IL FATTO BELLO

Facts of the matter

by Linda Falcone (issue no. 103/2009 / June 4, 2009)
Il fatto bello della settimana. Moments from everyday Italy

Pietro's soccer team is right-wing and his politics are left-wing, which, in Italy, makes him a rarity good enough to stuff and keep in the Natural History Museum, next to the anatomical wax models. He would fit in fine there in other ways as well, for Pietro is the closest I've ever come to encountering a truly beautiful man, in the strictly physical sense of the term.



As a rule, I am not particularly fond of beautiful men-especially Italian ones-for I've seldom met one who knows how to successfully shoulder the idea of his own unarguable attractiveness. Luckily, Pietro's eyes are far too occupied scrutinizing the ways of the world for him to ever really spend too much time mirroring himself in life's many full-length glass windows. At present we are co-workers. His job is to create absurdly prosaic press releases while mine is to produce slightly more penetrable versions that, admittedly, still leave real English-speakers nothing short of baffled.



Translating Italian journalism is a rather awe-worthy phenomenon as the breadth and scope of Italian articles justly merit the adjective ‘astounding'. Give a giornalista forty-three lines to play with and he'll cram in the creation of the universe, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the bad dreams he had the night before. Any regular reader will tell you that newspapers in Italy provide a marvelous example of creative prose. Articles begin with ‘Once upon a time, there was a king who had a very beautiful daughter' and end while you're still waiting for Godot. If it's news you want, make sure to skip right down to paragraph three, line four. There, nestled between mounds of masterful metaphor, you'll find the piece's sole strip of skinny fact.


Making Pietro's prose suitable for the English-speaking mind is like trying to use a ten-point letter in Scrabble. You really want to make it work but never seem to have randomly chosen the right combination of vowels. The essence of our relationship is simple and re-occurring: his word-counts climb into the zillions, while I'm hard-pressed to find two crusty English words stuck to the bottom of my overcooked verb pot.


‘Pi, I won't be able to get three word's worth of news from the piece you just sent,' I scolded him yesterday. ‘You say too much and barely say anything at all.'



‘Yeah. Well, most Italians do. They say it's genetic,' he grinned.


Benevolence came suddenly and I smiled. Appreciating his ability to make such a statement was decidedly more interesting than proving its indisputable accuracy. The Italian willingness to own up to undesirable cultural inheritances never fails to tame my wild-horse accusations. Rope up an Italian in the lasso of his own bad habits and he'll loosen your critical ropes with rodeo ease. Perhaps they know it: self-depreciation is so very attractive a trait.



Pietro realized he had somehow struck gold with me and prepared for his Eureka victory dance. ‘No one goes to a newspaper looking for facts, Linda. The readers already know that we've spent too much money and kept too few promises. They come to search out stories. It's like with life-the facts never change but the stories always do.'



My God. His victory dance had reason to be celebratory. Roman ruins and dinosaur eggs are still found daily everywhere but Bedrock. Kings continue to father lovely offspring. And beautiful men sometimes generate very striking statements. Che bello.  

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