My friend Cornelia has been pining over Pinco Pallino for several years now. Cornelia is a pseudonym and Pinco Pallino is the fictional name for Italy’s run-of-the-mill Joe Shmoe. The fact that she didn’t react to me calling him that means she’s almost finished fancying him.
‘You’ve had that guy on the brain for a long time. Enough now, don’t you think?’
‘Yes. It’s just that Italy is a good country for mooning over someone.’
Oh, no. That last sentence was going to pull me out of writing retirement, I could feel it.
For about the same amount of time that Cornelia has been pining for her stone-cold lover as if he were the sun incarnate, I’ve been busy doing un bel niente—a beautiful nothing. Yes, I’ve learned to oven-bake fish by burying it under a molehill of rock salt and taken a sewing course from a seamstress who believes that the placement of buttons on a collared shirt explains centuries of sexism—but from the article-writing perspective, I’ve been on holiday for over two years and quite enjoying the bel part of niente.
Still—a good question, psychologists say, is the world’s most effective catalyst to action. So here we are, feet first inside an article. Is Cornelia right, I wonder? Is Italy a great country in which to grieve? Does it provide the ideal landscape for pondering dashed hopes or yearning for the impossible? Certainly, any Dolce & Gabbana billboard might do much to prove that point. Their lace-clad ladies leaning on equally languid statues half-buried in sand are the photographic essence of pining. Sicilian landscape seems a likely space for it, so I’m giving it some thought.
Yet, Cornelia’s affirmation has alighted onto this page for another reason as well. After 20-plus years in Italy, I had quite forgotten that ‘moon’ in English is both a celestial body and a cartoon-like verb. Perhaps there’s a way to import the phrase ‘To moon over someone’ by making up the likeable verb lunare. I don’t suspect the Italians will mind much. They like la luna and use it often; the universal link between mood and moon is lost on no one.
In Italy, if you’re intent on feeling irritable, it’s not because you’re a terrible grouch who deserves nothing good in this world. Hai la luna storta—you’re simply carrying around a crocked moon. An even worse scenario is to be in a ‘bad moon’, essere in cattiva luna. The good news is that moons never last long. In no time at all, the crookedness can unbend and a bad moon become peaceably buona. And that’s why the Italian word lunatico means ‘variable’ not ‘crazy’. Alas, the same cannot be said for the poor lunatics who tread on English-speaking paths.
But all phases of the crescent considered, I’m not fully sold on Cornelia’s idea that Italy is the right country in which to moon the years away. Why? Perhaps because I equate yearning with loneliness. Or it could be because, in this country, no matter where one happens to be sitting—on marble steps or alpine mountaintops, on a break-neck bicycle or in the loggia’s shade—it always feels like the right place. And far from allowing for leisurely languishing all by your lonesome, Italy provides inclusive space: wherever you are, you’re right in the middle of it. If it’s hot, you’re in it. If there’s yelling, you’re in it. If there’s beauty, it’s not right there in front of you; it’s all around. My sister said it well once. We were at a café in Fiesole eating strawberry and coffee ice-cream, and with a sense of soddisfazione that’s seldom seen, she smiled and said, “Where is everybody else, we’re here.”
So if you’re mooning, wake up and smell the oven-baked fish. And if your dangling moon has gone darned crocked, don’t worry, this too soon will pass.
