Our
sun-up started the way weekend mornings should, with fresh bomboloni whose
warmth did not dissipate by the time we were home again. On Sundays, c’e un po’ di relax, but only after I unload a week’s worth of worries. Filippo always
speaks sparingly and with admirable directness, for the man’s greatest talent
lies in his ability to be catapulted into a maze of information without getting
lost in it.
Once the pastries were unwrapped, I
started straight in, ‘Do you think that I’m not intellectual enough?’
Filippo believes most of my doubts to be trick
questions, so he looked at me, weighing his options before answering. ‘Is this una domanda trabocchetto?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’ Mine was an honest concern, not
a ‘trap door’ question. I watched him pull his pastry apart and waited.
‘Cosa ti viene in mente? What comes into your mind?’ he
asked finally, rolling his eyes. Italians speak of the brain as if it were a
house and thoughts were thieves entering uninvited.
‘You know my lecture last week?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, a guy
stopped me afterwards and said that my talk made him feel like he’d spent the
afternoon at the hairdresser. He said that I was not intellectual enough. And
that he’d expected more from me.’
Filippo gave a
small smile. ‘I hope you asked for his beauty shop’s number.’
‘Oh, course
not. You know I can’t think così su
due piedi.’
‘No,’ he
agreed. ‘But you think at almost all other times. Seriously, ti fai dei film in testa delle volte. For your own good, you’ve got to
stop it.’
Filippo’s hand
moved to his heart as he finished the sentence, and I stopped eating breakfast.
This is what I mean: the man has incredible aim, even on Sundays. And though he
speaks little, his comments usually find their way to the center of things.
Farsi dei film in
testa, Filippo says,
is mainly a female habit, mostly practiced by Italian women, but I’ve been here
long enough to have learned it. Now, creating movies in one’s head would not be
an entirely bad thing if one were discussing American cinema, where
ultra-capable protagonists happily go about their business until two scenes
from the end, when they must put their intriguing life on hold for a stint to
save the world from something ugly. But what happens if the mind-films you
generate are of the slightly paranoid, Italian neo-realist variety, where the
people shot in the street are the ones you’re actually rooting for? In other
words, what if your mind works like most cinema italiano, and you’re programmed to produce some bona fide
Oscar-winning worries?
Our discussion
ended the way most troublesome conversations should: Filippo told me to stop
drowning myself in a glass of water and that there was no need to spend the day
all wrapped up in a scene I could no longer cut. All I really needed was
another jam-filled pastry to rimettermi
al mondo. And that was
all there was to it.
Thankfully,
there were still two left. And here comes the best part-the morning’s
realization, I mean. Italians may often generate depressing movies, but when
there’s talk about boosting one’s spirits, they use a phrase that makes you
happy just to hear it: rimettersi
al mondo. The
underlying philosophy is simple; when you’re worried and you don’t know what to
do, choose something that will ‘put yourself back into the world.’ Mostly
because it’s the best place we have. For English speakers, fantastic
experiences are ‘out of this world,’ but for Italians, there’s nothing as
healthy as standing in the crowded midst of things, right here, smack in the
middle of this fault-filled but wonderful world.
When they end
well, Sunday morning conversations push me to spend the week pursuing newly
exposed truths. For no discovery is truly complete unless accompanied by a bit
of investigative reporting. In general most people don’t seem to mind it. Al contrario, many start to expect questions, and if you come up
short one week, they wonder why they’re not being called upon to defend their
cause. This week’s query was a simple one: ‘Cos’è che ti rimette al mondo?’ What puts you back into the
world?
Happily, most
people’s ideas of instant revival were universal: a child’s kiss, a sincere
smile, a shower that’s borderline blistering. But some offered local or Italian
things: una bella
pastasciutta, Lucio
Battisti’s guitar songs, staring at the Duomo from the corner of via
Brunelleschi, un panino con la
mortadella, the view from
the Biblioteca delle Oblate, an afternoon walk along the river, the smell of
soap at the Santa Maria Novella pharmacy. Tiny sources of sollievo, capable of keeping one safely glued to the planet.
And for me?
Well, in all honestly, writing this column mi rimette al mondo, as do the people who populate it with their parole, some scalding, some warm.
