fora febraro

It's since noon that my windows rattle every two minutes from an explosion somewhere to the north. There is a low thud in the glass and I hear the sound rolling around the valley, bouncing off the mountains on each side. As the evening progresses, the explosions become more frequent. February is ending.

Fuori febbraio (out February) is an obscure mountain-people North-Veneto-and-Trentino festivity, hardly heard of down in the cities. It is said to originate from ancient Greeks who celebrated the birth of Aphrodite at this time. In Roman and Venetian calendars March was the first month of the year. This particular custom, "throwing out" February and "calling in" March, probably originates from the Germanic people colonising the Dolomite mountains area since medieval times. The songs and traditions differ from one village to the other. In some the custom is to burn the figure of an old lady (old year) as a part of the festivity (Befana!).

In Valdagno people go out on the streets with pots and pans, bang them together and sing:

fóra febraro
che márso l'è qua
se non l'è márso
mar-si-rá

[fuori febbraio / che marzo è qua / se non'è marcio / marcirá]
[February get out / 'cos March is here / if it isn't rotten yet / it will be soon]

This way of making mayhem will apparently wake up the nature and remind the year to get a move on.

Every other year a "chiamata di marzo" (March-call) is organised in nearby Recoaro where, instead of banging pots, people are dressing up like a hundred years ago and march through the town, accompanied by wagons of model old-style smithies, bakeries, pasta- and laundrymaking, and such. And some drinks, too, considering the cold. Well, this historical workday demonstration doesn't seem to have much to do with the coming spring, but at least everyone has fun and the children will learn that the pasta didn't always use to come in blue Barilla packages.

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By the way, the comments are now open to anyone, not only blogger users. I just discovered it and am hereby apologising for anyone who has been itching to discuss but hasn't been able to.

Vicenza: baxi si

The time for carnivals and other general mayhem when "everything goes" was almost over when Italy came to show open signs of a party-mood and finally threw a sizeable manifestation on the Dal Molin issue. For the past weeks, "Vicenza" has become the synonym of the leftist-pacifist event that took place on the 17th of February.

So what's the deal? Well, it's been going on for a bit of time already. Very simply said, the mayor sold the city's airport to the Americans who were planning to double the already existing military base in Vicenza. At first, noone knew about it. When the government changed, the issue came up along with the first doubting voices - the airport is remarkably close to the city centre and having F16-s depart from behind their houses didn't go down too well with people who don't approve of the US foreign policy. People started to manifest - there was one public protest after another in December, but the information didn't reach many. Vicenza voted yes on the political level, but few of your usual people-on-the-street would admit to approving the base-enlargement. The potential economical benefit and good relations to the US weighed up other arguments and the government, though carefully, said yes too. This simplified version is what I've gathered from the scattered opinions around here. Valdagno is situated 32 km north of Vicenza.

It wasn't until all the big newspapers had gone on about it for a while when Vicenza started to get real attention from all over Italy. Thus, coaches and reservation trains from Milano, Rome and Torino were organised; information blasted around the streets and websites; and the media did their bit of confusion. Three completely unconnected events taking place within a week of each other were all mixed into one: 1) the pacifist manifestation in Vicenza; 2) the arrest of 15 extreme-left terrorists; 3) the death of a police officer in the hands of Sicilian football-hooligans. The simple conclusion from all this would be that pacifism is almost as bad as terrorism, or that there will certainly be someone of this opinion ruining the whole thing. This scared a considerable amount of people off attending.

This was the reason why our small company arrived as late as 5 o'clock. We had spent the day relaxing, checking on the news and hesitating whether the whole din was worth it or not. Well, all in all it was much like your usual student day party where all kinds of leftsy* people come out to the fresh air - hippies, woollies (est: kampsikud), tree-huggers, punks, students, young political/ pacifist/ intellectual idealists and all others. (I do believe that only this kind of societal labelling will pass on the impression of it.) It was as peaceful an event as anyone could hope for and we saw nor heard of anything violent. That said, in my humble opinion the manifestation was rather an assurance of emotion than a political voice - coming out on the streets only after all the decisions had been made was never going to make a practical difference, though obviously it was worth something to show how 150 000 people feel about the base at Dal Molin.

But it was fun. In addition to providing a good picture of all kinds of political activists in the area, the event demonstrated some true playfulness. For example, in the photo on the left the sign reads: "BAXI SI ma co la lèngoa. no militari!" It's a play on words: baxi [read: ba:zi] in venetian dialect sounds similar to basi, (military) bases; but means baci, kisses. So - "OK to the bases/kisses, but only with the tongue! no soldiers!" My flatmates are illustrating how it goes.


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*leftsy - anyone not voting to the political right. In generalised stereotyped terms anyone who: doesn't devote their lives to earning money, and/or thinks about third countries, and/or wears colourful scarves, and/or relaxes, and/or doesn't mind reading Marx, and/or gives out communist leaflets, and/or is pro-choice, etc etc etc. This division is something new to me, as my life in Estonia has been blissfully apolitical (being certain that politics will corrupt any good ideas in no time and that in the end they're all the same and so on). By these Italian standards I'd categorise to the left -- all the more strange as I usually don't even know who to vote for, and regard the blue-eyed Italian communists as people who should reform their offensive flag and take a field trip to the nearest Eastern-European country.

m'illumino di meno

16 February was the all-Italian (international?) day of risparmio energetico - energy saving. A popular radio show, Caterpillar (pronunced Cat-eR-pi:ll-aR) on Radio Due, has done a good job talking of hybrid cars and simple everyday energy saving techniques; come up with a beaty little song; and created a strong slogan that is likely to come up every now and again. The name of the campaign, M'illumino di meno, literally means "I light up of less" and refers to Giuseppe Ungaretti's famous poem Morning (1933):

M'illumino
d'immenso.

In translation it says: "I flood myself with light of the immense". Caterpillar's adaption of it is witty, easy to remember and utter, and most importantly of all - strikes some note in any Italian that ever went to school.

From 6 pm to 6:05 pm, ENEL - the Italian electricity network - registered the decrease of energy use by the amount of 300 megawatt (approx. 5 million light-bulbs) as cities switched off the lighting on their main squares, people shut down their computers and our own humble flat was cooking in the light of a tiny IKEA saving-bulb.

We organised a candle-light dinner for our closest friends for the occasion. It had to be Friday, though the usual party-night is Saturday. (Due to long lunch-breaks, people leave work no earlier than 6 or 7 and bearing in mind to visit someone after a week of these evenings might not be easy.) We sent out the invitations and sat down waiting. By Friday afternoon only one person had excused himself, as his way home would be half the length of Italy. Another left the country in a flurry of fresh love and he was excused too. The others made no sign because:
a) they didn't check emails;
b) they did, but thought our invitation was a Caterpillar announcement;
c) knew there was something, but preferred to have their usual Friday-evening relaxation instead.
It often happens here in Veneto, but it still baffles me: it is the exact opposite of my first stereotype of the Italians. I was delighted to think that they value their friends and the time spent together much more than the Estonians do (not that the Estonians don't love their friends - they do - but the habitual everyday goings-on, studying, and work generally tend to take the first seat). In fact, I might have been mistaken due to the holiday-like nature of my first encounters. Or then again, I might have mistaken the Italians for the Portuguese.

Regardless of our company being the usual 4 instead of a merry 12, we enjoyed ourselves immensely over the food and the ceremonial feeling of candle-light, three courses of dinner and two kinds of wine. It was so good that it took us two days to do all the dishes.

What comes to saving energy, I don't think that 5 minutes of darkness on Piazza San Marco will change much; but if there were people who spent all the evening being fussy about turning on the TV, I guess it will have at least some kind of an impact for the next weeks. Then, of course, we'll go on using the tumble-dry, the lift and leaving lights on in the interest of atmosphere.

lezioni d'italiano per stranieri

Every Tuesday and Thursday morning I spend one and a half hours studying Italian. But it's not a mere session of grammar or vocabulary. The language class is much more than that. In fact, it is not too far from a kind of a zoo.

I owe a lot of thanks to Vides, an NGO that coordinates (among their other activities) the twice-weekly classes made specially for the numerous local foreigners. The differences from your average training-firm sessions are considerable. First of all, it's free. The teachers are volunteers - retired Italians that don't mind explaining alphabets, grammar rules or catholic traditions to immigrants of all shapes and sizes. The students are almost all women (the men, if there are any, go to work and can't spare mornings in classes). The didactic materials are anything that comes up - improvised conversation, photocopied grammar exercises, fiction books, Italian textbooks from Asian countries, and - always - world maps. Usually a study-group will involve as many nationalities as there are students and the cultural, geographical, linguistic and what-not differences give the teachers an inexhaustible amount of conversation material. This is what I mean by a zoo: making a usual introduction round can, and usually will, resemble a ride around the world.

Ciao, I'm Maris, I come from Estonia. Ess-too-nii-aa. It's in the northeast of Europe. (Pointing on the map) here, near Finland. No, not Latvia. Estonia. I live on this island here (interested nods and smiles at the mention of an island; luckily Saaremaa is big enough to be visible). And so it goes on. I'm unique in not having moved for work, and in coming from an EU member country (with the new exception of the numerous Romanians).

There is usually someone from India, someone from Moldova, one or two Romanians, a Russian, someone from South America, someone from Morocco, someone from Ghana or other parts of Africa. Africans tend to be quite advanced, though the accent can be quite strong. Indians and the Ghanese speak good English - this usually makes the teacher a little uneasy, because the opportunity to explain things in their language seems to be in reach, but is yet too far (few local Italians older than 40 will know English). Some of the women speaking only languages that use alphabets other than the Latin one are in for a difficult stretch of learning the letters the toddler-way: having the alphabets spelled out to them in a high voice accompanied by a mimic normally used to keep babies from crying (but then again - how else could it be done?). The Brazilians and also, Romanians, are greatly advantaged as their own languages work in much the same way as Italian does; they move along fast, but often retain the melody of their native language. Great numbers of Muslim women have only come to Italy to tend to the family while the husbands work, and usually don't interact with Italians (the same is true for many of the Indians I see) and this slows down their learning process considerably. I've always seen them as intriguing puzzles - you never know what's inside.

Then there are the Eastern-European women who have come to work as nurses to the elderly or housekeepers; not because this is their calling, but because ironing bedsheets pays so much more in Italy than being a lecturer, teacher, or even a dentist does in Russia. Often their families back at home have no other source of income, sometimes the husband is ill (or worse, likes to drink), and the teenage children need a lot of support without being able give much input of their own yet. These women (badanti they call them here) tend to live alone, devote themselves entirely to work and send as much money as possible back home. This is not very difficult to understand for Estonians. Despite all the economic growth and the pretense of being a developed "Western" country, the same amount of money still buys three times more food in Estonia than here in Italy; the difference in salaries compared to Finland not too many kilometres away is quite striking; and all the time more people leave for a shorter or longer period abroad. But seeing the other side of this migration is a very stark contrast to what I've gotten used to thinking when I hear "work abroad".

One of these badanti from Moldova - let's call her Ana - is 42, has lived in Italy for 10 years already and calls home every day to her pride and joy: her 17-year-old son. She learned to use the email to see the photos he sends her. I hear how much she pays for his education, all the necessary books and materials (it's an appalling amount of money), how long she hasn't seen him and how well he does in school. It's enough to make any woman feel a little sad.

Then there is the 6-year old Indian girl - an unbelievably sweet little being - who used to come to the class with her mother for a while and speaks better Italian than she does. I wonder who, or of which culture, she will consider herself to be in 10 years' time?

This exciting and mysterious carousel of colourful saris definitely makes up half of the reasons why I go. The second (or should I say the first?) is my own learning process. After spending some time in a fun, but too simple group, I'm now the single student of a former lawyer who knows Latin and French, is fluent in Esperanto and considers English to be a wacky language where people say "apple" and write "banana". I insist on translating random pieces of text to start getting a grip on how Italian could sound nice when written down; on going through explanations of the passato remoto (a scary grammar dinosaur that is yet alive and well in the South of Italy); and discussing the grammatical aspects of the dialects. He insists on explaining the Latin roots of important words (sometimes ones that exist in English and I learned when I was 10); describing how the grammar used to look a long time ago; and dismissing the dialect-issue. I think we both appreciate ending up together though. People who go to the language classes are generally practical and busy (why else did they move?) and I'm likely to be the most bookish one. Or at least the one with most time to muse over passato remoto.

Even if I miss out on a number of lessons for various reasons (the silliest one was last time when I missed a plane and didn't make it back from abroad on time), it's comforting to know that there is a way to follow what my language does. Before I discovered the classes, I was quite lazy with learning, as most people around me spoke English. By now I've switched to Italian as an everyday communication language, but talking to friends doesn't help me remember the gender exceptions (la foto; il problema) or get the hang of the subjunctive properly. Without the classes I'd most likely end up in an embarrassing situation where I talk as a local, but am completely illiterate. Well, to some degree this is already the case. But I'll keep trying. More delightful info on the passato remoto to come!