Rosewater and the Seven Dwarves

Rosewater and the Seven Dwarves

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Thu 04 Feb 2016 1:00 AM

At the age of 22, Italian citizenship in hand, I decided to apply for my very first concorso statale. If you don’t know how to feel about this first sentence, I’ll tell you. A ‘state contest’ in Italy is neither a medieval jousting competition nor a Southern belle beauty pageant. Yet, it’s more evil than either. Those in the know are already sitting on the edge of their seats, shouting ‘Don’t go there’ in the very same way audiences try telling a horror-movie heroine not to brave the basement stairs.

 

Illustration ©2016 Leo Cardini / The Florentine

Illustration ©2016 Leo Cardini / The Florentine

 

The warnings never work, of course. To carry the lead in a scary movie you’ve simply got to be stupid—or at the very least, naïve. Naïve is what I was in 1995, way back when Italy was not yet a European colony and employment for the young was not the fable it has become today. Thus, I believed in the enduring jobs my relatives enjoyed. And, as a neo-grad in English literature, I also trusted D.H. Lawrence’s toffee-like take on Italians: ‘They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips… and they smile with sunny melting tenderness into each other’s face.’

 

I’d never seen a parsnip before, but all the rest sounded good, and I wanted it long term. Make-a-living money was the first thing; my father’s graduation card had read: ‘Thank God Almighty, I am free at last,’ which clued me into the fact that I’d be needing some cash quickly.

 

To enter an ‘open competitive exam for state level employment’ you’ve got to talk to your friendly neighborhood delegato, who apparently thought it her job to weed out the weird ones. And with my hybrid paperwork, ‘weird’ meant me.

 

‘We cannot accept your university degree as valid, as it was not earned on Italian soil,’ she informed me.

 

‘But I did more than half of it at the University of Venice.’

 

‘Yes, but the degree was not printed here. Nor was your high school diploma. The best I can do is put you down for having graduated from middle school.’

 

Middle school? Ma fa sul serio? This is the part of the story where Italians would say, sono cascata dal pero. Without warning I ‘fell from the pear tree’ and, wham, got hit with hard reality. Gone were my high-in-the-boughs visions of grandeur. My degree was suddenly worth less than a pear core and could be disregarded as easily as this delegate could say ‘shredded paper’. But the tree-falling feeling did not end there. The woman added brutality to bruise by saying that everyone knew American universities were ‘all’acqua di rosa’ and that such a ‘rosewater education’ could not be called equivalent to its old-school European counterparts.

 

The woman was stone cold in her last comment. And, no matter what Lawrence might think, there was not a bit of butter in her. I was the one feeling melty. In English, we have since coined the term ‘melt-down’ and I half suspect it originated in that delegate’s office. But I had no real comeback, and alas, I still don’t. Unless you count this article, which may well morph into a response 20 years in the making.

 

Hmm. An answer that’s been incubating for over two decades should take a stab at being fair and funny once it hatches, don’t you think? Otherwise, how are those of us who are not D.H. Lawrence expected to get through life?

 

That said, here’s today’s take on the experience.

 

I have long been privy to the ‘intellectual superiority’ of Italian education. I have known it since the age of four when my cousin told me that two of Snow White’s Seven were named ‘Eolo’ and ‘Gongolo’. Any toddler who’s expected to be well-versed enough in Greek mythology to get that ‘Sneezy’ was named for Aeolus, the king-god of the winds needs to get some damn good schooling. And poor Gongolo? His name means ‘great satisfaction’ and derives from ‘gola’ or throat, because—according to the unarguable Accademia della Crusca—the throat hangs low when one laughs, and that, my friends, is why ‘Happy’ has a name that’s so utterly unhappy.  

 

As for the rosewater comment, I think it would be a downright marvel if education, American or otherwise, were even a tiny bit like rosewater. It improves digestion, calms the nerves, reduces acne, relieves depression and cures respiratory ailments. If schools the world over actually had a hand in helping us master those miracles then everyone would be happy, not just that little nano and his bravo brother dwarf.

 

Salva

Salva

Enjoy more of Linda Falcone’s humorous
insights
on Italian culture in her two classic
books published by
The Florentine Press!

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