Archived entries for Silvio Berlusconi
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Searching for an Edward Hopper exhibit on Sunday, we happened upon a stage being prepared for Silvio Berlusconi. Several hours later, the Prime Minister was assaulted within two or three meters of this location.
Watching the news over dinner, the proximity of the event felt especially unnerving. Relatively private, without many local acquaintances, it was a visceral reminder of where we are, and how deeply we’ve become tied to it.
Last of the Mannequins
Coming home from dinner a few nights ago, Jennifer pointed out the number of stores that had closed along the Corso Buenos Aires. “The economy is definitely worsening here,” I replied. “Just look at how many folks have moved out of our building.” A few minutes later, we found ourselves staring at five for rent signs at our building’s entrance, (“affitasi” in Italian), along with a fresh advert for the sale of a live/work space.
If you’re used to living in apartment buildings, you get accustomed to people moving in and out, especially in densely populated commercial areas like central Milan. However, such a high turnover is especially noticeable when your building only has 14 units. Considering the immense political and economic turmoil Italy is presently undergoing, the exodus from our building helps personalize the turbulence, however uncomfortably.
Driving it all home the following day was the closure of the bakery on the ground floor. Ever since we first moved in, we’ve relied on it for basic needs like bread, beer and mineral water. Run by an elderly Italian lady, her establishment has been indispensable to us. If you were out of breakfast cereal, you could always run downstairs and buy a delicious brioche. If it was dinner you were after, you could get an excellent slice of focaccia pizza.
What defined the place was not the food, though, but the presence of three enormous mannequins, caricatures of Italian peasants, wearing vintage clothing, sporting disproportionately large, workman-like hands and bulbous noses. Affixed to the rear wall and the ceiling, every time you entered the bakery, there they were, looking down on the baked goods, as though they had harvested all of their ingredients. Cliched, sure, but still impressive.
Hence how striking it was to see the last of the mannequins lying on the floor yesterday evening, grasping a bundle of fake wheat and a piece of plywood in its hand. Everything in the place had been cleared out, save for this lone, dismembered-looking farmer.
Bringing Home the Bacon
At the top of my parents’ list of requests was prosciutto. They wanted a kilo and a half.
“We service Silvio Berlusconi,” said the butcher as he slid the meat into three separate half-kilo packets. “We send it straight to Rome, at his request. We even handled the ham for the G8 meeting in Genoa, in 2001.”
With endorsements like that, how could I refuse the sixty-four Euro price tag? Truth be told, of course I would have paid that much. This was for family. I just wasn’t sure I’d ever spent that kind of money buying lunch meat before.
Granted, this wasn’t any ham. It was two year-old prosciutto from Parma. But, I figured that since I was taking it to Israel, to be consumed on Shabbat by a bunch of hungry relatives, at the height of the swine flu crisis, every penny was worth it.
Same Europe, Different Country
I can’t think of a better photo to begin writing from Milan than this. “Silvio, we’re here,” or so my terrible Italian renders this smart dig at Berlusconi. A language I once had a reasonable grasp of as a child living here in the early 1970s, both Jennifer and I plan on becoming far more fluent than we are at present. Granted, we have an excellent grasp of both French and Spanish, so we’re not badly off. Still, one can only go so far responding, as I am often inclined to do, as though we are back in San Francisco, ordering burritos.
We moved into our apartment on Thursday night. The end of ten days of travel, during which we drove to Milan from London and back to return our rental, it was a remarkable relief to finally enter our new home. The 1600 miles of highway we covered did not catch up with me until this weekend when, after having spent a day of ferrying things up from our basement storage space, I felt as though I’d been placed inside a concrete bodysuit. I don’t know if I can remember a time I ever felt so tired.
Like Israel, like America, my family history here is deep, my interest in it partly personal, partly political. In other words, business as usual. Nevertheless, Italy is not a geography I’ve acknowledged as being influential, though I do mention it in my first book, Jerusalem Calling. My father worked in the Genoa area for nearly twenty years, my brother David frequently traveling to Milan for close to a decade. I did my own small part, exporting experimental and hip-hop records to distributors in Rome and Pisa during the early ’00s.
One story, consistently retold by at least two generations of Schalits, concerns our longstanding ancestral relations in the country. In Venice, to be precise, apparently beginning not long after the Spanish Inquisition, lasting, or so the narrative goes, until the late 18th century. Another anecdote is about a relative of ours named Enrico Schalit, a cantorial composer from either Mantova or Padua, if I remember the story correctly. I’ve never taken the opportunity to get it all straight.
During the time we’re here, I’m going to collect these stories, and place them in proper context. For the moment, I’ll assume that their relative consistency means that there is some truth to them, and that its just a question of determining what’s more plausible than not. In the interim, I’m savoring the significance of having retraced, however inadvertently, both my brother (18 years my senior) and father’s respective footsteps. Not to mention, of course, my own.
Found in Translation
Despite the Berlusconi government’s affinity for the Israeli right, Italian civil society indicates a similar fondness for cultured liberals. The window display at the Feltrinelli store on the Corso Buenos Aires.
Everyone’s favorite Orientalist, this time in Italian. The Mondadori store, near the Duomo, on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele.
Why I Love Italy
At least a third of my time at Allvoices has been spent writing summaries of developing news stories. Over the course of the last 6 months, I completed over 130 such pieces.
I wrote Italy to Fingerprint Gypsy Population last Thursday afternoon. It’s a good example of how I write these kinds of analyses when I feel as though I have a little more room than usual to editorialize.