Quiet Sunday

Today I decided to take the day ‘off’ and not go into Venice at all.  I’ve been really tired a lot of mornings—last night I slept almost 12 hours, and it wasn’t the first time.  Maybe that’s because I’ve been on the go so much—yesterday I was in Venice from before 9am until after 5, most of that time spent on my feet—but I do that every time I travel and I never sleep this much.  Of course typically, I don’t let myself sleep this much because there’s so much to do, so it may be the result of knowing, subconsciously, that I’m here for a while.

Last night I dreamed about the house shaking around me.  In New Haven this would not be so surprising, since the house tends to shudder if a big truck races past (in fact when we had that small earthquake last year, that’s what Sean thought it was).  It was apparently a real earthquake, though, in Emilia Romagna.  I just felt a brief aftershock a few minutes ago.  I remember the first time I felt any kind of tremor was three years ago in Rome, when I noticed a glass of water on the table vibrating and thought for a minute it was the people in the apartment beneath us—nope, it was basically a long-after aftershock of the huge L’Aquila terremoto that devastated the city.  It’s a little freaky to think about the sheer size of the tectonic plates, about the way they move against one another to create earthquakes.  It’s like the surface of the world is on the back of something living that could shake us off, if it wanted to.

The other big news of the day was a bomb placed outside of a school in Brindisi yesterday morning that went off right as the girls were arriving on a bus from the towns in the countryside.  (I actually heard someone talking about this in a bookstore I was in yesterday morning; I heard “bomba nella scuola” and thought, wait, did that happen here?  Wouldn’t people be more freaked out? Since it wasn’t in either of the newspapers I read yesterday afternoon, I forgot about it) One girl is dead, so far.  People have immediately suspected the mafia (the name of the local mafia is Sacra Corona Unita, which sounds like a soccer team);  mafia activity is pretty high there, and the school is named after the wife of Falcone, one of the two anti-mafia judges assassinated in 1992 (the wife died too).  The families of some of the students have links, too, apparently.  Yet there are clear indications that it might be garden variety terrorism instead, since the mafia don’t use the kind of bomb employed in this attack, and they’ve never attacked a school (as someone pointed out in the paper, they’re not stupid, they know killing schoolchildren is bad for business).  As someone else wrote, it’s one thing to hear of this kind of thing happening in the Middle East—as terrible as that sounds—and another to hear about it in your own country.  I can only imagine if that happened at an American school.

This morning I went downtown to get groceries.  At home we’re used to doing shopping once a week, maybe, but in Italy, due to the tiny size of the fridges and also the lack of preservatives in things like bread, you have to shop every couple of days.  Today my goal was ingredients for the no-cook pasta that Sean and I love in the summer time, with cherry tomatoes, arugula, basil and garlic.  Before I could prepare it, though, I cleaned the kitchen and did Elsa’s sinkful of dishes, for my own sanity.  She’s one of those old people that just really doesn’t give a damn anymore—four coffee cups on the table, crumbs everywhere, trash can full. I swept the floor and I do not even want to guess the last time she’d done that.  But hey, she’s over 90, and god knows my grandpa wasn’t much better.  Now the mixture is in the fridge waiting for me to make pasta later.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find ricotta salata in the grocery store.  There were a thousand kinds of cheeses, many of which I’ve never heard of because they’re probably just local variants or something (there was also something called table cheese, which I decided against trying today), but no ricotta that I could find.  Finally I turned to an older woman, told her I was American, and asked her if the ricotta was lurking there under some other name unknown to me.  Nope, she said it should be there and to look for it, or ask someone.  However, I managed to find a small container of parmesan, which is the other cheese the recipe suggests, so I left it at that.  Another time, I suppose.  Another challenge was estimating amounts—Elsa has a food scale, but when you’ve got a 500 gram box of tomatoes, how much of that is 1 pint?  More to my chagrin, I discovered that although she has a garlic press, she seems to have no chopping knife.  Luckily I was only roughly chopping the greens. 

You know what else is surprising?  The number of stores open here on a Sunday.  In Florence everything shut down on Sundays, except the big grocery store that was by Piazza dei Ciompi, and Rome was the same, at least in the neighborhood where we stayed.  Here there are bars, tabaccherie, even little produce shops on the sidewalks, all open.  I don’t know if that’s just a peculiarity of the Lido, or Venice in general?   Certainly there seem to be many more supermarkets around than I remember.  I’ve spotted 5 or 6 in Venice itself, most of them In-Coop; here on the Lido there’s an In-Coop just a few blocks from a Billa. Italian supermarkets also have their own store brands now, too; Billa’s is called Clever.  I have Clever mozzarella in my fridge and balsamic vinegar in my cabinet.  Another thing that’s changed is that you can’t buy foreign stamps at a tabaccheria anymore, which I used to do in Florence; when I asked for stamps with my newspaper today she said they only did Italian stamps.  For foreign I’ll have to actually go to the post office.  I haven’t even bought post-cards yet, of course!