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Italy as a Museum: New Impressions of Italy
by Dr. Emanuel Paparella
2010-08-09 07:42:29 |
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Once again this year (2010) I have taken 18 students from Broward College for a five week study trip to Italy. We have been back for three days now and are barely over the jet lag. Once again the students studied at the University of Urbino and traveled to Venice, Florence, Rome, with minor excursions to San Marino, Assisi, Gubbio, San Leo, Verona were they were treated to a magnificent production of Verdi’s opera Aida in the Roman arena choreographed by none other than Franco Zeffirelli.
 After the initial culture shock the students immersed themselves in Italian culture whose language they studied in the morning. This year we even added a course on Italian films shown in the afternoon which attracted even those who were not taking the course. They delighted in the famed Ducal palace, the gelati, the cafes, the good wine, the good food at the University mensa, the beaches, the excursions to Assisi were they saw the famous Giotto frescoes which begin Italian humanistic painting, the extraordinary Renaissance art, architecture, monuments, museums, gardens. They seemed to be particularly struck by Venice, the first city which they visited for three days. They even bought new luggage to bring back souvenirs of Italy to their dear ones.
And so it went for five whole weeks. The trip could not have been more successful in providing those students with a first taste of Italy and inspiring them to eventually return on their own. I think they’d be the first ones to concur on such an assessment, judging from the evaluations they have submitted on the program. It bears mentioning here that the program is open to students of other schools and even non-students as long as they register for one course at the college. Next year we hope to enroll a larger number.
Indeed, Italy seen with fresh eyes as a tourist, albeit studying at a university, is an incredible experience, it could even be a transforming civilizing and humanistic experience for those who appreciate what it has to offer in the humanities and the arts, literature and philosophy. Invariably, one detects that some of those students have indeed had such an experience while the more superficial ones among them (and there are always a few of those) go abroad to get stoned, to enjoy the fancy hotels, to look for romance, all experiences they could have had at home at a much cheaper price. Italy is wasted on those, but those are indeed a tiny minority, a phenomenon already observed by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago when he said that youth is wasted on some young.
There is however another phenomenon which has nothing to do with age or gender or time. A phenomenon I have been observing for some time now, every time I return to Italy; but to notice it may require a modicum of maturity and wisdom even in the young. It is the conception of Italy as some kind of museum; a museum about which one takes as many pictures as possible in order to take them home to place in one’s albums. As the slogan goes: one goes to Italy to see the sights. The sights are usually Venice, Florence, Rome and sometimes Pompei thrown in as a bonus.
Pompei is instructive, since it is a dead city wonderfully preserved, it is in effect a museum always full of tourists incessantly shooting pictures. If we are not careful Venice may eventually become another dead city or museum. On an average a thousand people leave the city every year. If the trend continues it will be a dead city in one hundred years, where one will only see tourists roaming and milling around. As it is, especially in the summer, one notices precious few Venetians in its streets. It takes a movie such as Bread and Tulipans to remind us that people actually live and suffer and hope and despair and work out their destiny in Venice. Those people living there seem to resent the tourists who invade their city every year while at the same time providing a living, the only possible living, for them; surely a schizophrenic situation.
If the reader is wondering where do those Venetians move when they leave Venice, they should know that they mostly move to Mestre, an industrial city, as ugly as they come, with the dubious distinction of being one of the destructive polluting factors of Venice slowly killing the city. In a sense Venice has become the symbol of our brave new world which prefers comfort and material prosperity to beauty and has killed the very concept of beauty replacing it with the shocking and the vulgar. This modern phenomenon can be encapsulated by the exclamation of a student on another trip: “how beautiful Venice is!” But you see, he was referring not to Venice but to Mestre which is the last city before arriving in Venice. If Mestre proved to be a beautiful city to this student’s eyes one can just imagine the ugly place he must have came from.
That is why this year I decided not to take a camera with me and focus on just enjoying the sights without the anxiety of capturing them, and most importantly interacting with the people who live in Italy. It is hard to do that with a camera covering one’s face. I don’t know if this was noticed by the students. In case they did, now they know why. It was not because I could not afford a camera.
I trust they noticed that indeed there are people living in Italy and they speak Italian and they congregate in the piazzas where they carry on interminable conversations replete with expressive gesticulations on the meaning of their heritage and civilization within modern society. Unfortunately few students stop to talk to them, for they are too busy taking pictures of the sights to bring home.
I always manage to meet one or two of those interesting erudite people every time I go to Italy. I met one this year too. His name is Norberto Lombardi and he happens to be the regional representative for the Molise region in Rome. I met him on my way back from a quick visit to Bitonto in the southern region of Puglia (I left the students for a few days in the capable hands of a colleague from Broward College) to visit my bed-ridden mother. On the way back by train I stopped in Campobasso where Noberto, the director of the Urbino Program and another colleague who also heads a program in Urbino were waiting for me at the station. Noberto took us with his car to visit the Roman excavations recently found near Campobasso complete with temple and stadium. It was like visiting a mini Pompei with a difference: this was not a mere archeological site. Farmers had been living on top of these excavations. Some of them have been convinced to leave the area with some compensation and some are still living there. The houses they live in are very rustic and almost as interesting as the Roman ruins themselves. We had a great time discussing this intriguing phenomenon of archeology and folk culture coming together, i.e., of Italy as a museum vis a vis a living country within modernity. This article would become far too long if I were to even partially repeat here the discussion.
Afterward Norberto took us to a tour of the city of Campobasso (the capital of Molise) giving us all kinds of historical and cultural details on everything we saw, and then treated us all to a very good trattoria where the spirited conversation continued over local food and good wine. The next day Norberto further treated us to an incredible folkloristic feast whose tradition goes back two hundred years but more likely to pagan times: the so called feast of the grain of Saint Anne celebrating contadino (farmer or what Silone calls “cafone”) culture in the region. It takes place in Jelsi, the town where the director of the Urbino Program, Mike Vena, was actually born and from where he emigrated at the age of 18. People in the procession which had some 40 carts and lasted a couple of hours were dressed up in their typical folkloristic costumes, some of them dancing the tarantella and singing local songs in dialect. The focus was on the carts pulled by gigantic Marchegiane white cows with various imaginative representations all made with grain. Even though the feast is dedicated to St. Anne (the grandmother of Jesus Christ and therefore to the wisdom of old age) the feast is a pagan celebration of the fertility of the land. Here again I took no pictures but I did buy a booklet illustrating the feast with an article by Mike Vena in it reflecting on the bridge between two cultures which the immigrant represents abroad.
Afterward it occurred to me that it was indeed sad that our students are not offered a glimpse of this rustic culture of the people from time to time. That they are taken from Rome upwards to see and photograph “the sights” and thus given the erroneous impression that all that Italy has to offer is from Rome upwards and it is all in museums; that is to say, Italy is a museum to be seen and preserved in pictures while ignoring the people who actually live there. It is sad that the students are never given a hint of the important fact that before they spoke Latin in southern Italy they spoke Greek and that in fact the whole of southern Italy was called Magna Grecia and the very name Napoli means new city (na polis) in Greek and it was there before Rome; that Greek temples exist in Sicily in Agrigento and in Paestum near Naples which are better preserved than the ones in Greece.
While ruminating on these thoughts on the last days of the program in Rome I picked up La Repubblica and there read a sequel to last year’s scandal of Berlusconi’s escorts in the people’s palace. It was revealed that it was not just one but dozens of escorts which were provided for his cronies too. I thought to myself: how bizarre, but then again, what else is new in Italy? The answer came a day later when I went to St. Peter Square and low and behold I found it full of young people between the ages of 14 and 24 singing and waiving their flags from all over the European Union and waiting for the Pope to appear which he did eventually; there were some fifty thousand of them.
This unexpected scene brought me back to my ruminations on the European Union for the last ten years or so and how tragic it is that Christianity is no longer perceived as a cultural cement of sort for the union’s cultural identity and it is no longer given a place, together with soccer games, in the public square. The sight of those festive young people uttering all the languages of Europe proved to be the silver lining of my rather sad ruminations that day. I thought to myself: how wonderful it would be if some of my students had seen this demonstration and then take it home as an experience of the diverse culture of the EU of which Italy is a principal part; the old dream of Dante. On the way back to the hotel I was pleasantly surprised: some of them had actually seen it and had duly photographed it. When they look at such a photograph in their album I hope that it will intimate to them that Italy and its people is by far more important than Italy as a museum
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