Lentils

"Lentils?!" I exclaimed, a touch puzzled. I associated lentils with cheap student meals: little lumps of brown in a bland broth. 

"My mother's lentil soup is delicious," said my friend. I was skeptical. 

"But why lentils?"

"Lentils symbolise prosperity. The more you eat the richer you'll be in the new year."

Lentils and a sausage (cotechino) or stuffed pig's trotter (stinco di maiale) was the traditional dish for New Year's Eve. 

So what could I do but try it? I boiled the lentils and the sausage as indicated on various packet instructions. It all looked, well, rather uninviting. It was. The lentils were soggy and had a distinct earthiness to them. The sausage had an unappealing puddle of fat leaking from it. I ate a few mouthfuls and gave up. Nobody could be that desperate for wealth.

I asked around a bit more. It seemed I had used the wrong type of lentils. Now those grown on the plains around Norcia and Castelluccio were the ones to use. The cotechino could be enhanced with a little mostarda, which isn't mustard, but candied fruit in a spicy syrup. It looked like just not-the-thing to have with meat.

Traditional: cotechino, lentils and mostarda

But I gave it another try. The lentils were definitely tasty but the cotechino? Let's say greasy sausage and sweet spicy syrup are not a marriage made in heaven - though a lot of Italians would swear otherwise. 

 It turns out the whole traditional New Year's Eve menu is geared towards prosperity in the new year. The lentils because they are round, flat and vaguely golden in hue represent coins. The fatty meat symbolizes abundance. The meal is then rounded off with grapes to ensure frugality with the new found wealth. 
 

lentil lasagna

However, as I peruse my food magazines, looking for a new take on old lentils, I realise that I may not be the only person who finds the New's Year Eve menu a tad dull. My eye is caught by the picture of little nests of filo pastry with dainty spoonfuls of lentils in them and cubes of cotecchino atop. It looks nice - maybe without the sausage? But would such a small quantity of lentils bring me the desired prosperity?

First words: ragazzi, ragazze

Turn back the clock, eighteen years: it’s summer. It’s hot. I pace in front of the blackboard. I hate the thing, after three hours I’m covered in chalk dust. Back and forth I go and wonder where my students are. They file in, in their camouflage gear , greens and khakis. Twenty conscripts entering the quonset hut for their obligatory English lesson. They don’t want to be here. Do I?

There is only one window, at the back of the room and the sun is beaming through it. I can make out a bobbing sea of heads but nothing else with the light shining in my eyes. I beam, the not-quite-yet-perfected stage smile: “Ciao ragazzi!”. One of the few phrases I know in Italian. The more enthusiastic among them answer, “’ello teacheerrr.”

Roll on to 2016, it’s lunchtime and I’m sitting in reception.  Head office calls: “Are any of the ragazze there?” asks Clara in her cherpy voice, just too high pitched to be genuine. I pause. Ragazze (girls)? I know who she means so I say: “No, they’re at lunch.” 

September, the month when we do the level testing. I’m whiling away the time in the staff room when one of the secretaries  calls me “there’s a ragazza in reception waiting to do her test.”  Mentally I imagine a child then dismiss that as children are called ‘bambini’. So, I think, a young teen, maybe a university student? I round the corner and face a woman whose girl-hood is long past.  

Have I reached the land of eternal youth? 

The term ‘ragazzi’ can simply mean ‘guys’  as in ‘hey, guys’ which was the use I made of it back in the days when I was going from army base to army base, entertaining  (i.e. teaching)the conscripts. The Italian military didn’t know what to do with them so English lessons. The following year obligatory conscription was done away with.

The term ‘ragazzi’ or ‘ragazze’  (singular: ragazzo or ragazza) seems applicable to everyone provided the interlocutor is older, or considers themselves in some way ‘superior’. This last is in itself a hard concept to assess as it is often a figment of the speaker’s imagination.

University professors may call exams, forget to cancel and not turn up. The next session for that exam will be in six months’ time. Never mind,  the ragazzi (university sudents) who have studied for it, stressed over it, will understand. Company bosses may forget to cancel meetings, never mind the ragazzi, their employees, won’t (can’t) complain.

Many people consider it a friendly gesture, there’s nothing wrong with calling a group of adults ‘ girls’ and ‘boys’ whatever their age. But  it is also a not-so-subtle belittling. The language makes sure people are kept in their places.  

Italy is an ageist country. Magazine articles have the ages of the people in brackets beside their names. Much debate goes on about the relative youth or not, of public figures, with the attendant comments on their appearance, even more markedly so if a woman (ragazza) is being talked about. 

At job interviews age is mentioned alongside other topics which in many countries are considered inappropriate. 

Then at a certain point in a persons life the notion that age confers automatic respect comes into play. Thus, the indignant, “how dare you say that to me. How dare you speak to a person of my age in such a way.” Never mind the speaker may only be a few years older. Never mind that the person has done nothing to deserve respect.

I’m looking forward to playing that card!

 

 

 

Strolling down the high street

There are people everywhere: laughing, chatting, toting shopping bags with the names of international high-street brands emblazoned on them. and gesticulating as they hold shouting volume conversations on their Smart phones. Toy dogs in plaid coats tug at their leashes.  A bicycle whizzes past. A woman shrieks as a rat darts alongside the pavement past her Louboutins. Parents push strollers round the pot-holes and narrowly miss the ankles of love struck teens walking arm in arm. A group of loud American tourists push their way through the throng on their hired rickshaw. A police car slowly wends its way forwards, pauses, then continues. This is Via del Corso, Rome's high street. 

Its present name dates from the 15th century when, for the carnival, riderless horses would race down its length in a 'corsa dei barbari'. It was well suited for this being the only perfectly straight road in an area characterised by meandering tight alleys and small piazzas. 
  
 Before that (from circa 220AD) it was known as the 'Via Lata' (broad way) - and spanning 10 metres wide for the ancients this was indeed a wide road. It was part of a much longer road that stretched as far as the Adriatic. What remains today is 1.5kms long, from Piazza Venezia to Piazza del Popolo, and straight as a die. What was considered with awe in ancient times is considered with irritation in current times. 

 It takes little to block it. The road is part of the designated ZTL (zona traffico limitato) but not included in the limited traffic are the daily buses, taxis and parliamentary vehicles that run up and down it in continuation. 

I start my walk as I alight from the bus opposite the imposing facade of the Palazzo Doria- Pamphilj. Ten years ago,  I worked for a school which had its headquarters on the fifth floor of the building. I'd enter through an imposing door and start my long slow climb up. There was a lift. Its coffin-like dimensions and slowness made me imagine a bent old man somewhere in the cellars of the building cranking a rusty handle round and round a pulley which lifted the box up into the heights of the palazzo.

I always went up the stairs, two narrow flights past the entrance to a private university. Then out of nowhere a large, rather grand looking marble stairway appeared but the worn, shallow steps were slippery. I would pause at the top of them beside the entrance to a legal office and peer down into a splendid courtyard. The last leg involved a very narrow flight of fifteen steps past a private apartment where an elderly man would walk on the narrow landing with his zimmer frame up and down, up and down. Finally. a bit out of breathe I would climb the last steps to the locked glass door of the school where almost every time someone would ask, "but why didn't you use the lift?"

Today I notice that the courtyard is open so I go in and have a look at the orange and lemon trees and the famed renaissance colonnade before resuming my walk up the street past the church of Santa Maria in Via Lata which in the fifteenth century operated a soup kitchen for the needy and onwards past the church of San Marcello on its small piazza.  

 Down side alleys tables are set up, some are still occupied by a few late diners though this being the heart of touristic Rome most of the restaurants offer non-stop service from lunch through to dinner with low quality over-priced fare.

I came out early so as to avoid the passegiata - starting around 4pm when Italians come out to stretch their legs after lunch and walk off some of the pasta. The Corso is not well-designed for crowds of people. The pavements are narrow and the herds of bovine-like tourists clog it up. They move forward in clusters clad in their identical red T-shirts or sporting a baseball cap or following a yellow flag held aloft by their guide.

 Locals push around them or through them as they try to get on with their daily business: civil servants going from building to building, shop assistants on a break, waiters bearing aloft trays of food and swearing beneath their breathe in the best romanaccio as yet another careless tourist cuts in front of them...

If the street has a middle point it would be around the height of Piazza Colonna with the victory column of Marcus Aurelius standing proud with its depictions in relief of the Danubian or Marcomannic wars. Closer to the road is a fountain. Gulls often perch on it. 

Opposite the Piazza is the restored art nouveau Galleria Colonna. It was renamed Galleria Alberto Sordi after a famous Roman actor who died in 2003 the year the gallery was re-opened in its present incarnation as a shopping mall.

After a brief foray into the gallery, to a large book shop, I continue up the Corso towards Piazza del Popolo. I pass by Palazzo Chigi home of the Prime Minister.

It was bought by the Chigi family, from the Aldobrandini who had run out of money and left it unfinished. The Chigi finished the job. Pope Alexander VII (a Chigi) was  responsible for tidying up Piazza Colonna and much of the Corso which up until then had been semi-permanent building site. 

  Since  the 15th century the Corso had been a  fashionable place for new building projects funded by either the church or the nobility. Churches sprung up mushroom like and nobles erected palaces. Then as now, resources would run out and a once sprightly building site would be reduced to disuse and abandonment.

 As I walk down the road past the entrance to the upmarket Via Condotti with a distant glimpse of the Spanish Steps, past the impressive Fendi building adjacent to a vast H&M retailer, I notice the many signs affixed to facades telling people of illustrious guests, or the names of the palazzi, or old faint letters which describe a past occupation for the building. The history of the road is there for all to read.

The old Metropolitan cinema, where I used to see films in original version, is still there, all boarded up. Numerous shops have come and gone. 

The church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli is hidden under scaffolding but its 'twin' Santa Maria in MonteSanto has come out of wraps looking cleaner. They are both 17th century baroque churches.

I stand at the end of the street and look northwards just making out through the crowd which is growing by the minute, the white Victor Emmanuel monument, 1,5 kilometres away.