Ordinary magic

The impression that pushed itself center stage after my time in Rome this February was culture shock. It hit me as soon as I stepped off the plane from New York, still in the jet bridge.

I was stunned at how good-looking everyone was. Airport employees standing around chatting. The little airport elf lady with her tight curls and trousers, conducting the human orchestra with her gold-bangled hands. No one was fat! Everyone was well-combed and put together.

This might have been my ninth or tenth time in Italy overall, and though it’s been a while, the city is familiar in the way riding a bike is – your feet remember where the streets lead, how the center is woven together. Sure, all those years ago I’d admired the Italian style and noticed how pleasing to the eye the men were, but it was an observation on a long list, far below the aesthetic bliss of Rome itself, the history and architecture, the orgasmic food. This time around seeing the way people looked left me feeling like I was encountering another species.

Virna Lisi in Rome, 1959. Photographer Angelo Cozzi.

Here’s the ticket man by the Pantheon with his long gray hair pulled away in a half bun, looking like he belongs in a perfume ad, steering a dinghy into the sun. Here’s the older cashier lady, eyes an indeterminable color, like water in a fountain, both turquoise and opaque green, depending on the light. Preserved yet crumbling, like a priceless fresco. Everyone with their long cane umbrella. Everyone in dresses and tights.

I was last on the continent five years ago. A significant Eurotrip even farther back, when I lived there and this American chapter was only beginning. Time had fogged up my perception lens so much, I’d forgotten what everything was like. I suppose I knew logically but had recalibrated my expectations to the point that I no longer believed myself. After a while you think, maybe I’m a moaner, incapable of adapting. Maybe I romanticize the past and all of this exists only in my head. You normalize your reality and tell yourself your vacillations are just your own emotional volatility.

I marvelled at clean buses gliding up to bus stops with digital tableaux displaying how many minutes left till the next one arrives. This used to be normal to me less than a decade ago but now felt like a revelation. The airport, excellent fifteen years ago, now seemed like a mirage in the desert after JFK and Newark. I used to expect airports like this, but now gaped at the pianos at every other turn, the cosmic clean bathrooms, cheap, palatable food and coffee. People not dressed in sweatpants.

How enjoyable cafés and restaurants are, without anyone planting their head in your face every five minutes and screaming, “How are we doing here?!”. The space to sit around unbothered, over food in human sized portions, to vaguely wave whenever you need the check, however long later. The general sense of dignified distance between people, when things are civil but reserved, without constant forced, awkward conversation. Being able to hold eye contact without smiling like the Joker, maybe give each other the occasional up and down.

Virna Lisi in Rome, 1959. Photographer Angelo Cozzi.

Unexpected comforts, like noise level – a steady Babylonian hum of different languages all around, never too loud. Even the ambulance sirens were on a long forgotten, lower volume. It was strange for everyday interactions to require so little psychological effort.

Small things like buying normal sunscreen in the pharmacy, and throat sprays, and other medications that exist everywhere but the US.

Dogs running around freely in parks – gorgeous masterpieces of parks in the city center. Dogs on trains and buses, in cafés and restaurants. This was a pang of a memory, reminding me of six off-leash months in Moscow, and how effortless taking the dog everywhere without a second thought had been.

I watched my surroundings - dogs, people, life going about its business - normalcy that had become foreign to me. How easily I’d absorbed the story that Europe was fading. Too poor, too slow, too irrelevant. “Look at their taxes!” And then you see it again, and the spell is broken. They might have little cars but their everyday, the way they look and live is a jolt after the bleakness across the ocean. Gulp your coffee on the go as you scan your Slack. Check your stock app at the gate. Keep your dog out of the park and café lest someone sue you. Run, run, run! Everything is urgent and nothing is ever enough.

I realized just how much my own perception had been reshaped by an anxious, isolated culture devoted only to worshipping money. You gaslight yourself that what you knew empirically to be true is a product of your imagination, that there is no other way.

The distortion was vaguely familiar. Reminded me of how the West sermonizes about Russia – all empty shelves and bears on the street. At first you laugh at it, but after several years you become the joke, tentatively talking to your friends in newspaper headlines, doubting the videos they send you. The truth must be like that little bubble in the spirit level, quavering between two narratives.

Virna Lisi eating an ice-cream and Esperia Pieralis, Rome 1959. Photographer Angelo Cozzi.

I spent some time with my sister-in-law, who has been living in Italy for well over a decade. Long enough to talk with her hands and have a sing-song accent when she speaks Russian. She got her PhD there and has plenty of local work experience both in academia and business. Sure, she says it’s not all roses and butterflies, there’s bureaucracy and nepotism and all sorts of dickishness. But she does not want to leave. Not even to some economically more spruced up Germany, let alone the US. She sommeliers as a hobby, travels, loves food and culture. Life is too short and the lifestyle too good, something all those potential extra euros and dollars cannot buy.

Made me think of an old joke:

A man is lounging under a palm tree, eating a banana. An American walks by and says, “Instead of lying around, you could gather a crate of bananas, take them to market and sell them.”
The man asks, why?
“You could hire helpers, build a big business, make a lot of money.”
The man asks, why?
“So you could become as rich as me and lie under a palm tree doing nothing.”
The man says, “I’m already lying under a palm tree doing nothing.”

I understand the narcotic haze of tourist perfection. I try to snap myself out it with cynical slaps about the all the usual backwardness and poverty. I quiz a friend who’s been settling into Turin with a baby, at the mercy of the paperwork, in that most bitter new immigrant phase. “Is it worth in the end, because of the beauty and the culture? Because of what you see when you step outside?” She swings back and forth from a quick “No!” to blurting out love confessions despite herself.

I listen to this and remember a reel of a guy swearing about the goddamn drag of it all, the inefficiency, and then the camera pans up and the post office ceiling is a godly painted whirl of perfection. He just trails off with “How fucking beautiful…”

There’s a Russian saying that men love with their eyes and women with their ears. Sometimes I think that I’m such a man in this regard. I even tingle with wonder in Catholic churches that have nothing to do with me, because their beauty is universally divine.

Virna Lisi in Rome, 1959. Photographer Angelo Cozzi

By the end of the trip, I can see the current of calm emanating from the people around me. Slower, unafraid of tomorrow, infectious. This is the magic, something foreign to both Russian and American realities. One too broken by centuries of tyranny, the other entirely disfigured by greed. And here – a third way of living, making the ordinary extraordinary, mundanity morphing to fit the historic splendor it inhabits. The ludicrous luxury of focusing on your scarf choice, come what may. Of being told off sternly for not having the complimentary glass of red, “Madam, no-no-no, you make-a me cry!”

Like that NYU Marketing professor says, the US might be the best place to make money but Europe is the best place to spend it.

What I want to buy is watching my dog lazily lift her ears, translucent in the evening light, as the waiter places my aperitivo on the table.