy of Sex. Don't be embarrassed. There's nothing to be embarrassed about! A lot of otherwise normal people, some almost as normal as you and me, eventually fall prey to that secret curiosity that they would never admit to, that curiosity they have puzzled over— the Italians, this interesting, curious, undecipherable people, who are a constellation of inherent contradictions, both holy and venal, proud and profane, tranquil but loud and whose calloused hands love to work in stone, cement, concrete, bricks and sometimes petit pointe. You get the picture. 

You see, you probably wouldn't have picked up this book in the first place if the subject matter had not teased your curiosity and if Italy and the Italians already did not hold some vague fascination like the way your cute little red-haired deskmate in second grade held some undefined allure for you or in the same way that our quintessential American-Italian diva— Lady Gaga, known to her former classmates at a Convent School in New York as Stefani Angelina Germanotta— allures audiences world-wide. And she did ‘what?’ You demand to know.  She did what?  She changed that beautiful, melodic Italian name for ‘Gaga’, Lady Gaga? Madonna mia. Che dispetto.

Such is the cost of allure and celebrity, the cost of the outrageous. Yet that fascination is all very understandable, puzzled as most of us are by this universally gregarious, quietly quirky, mildly mysterious, spirally spiritual, resolutely religious, profoundly annoying people. The Eye-Ties with their seriously hi-cal food, their lovin' wine and their fightin' wine, the heart-weeping, melodious romantic love songs, the handsome, growling actors with all their painful emoting — Stallone, DeNiro, Tarantino, Valentino and Devito — whose painful ululations have been favorably compared with a TV commercial for Preparation H. And finally there are the ample-breasted Italian actresses and models with their knock’em dead good looks whom all the world’s males love and their wives love to hate — Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale,  Lorraine Bracco, Marisa Tomei, Linda Evangelista, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Pesci. Hey! What are they doing in here?

You see, Italians, whether at home or abroad, and their country, Bella Italia, exert a mysterious attraction that makes the rest of humanity either love them or hate them as we do with hip-hop music (there is nothing in between; it is like the McDonalds hamburger that failed the course at Hamburger U.) Italians generously draw millions to their food as a special event treat or daily fare, wearing their over-the-top designer clothes by Donatella Versace and the nearly unpronounceable Ermenegildo Zegna. And don’t forget being entertained by their dark side, driving their cutting-edge cars, wondering why so many famous and accomplished celebs came to Italy every year to traipse around that little country, to cram its cities, byways and hill towns in search of some elusive romantic ideal or ‘action’, maybe, but not necessarily inspired by Frances Maye’s breakout novel, Under the Tuscan Sun. But it’s possible.

One is almost tempted to try to demystify it all? After all, what need is there to look to them for understanding? Why try to demystify it all? What need is there for demystification? Why try to drain a lesson from every quotidian parable or vignette?

Didn’t Hill Street Blues confound even its most central character, Lieutenant Furillo, who expressed slack-jawed disbelief  when he heard that Joe DiMaggio, the other quintessential American hero, was Italian:  Good Grief! he says. Is nuttin’ sacred any more? You’re talkin’ about Joltin’ Joe for Pete’s sake!"  And that’s not quite as salty as the mystified Lieutenant Furillo put it.

‘So? He’s Italian. Period."

Yeah, but DiMaggio ain't short, he ain't dark, he ain't fat, he don't have no greasy hair ana big nose, and oh yeah, he don't talk wid no accent. So how can he be Eye-Talian?

A fair question, Lieutenant Furillo.

Ah, how indeed! Poor Furillo, himself an Eye-Tie, must have been obviously eating too many of his own North American gastronomicly delightful, prize-winning specialties — partly thawed Mama Mia’s frozen TV dinners, washed down with Mojave Muscatel known to be capable of rusting railway spikes; and all the while he is watching The Sopranos, with Tony Soprano blowing cigar smoke in some hapless goomba’s face.

Now to attribute generalized characteristics to any identifiable group has not only fallen into disfavour these days, but you can wind up celebrating your birthday in the local lock-up and you might even be perceived as offensive by anyone who is not just back from a five year trip to Venus (including Lady Gaga).  Such generalizations nowadays will earn you a visit to the local Regina Coeli lock-up even if those characteristics you mention are laudatory and complimentary rather than mischievously critical or hurtfully negative. Generalizations  about any class or group are no longer allowed in any form or for any reason, not even if they are complimentary about  Brazilian massage parlours.

So as we nibble carefully at the topic, let us avoid generalizations about Italians and stay with observations which, by their very nature and legislative fiat, are permitted to be characteristcally picante; and from the Italian perspective it is okay to look upon such utterances as nuggets of human foible with something to teach us. Maybe, or maybe not, but there is no arguing with facts or even the more trendy version that the politicians call ‘alternative facts’. Flip Wilson was right. What you see is what you get. With the Italians anyway.  You get, as well, this tome of tales, some true, some tall, all preciously absurd if you think about it.

Those who have been blessed with that passion approaching a gelato addiction for Italy and the Italians— such as English poets and novelists, about whom there will be more later, unfortunately—have sometimes compared the French to a bicycle without a chain then observe that the Italians are like a chain without the bicycle. It is an assessment made less in mischief than in wonder and perplexed admiration as they contemplate this eternally self-contradicting, furiously puzzling people ,who are genetically predisposed to la dolce vita, a race both reactive and nihilistic that survives and succeeds in spite of itself. That happy result could be attributed to their incorruptible, excellent civil service that keeps an eye on things and helps the country avoid all things evil as well as most things good.

Could it possibly be, just possibly, that the Italians as a nation are the personification of playwright Giuseppe di Lampedusa's Six Characters In Search of An Author? Are they a race that has gone (and continues to go) its own obliviously triumphant, merry way from ancient times to modern and post-modern, seeking, searching, discombobulating, taking a random walk through life, but never quite finding what they are looking for? To seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield! Hmmm? I think so. According to the good Professor Bellinzona (More about him in a minute. I’m getting to it.), Tennyson probably made that observation in ‘Ulysses’ while he was thumbing rides on one of his many inspirational junkets around Italy.  Tennyson, that is, not Ulysses.

Uultimately, concluding that the Arno of Inspiration is not yet dry, I take up my pen again, and like a cloistered medieval monk  I am moved by the prospect that the enduring conundrum about the Italians has never been resolved to the satisfaction of the average Yale graduate and the questions and conundrums they have left with us.  Was the turbulent and quirky history of Italy a consequence of the turbulent and quirky nature of the inhabitants, or, conversely, is the Italian nature— 'personality' might be the better word, but that’s a stretch—a product of the country's turbulent and quirky history?

Or were both its history and the character of its people the product of its geography? The question is more than the traditional chicken-and-egg conundrum and makes the whole Intelligent Design-versus-Creationism controversy come across as trifling by comparison. 

So, let’s get on with it. I’ll lay it on the line for you as my mentor, the worthy Professor Bellinzona, says—and I repeat, there’s more about him coming up next, so don’t leave your seat in this ‘Theater of the Absurd’ to go to the lobby for more popcorn and a nine dollar Coca Colas; Bellinzona is the prophet who cautions you.  And so now, like Caesar, we dare to cross the Rubicon.

––––––––

-2-

Una Sera a Nuova York

[An Evening In New York]

Across from the prairie-wide traffic exchange they call the Lincoln Center Plaza and its mad traffic, across also from New York's Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera, there is a sidewalk café whose name is unimportant because its reputation stands on some of the best caffé latte in the city if you are American and the best caffé Americano if you are not. From here you can sit and watch the seniors all stuffing packets of Splenda into their pockets and purses while exchanging stock market news about how many thousands of dollars they’ve made in the last five minutes. The coffee shop’s location is everything, as they say, which takes in virtually anywhere in New York. Sitting here, as you sip your hi-octane triple Colombian, low-fat latté, your evening is complete as you nibble at a brioche baked fresh daily somewhere west of Albany; you can see across the plaza to the broad, open Lincoln Center where this evening erupting fountains cool the hot August air and the steaming concrete dampens the furs and tuxedos of the chattering opera fans.

The square is lit white-hot as throngs of opera lovers pour out through the building’s five great arches. The opera buffs stagger into the night toward Wall Street and the promise of untold riches. With blank faces emotionally empty after two hours of Turandot, the scene evokes long-ago misty film images of Kathryn Harrold tearfully striding away across the great square to the dying echoes of Nessun Dorma after her bust-up with 'Giorgio', the supposedly slim, handsome heart-throb character improbably played by Luciano Pavarotti in the romantic comedy flick, Ciao Giorgio!

Or maybe it’s the image of Cher in Moonstuck, dubiously searching the square for love-sick Nick Cage on their clandestine opera date. Something like that, all these images being suitable for family viewing and having no foul or colorful language, no overt violence, just plenty of tuxedoed men and their ladies in slinky gowns and dripping in dead animals’ pelts, all necessary tonight because winter is not allowed in NYC , the crowd is permitted to show off this off season apparel.

The chiaroscuro caused by dark sky and bright flood lights make for a street scene that is an eerie parade of ghosts. And a ghost is what I think I see when a tall, thin, bent, elderly gentleman, a praying mantis of a man, glides along the sidewalk among the strolling crowd. His eyes flick up and down the street, looking for a vacant seat at our sidewalk cafe. Impeccably dressed in a dark, chalk-stipped three-piece suit, a foulard at his jacket pocket, his steel grey Van Dyke beard gives him a sinister look, heightened by a black, broad brimmed fedora.  Could it be Father Guido Sarducci from Saturday Night Live? No, but maybe a cape, spats and a silver headed walking stick would make him into a character from Phantom of the Opera. Or maybe even a Mafia consigliere. But as he gets closer, the impression softens even more and I am thinking he's probably an over-the-hill gigolo out cruising the bistros for rich widows. Good for him.

Oh, what the hell, I think and when he looks my way. I nod toward the vacant chair at my table. He thanks me with continental formality, a jerky little bow from the waist as he makes his way through the café's iron ornamental fence and winds his way among the tables to the empty chair.

Thank you, he says. I am supposed to meet my niece, he says.

Oh, sure, niece, yeah, I think. I must have the look of an agnostic at Midnight Mass because he reads my mind.

"Yes, my niece, he emphasizes. And my nephew also. They should be along any time now that the opera's out."

He steadies his gaze on the Met crowd across the avenue. A waiter brings a double cup of espresso and sets it down in front him. I don't remember him ordering it. Again, he reads my mind.   

They know me here, he says as he tips the waiter.      

Thank you, Professor, the waiter says.

Professor? I say.

He shovels enough sugar into his brew to launch Cuba’s GNP into orbit.

Ah, yes, he says. Please forgive. I was preoccupied watching for Bianca-Angela.

Your niece.

Yes. My niece.  He stabs his hand into an inside pocket of his suit and the bony hand comes up with a business card.

Professor Angelo Bellinzona

Professor of Italian Studies, Emeritus

Faculty of Arts

Columbiana College

New York, NY

The back of the card holds phone and facsimile numbers and an email address revealed in handwritten scratches as if Tweety Bird had marched across it.

Emeritus? I ask.

"A nice academic way of saying ‘Out', retired. Over and done with. Finito. Kicked out! Call it what you want. The Board of Regents in its imperial wisdom and majesty has decided that I have nothing more to impart to the youth of America. . . except for the mantra ‘Would you like fries with that?’ in Italian, of course.

There was a resignation in his chuckle and he shook his head in apparent disgust  before taking  a gulp of the cooling espresso.

Sorry to hear that, Professor. . .Too bad, I offer. It's a feeble rejoinder to the old man." I thought I saw his eyes tearing up, but it might have been from the exhaust from a thousand honking taxi cabs. 

And you, he said. You are America's youth. So young! What? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?

Twenty-four.

Not a native New Yorker. . .

I'm from upstate. Buffalo, that area. . .

And you've come to New York City to seek your destiny no doubt. . .

Hardly. My turn to laugh now. Just passing through. I am flying out of LaGuardia for Italy tomorrow. Heading for Rome and then going in search of my roots for a couple of months, not my destiny.

You are Italian then?

I plead guilty to that.

And you talk like a lawyer.

Just out of law school, but not sure I want to commit to it yet.

Why did you do it then? It must have been a lot of work.

Why does an Italian boy do anything? To please his mother or re-ignite the fire in a coveted girlfriend that wouldn’t go out with him in high school . . . But a lifetime of writs and torts excites me less than a game of snooker right now. Maybe I’ll change. I'm taking a couple of months off to check out the Italians. It might tell me what I need to know about myself. . . .I know this sounds like a lot of narcissistic bullshit. . .

"Meno male!"

Huh? 

It's not so bad, your motivation. Sometimes we have to do that. It's a quest for self-identification and self-esteem in a large and increasingly complex world, almost as complex as Disney World during a power failure. . . you're not the first one, or the only one to go on the search-for-self.

No, I guess not.

You know, Bellinzona said as he tipped some ash from his cigarillo, when I was a youngster, one of the first things that struck me—right between the eyes, as they say—when my family first came here to the United States. It was how many insulting words there are to describe Italians. At least in those days. . . 

I've heard some of them . . .

"I was on the receiving end of all of them at one time or another, he said, especially in high school—WOP, DP, Greaser, Eye-Tie, Dago, Spaghetti Chomper, Big-nose. And those are the nicer ones. I've heard’ em all."

Big-nose doesn't even belong in the list, I said trying to counter hurt with humor. I doubt Italians have bigger noses than anyone else. . . "

It could have been part of the Jimmy Durante Syndrome, Bellinzona laughed.  The Schnozzola, they called him and that’s what he called himself. He parlayed it into a career on stage, screen and radio. What's that new saying? When somebody hands you a lemon, make lemonade out of it. Same thing applies to big noses.

Still nobody likes to hear that shit, I said.

There's another side to all this however. Bellinzona continued. "It might not be what you would call a good side, but it is another side, a side to consider.

What's that?

I'll tell you my theory although it's not really a theory. . .  My family came from a town in the extreme north of Italy, high in the Dolomites, very near the Swiss border. Joe DiMaggio could easily have hit a homer from our back yard into Switzerland. Over the years, the border was always shifting, a kilometer this way, a kilometer that way, with the result that in one decade our town would be in Switzerland, next decade it was in Italy. So in one decade the residents were considered Swiss, the next decade, Italian. After that, who knew?  Lapp-landers maybe.  

The Professor’s laugh was encouraging.

So, what's the name of the town?

He nailed me with a steely glare then another chuckle bubbled out.

Bellinzona, he replied casually as if there was nothing curious about this coincidence. Our family name was taken from the town. There was nobility in our family away back there somewhere, but we'll forget about that . . . We just took the name of the town.

So, there's Swiss in your family history?

"Yes. But let's not digress, eh. Let's get back to family history."

Go to it, Professor, said I.

After we came to America and started learning all the insulting names, I did a shameful thing. I began telling people I was Swiss instead of Italian. It was a half-truth at least. I'd say I was a Swiss-speaking Italian.

Why the hell did you do that? If they'd insulted me I'd have punched their lights out, I said mustering my most menacing Robert di Niro tones.

"Basta, basta!  Enough  . . . I did it because I had discovered an easy way out, caro mio.  You see, there are no insulting names for the Swiss."  The comment hung in the air while I contemplated it.

There aren't?

Can you think of one? Just one?

Naw, no can do.

"Va bene."

Well, I thought about it quite a bit when I was young. If I had been born just a couple of hundred meters from our house, over the Swiss border, as close as Phil Rizzuto could fling a pop-fly to home plate, there would have been no insulting names to call me. Of course, all of this would be pure speculation if the border had shifted a bit south in those days. But it didn't.  So I was born Italian. . . Someday I'll tell you about Napoleon. He almost missed the boat too, so to speak. . .

Cool, was all I could think to say at first until I remembered something from a television show. "Say, professor. Didn't I hear all this a couple of years back on television, on Hill Street Blues I think. That was one of Lieutenant Furillo's lines on The Blues. . ."

Ah, plagiarism is a sad accusation, my friend and I plead not guilty.

What then?

A neophyte television writer who spoke the line, as I recall, was a student in my class at Columbiana. He's in television now I understand . . .

Small world, say I.

My birthplace ruminations led me to a far more important revelation however. . . It was a revelation so enlightening that I caused me to change completely and stop my little shameful charade. It made me Italian again.

So? And what was the revelation?

Bellinzona leaned back and smiled. I would soon note that he tended to lean back and toss a mischievous smile a lot.

If you will permit me to treat you to a bowl of exquisite pasta and some cheap but excellent wine at a bistro I know down on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, I will reveal it to you, my friend.

Not otherwise?

Not otherwise.

No Professor, I'm afraid not. I'm tired and need some sleep before the flight tomorrow. Thanks just the same. It's been an interesting conversation. . . But I'm as beat as hell. . .

No need to explain. No need to explain.  . . Just remember, you will know if your quest is being successful because you will encounter many surprises. . . Ah, there is Bianca-Angela now, he announced. waving his unlit cigarillo toward her.  "I must depart. Buona fortuna in your travels. Keep my card and contact me if I can be of any assistance. I will be returning to Italy for the summer myself in a few days. Maybe domani, tomorrow."

We stood, shook hands and he turned to walk away with his niece who had stayed out on the sidewalk, not wanting to be introduced, I guessed, which was too bad because she was a good looking nine out of ten and she never gave me a second look. And, like most men, my fantasies began churning and I was momentarily mesmerized by that most alluring of feminine traits, indifference and stand-offishness.

Quick decision. Crow-eating time. I jumped up from my seat.

Ah, Professor, Professor Bellinzona, I shouted as they walked away. . .  You know, it's still early and I can sleep on the plane tomorrow. If that dinner invite is still open, count me in."

The Professor extended one hand and flagged a cab with the other.

Good' he said. "The restaurant is called 'La Pergola'. They know me there.

The Professor was right. The restaurant was as he had described it in the cab on the way. Unpretentious. Chrome and formica chairs and tables. No plastic grapes or provolones hanging from a fake arbour, no Domenico Modugno moaning passionately in the background. Just tons of exquisite pasta—I ordered the pasta olio e aglio—good, fresh radicchio salad, fresh Tuscan bread, all capped off with a few glasses of  Sangiovese so rich and red you could paint a barn with it.

And all this time I'm sitting across from Bianca- Angela's distant gaze trying to concentrate on the Professor's ramblings.  "I tell you, caro mio, the revelation—when it came—came to me in a flash. It was like a burst of brilliant Sicilian sunshine coming out from behind the dark clouds of self-doubt and then a great, dismal oppression was lifted off me. It was an epiphany.  .  . by God, yes! An epiphany! That is the buzzword today, isn't it? That is the only way to describe it."

I made it a point to look very interested, which I was, as much to impress Bianca- Angela  as to satisfy my curiosity about her uncle's 'epiphany'. He leaned back and smiled at me, smugly. He was about to impart his secret, his enlightenment, his discovery.

No one cares about the Swiss. He said it casually as if it was the most accepted notion in the world. And he said it with finality.

I don't get it. . . . That’s your big revelation, Professor?

That's it, my friend! No one cares about the Swiss.

That's it?

"That's it, caro mio. That is the enlightenment."

"Professor, you've really lost me. Maybe I'm particularly thick tonight or maybe it's this wonderful vino rosso. . ."

"Good lad, starting to learn a few Italian words, Huh? But it’s ‘nero’, vino nero."

Huh?

"The Italians call it vino nero. Black wine. Vino rosso is sort of a British corruption and refers to that thin, overly clarified brew they love.  .   . Sorry for interrupting. You were saying?"

I just don't follow you on your observation that no one cares about the Swiss. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But what difference does it make to you. . . or me for that matter?  Bianca-Angela was smirking. I hope I'm not sounding offensive, Bianca-Angela. . . 

Not at all, she said. It was the first time she'd spoken directly to me except for a Would you mind passing the olive oil, earlier on.

The Professor took up the slack, talking like a southern United States senator.

"Why have the Swiss never been given insulting names? It's because no one cares about them. It's as simple as that! They don’t bother anyone and no one bothers them. Have you ever heard of anyone being angry at the Swiss? Or bent over with laughter at their comical antics? Or excited about something stupendous they've done? No, no, no! The answer is 'no'. People just do not feel anything about the Swiss one way or the other and so don't react to them. The Swiss bathe in their precious neutrality in more ways than just political and financial. They are neutral to us and so are we to them. It is simply a case of MAD, caro mio. Mutually Assured Disinterest. That is my theory."

And the Italians?

"Aha! Just the opposite. No one is unaffected by us! They curse us and criticize us and call us dagos. They marvel at us. They swing back and forth, avanti e in dietro like Umberto Eco’s pendulum in an earthquake. They make fun of us, love us, laugh at us and with us, and—to show they care—they insult us by calling us names that used to sting once but now make us laugh. That process caro mio, is the cultural and societal hazing we must endure before they will admit us into their club. And you know what?"

No. What? As a newcomer here in America I played along."

Bellinzona looked around conspiratorially, then continued sotto voce. They are really pulling for us all the way! Take a lesson from the Jimmy Durante Dilemma, my friend, and turn the sour into the sweet.

You learned that from the Italians living here or in Italy?

No, from all of them— in Italy, here in the States, even in Australia. Anywhere. They do not change that much one place to the other and they all provide the examples you are looking for. . .

The Professor's words hung in the air so heavily most of the next day on the bumpy Alitalia flight to Milan . . .it felt like the cargo hold must be full of Ringling’s elephants.

*     *     *

So, dear reader, with mighty courage and a dollop of moxie, let us now boldly advance beyond stereotypes. But before we do, in order to ease your voyage of demystification into the arcane world of the Eye-Talian (rhymes with stallion) and to facilitate your appreciation of that delightful race that has spread both its genes and its Pizza Margherita throughout the globe, I will invite you through the portal of eternal wisdom and absurdity, cautioning you with