Flesh for Fantasy

I’m used to seeing recyclers sort through all manner of rubbish. Standing behind a Milanese refuse truck hauling large quantities of discarded meat products is a completely different story. Via Padova, sometime in February.

Declining Exchange Rate

One of the best places to gauge Italy’s changing demographics are the open air markets held throughout Milan each week. Our neighborhood affair takes place on Tuesday and Saturday. Hosted in a square bordering Via Vitruvio, its a great place to buy everything from olive oil and parakeets, to Italian translations of the Koran, and cheap pantyhose.

For the last month, I’ve forced myself to go down to the market, and record the different languages I encounter as I walk from one end to the other.  French, Arabic, Spanish, Tamil, together with several different Italian dialects, are the primary languages spoken. Often I have found myself recording one language on my left, another on my right, simultaneously.

Focused on making audio recordings, I almost always left my camera behind on these trips. Last week, however, I made an exception. An Egyptian merchant had been selling Obama-themed grocery bags for the previous couple of weeks. I didn’t want to buy one. However, I didn’t want to leave Milan without having taken a picture of one of them either.

Clampdown

On Friday night, Jennifer and I went out for dinner. Our destination was an Arab-run Tex Mex place on the other side of Piazzale Loreto, a block from the Egyptian consulate. In the year that we’ve been living here, it has definitely become one of our favorite restaurants, even though its not exactly orthodox in its take on the cuisine. Nevertheless, its offered us welcome relief from pasta.

On our walk to the restaurant, we noticed a significant amount of police and military vehicles in the square. Large Carabinieri-marked vans with anti-riot mesh attached to the windows, and oversized, camouflage troop transports repeatedly whizzed by us. Their destination: Via Padova, the site of fierce street battles between Latinos and North Africans two weeks before.

Unnerved by all the activity, following dinner, we took a shortcut home through the Loreto tube station, which you can walk from one side of the square to the other. Its normally bustling passages were empty. Gone were the usual south Asian street vendors hawking keffiyehs and Obama-branded beanies. A trail of blood extended down the floor, stopping, suddenly, fifty or so feet later.

A couple of hours later, I took Pixel out for his last walk. Security personnel continued to drive around the square, periodically turning off onto Via Padova, sometimes onto Corso Buenos Aires, where an ambulance stood parked, lights flashing. From what I could see, the police vans were full. It was difficult to see  through the plastic windows of the army vehicles.

The Carabinieri van, above, was positioned at the entrance to Via Padova.

So Twentieth Century

Rome’s old Jewish ghetto is full of arresting political and religious posters and flyers.

World War II is everywhere, or so it seems. Famagosta tube station, Milan, mid-February.

Wild in the Streets

For the last fortnight, I’ve run into this truck on my morning dog walks. Pixel and Raster always stare up at the collection of  animals quietly, looking a little perplexed.  The driver, a fifty something Arab-looking guy, smiles.

Yesterday, Pixel broke form, and barked repeatedly at the big white tiger. I was unsure as to whether it was because he was the closest to the sidewalk, or because it looked familiar, but didn’t smell particularly alive.

Going Underground

The coffee is okay. Perhaps a little too nutty for my taste. It’s probably one of the same discount brands on offer in the deli. However, the piadina sandwiches are pretty good, during the winter it’s always warm inside, and there’s a newsstand with an excellent selection of international newspapers less than twenty feet away.

Located in the tube station underneath our building, I increasingly find myself eschewing above-ground establishments in Piazzale Loreto in favor of this cafe’s womb-like environs. Despite the fact that it’s always busy, there’s something calming about the cheap cappuccinos and availability of familiar news periodicals.

Like the majority of the cafes in our neighborhood, it is also full of foreigners. Eavesdrop on any of the conversations taking place and one will hear everything from Albanian and Arabic to Portugese and Tagalog. If I have any difficulty ordering, there’s oftentimes one or two Peruvians on staff whom I can speak to in Spanish.

If you were to ask me for an example of present day Milan, I’d be hard-pressed to offer something more au courant. No, its not Peck, or one of the hip cafes in Isola or Brera, where the coffee is indeed superior. It’s the fact that this place is both so totally comfortable and contrary, simultaneously, to Italy, as we imagined it to be.

It’s Snowing Inside

It was so cold inside our apartment today, Jennifer covered our oldest dog, Raster, with a fleece blanket. Already wearing a sweater, the arthritis-ridden six-year-old Schnauzer is so easily impacted by the cold that his first impulse, whenever we take him outside, is to freeze. In his tracks, that is.

It has been a cold winter in Milan, the likes of which I haven’t experienced in years. Though Europe as a whole has been experiencing record low temperatures, we’ve been unfortunate enough to have our building’s heat switched off a total of fourteen days in the last twelve weeks.

Unbelievable, isn’t it? There is something distinctly cruel about it. However, the owners of the roof, who decided to build an entire new floor above us (we live on the top floor) say that there’s no way around it. What’s worse is that they have no inclination to warn anyone. We find out when we get cold.

The heat was turned off last Friday. Eager to warm myself up, I decided to take a walk, and shoot some pictures of falling snow. One block way. I found the dog above, relieving himself in front of these election posters, urging Milanese to vote for the Lega Nord, Italy’s leading anti-immigrant party.

The Money Channel

Self-explanatory. Watching TV in Rome, January 31st.

Out of the Ghetto

The February edition of Pagine Ebraiche is now out. Pictured above is an author interview, centered around the publication of Israel vs. Utopia. The title is “From the Venice Ghetto to Rishon Le Zion”, in reference to my family’s greater path of migration to Ottoman Palestine. It’s the first of two pieces of Italian press on the book, the second of which is forthcoming next month.

There are a couple of errors in the profile, but they’ve since been corrected. It’s an otherwise terrific piece, which, most importantly, gave a certain member of my family, extremely self-conscious of our Italian heritage, an enormous amount of pleasure to read. Granted, his Italian is about as rotten as mine, but still good enough to get the gist of an 850 + word newspaper article.

Beware of Phoneys

The Italian army assists the police and undocumented foreign workers in rooting out unauthorized Prada imitations from China. Corso Buenos Aires, Milan.