eurochristmas

how much of who you are is made up of where you are from? the place where you were born, what people you've had around you, all those elements of course have a profound impact on the person that you are.

Spending some time "home" for Christmas i have enjoyed coming back to what has made me the person that i am. Being used to living in the uk, it's fun to rediscover the little differences that make up the big picture and point out to the fact that you're in a different country.

My home country is Italy. i like my country: i think it's quite cool at times, and quite annoying at others. all in all you could say i love it from afar. living there would drive me insane but going there from time to time is great and i keep on good terms with the nation as a whole.

The main thing that annoys me about being from italy, though, is that everybody i meet has such a clear opinion of it, even if they've never set foot there. They've all heard and internalised certain facts about the country and they all regurgitate them and spurt them all over my shirt when i talk to them.

Americans, i'm sorry to say, are the worst. Because they transpose this idea of italian-americans onto italian-italians. Italian-americans themselves seem to have an idea of italy that's romanticised at best, and delusional at worst.

For this reason i generally dislike telling people that i'm italian, because i know that any comment about italy, whether positive or negative, is going to piss me off in one way or another. It's the way that a rather complex, multifaceted and quite troubled country can be reduced to a couple of statements generally involving mums and pasta that annoys me.

It's also the fact that i don't fit comfortably in the idea that people have of italians, that puts me up against this mythical land of loud, extroverted and sociable people that i'm obviously a bad example of. At one point or another, i inevitably end up causing some surprise by pointing out one of the following facts:

_i am not a "passionate" lover (ok, i don't point this out to a lot of people)
_i don't care about football (soccer)
_i don't come from a large family
_i am not religious
_i am out to my family

The italy that i know has nothing to do with all the above. When i think of italy, some of the things that come to my mind are:

Food-fascism: there's normal food (italian) and the "rest". The "rest" went, in recent years, from weird to interesting but you still probably wouldn't want to strain your system by having it twice in the same week.

Hygiene neurosis: i've grown up being told not to hold on to supports on buses, not to use toilets in public places, not to kiss people allowing my lips to come in contact with the cheek of the person i'm kissing and various priceless advice that, i assure you, will come in very handy when bacteriological warfare is waged against us. I remember, as a child, going to play at a friend's house where the first thing i had to do upon arriving was wash my hands 10 times. I remember a neighbour that children used to call "the jug" because of her habit of constantly keeping her gloved up hands on her hips to avoid touching anything. To this date i often sport an approving smile going into an italian supermarket and being asked to wear disposable plastic gloves before buying fruits and vegetables and i've even seen immigration officers in airports adapting the same principle to avoid the lethal finger-to-passport contact.

Informal shop-assistants: there's never any attempt to be systematically polite. Shop assistants can be obnoxiously rude or heartwarmingly friendly. Or anything in between. There's no absent-minded, mechanical politeness to be expected. Shortly before Christmas, while on a shopping spree, i found it refreshing being offered a biscuit by a shop assistant who was casually snacking while giving people information. I, of course, declined because at the time I wasn't wearing my bioresistant bodysuit.