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.
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 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 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.
The Italian army assists the police and undocumented foreign workers in rooting out unauthorized Prada imitations from China. Corso Buenos Aires, Milan.
Over the course of the past two weeks, I’ve made a point of taking my digital audio recorder on my daily errands. Turning it on whenever I leave, the goal is to record as much of the city as I can.
Milan is as vibrant an audio experience as it is a visual one. For every image, such as the photo above, of an elderly Roma on the floor of the Duomo subway station, what you hear can be just as moving.
I hadn’t heard of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography before it ran one of the first pieces on Israel vs. Utopia. Today, I was informed that the book had made it’s 2009 best-of list. IvU is the 6th book cited, as you work your way down the page. The reviewer writes with an enormous amount of energy, and is extremely supportive.
I just did an interview with a terrific local journalist, Anna Momigliano, for Italy’s Jewish monthly, Pagine Hebraiche. We covered a lot of territory, relating to the book, as well as my family’s background in Venice. It was a nice change of conversational coordinates to navigate, though I wish I’d had more time to do my homework on my Italian ancestors.
The hummus was excellent, even though it could have used a bit more tahina. Jennifer was definitely impressed.
All I could think about was repurposing the name of the place for a new book title. Vacationing in Trastevere, 12/29.
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