Catherine sold her house in Leicester, intent on
moving to Florence and financing her long-time professional dream: event
planning in Tuscany. Villas, castles and monastic courtyards that house no
clergy make great backdrops for high-end cultural events, she thought. And fino
a qui, I fully agree. Yet, beyond the rolling hills and prettiness, I
cannot justify this career choice in any way except to say that my friend is a
glutton for punishment; businesses based on organizational skills are new to
the bel paese and, at best, they evoke suspicion or begrudging
recognition. I’ve tried to get her to admit it: moving to Italy with hopes of
planning something once unpacked is a scheme that must have seeped over from
Switzerland, a place where professional planners don’t exist either, for
reasons that are very much opposite.
We were at one of
her rocky but successful dinner parties where a musician dressed in
fifteenth-century garb pulled the strings of a twanging, harp-like instrument
that, happily, does not have a modern equivalent. While Catherine worried about
such larger issues as phantasmal lighting and short extension cords, I grappled
with the social implications of eating fettunta, an oil-soaked appetizer
whose garlic crunch should be illegal at gatherings. Because she had an ally in
me, more than once Catherine kicked me under the table before mildly voicing a
comment that no one but a British national would recognize as criticism, unless
she knew the back story. Still reeling from purposely perpetuated obstacles and
red tape, she was rather bitter about it. ‘When Italians don’t feel like
solving a problem, they relegate the solution to un secondo momento,’
she said.
I gave my friend a small smile. ‘A second moment’ is
that deliciously undefined time-space that has as much chance of materializing
inside the third dimension as you and I have of winning the Lotteria Nazionale
on January 6. Though translated as ‘later’ or ‘afterwards,’ this mysterious
expression may not be temporal at all; in fact, it feels more akin to a
fairy-tale place-the paradise of procrastinators, a mini-slice of Eden turned
Tuscany. Around here, everyone knows it: approved long-term action calls for
far too much rigmarole. It’s best to pass over the paper shuffling by settling
for a temporary solution that will only stand firm until the night’s show is
over. Journalist Giuseppe Prezzolini encapsulated the issue well when he wrote,
‘In Italia niente è stabile fuorché il provvisorio’ (‘In Italy, nothing is
stable except that which is provisional’).
Prezzolini is, of course, a giant in social criticism,
but allow me to build on his wisdom by stating the obvious: Italians do not
like to plan things. And I say this with every hope of sidestepping the
‘spontaneous’ stereotype. As hounds of habit who place their trust in solely
time-tested tenets, Italians do not stray, even figuratively, from the proven
comforts of casa in search of uncalculated whimsy. Thus, there is no use
gobbling up the marketable but misguided idea that the whole country is
crawling with spur-of-the-moment souls intent on wandering the world with a
knapsack full of nothing but impromptu adventure.
The utter lack of urgency when it comes to drafting
pre-established arrangements-however pressing these might seem to the non-Italian
mind-may simply be an issue of architecture. In other words, Do you see that
pillar over there? My grandfather used to step on the stone block right under
it. His grandfather would roll a wagon over it. The ancestor scenario
continues, tracing back to the chap who can take credit for digging the
column’s stone from a cavernous Carrara mine.
It is paramount to remember that, ultimately, this is
a land of stone and marble. The drop-in-the-bucket effort one makes today has
little, if any, instantaneous effect on life’s overall design. So why fret
about making things happen? Count a gazillion drops trickling over several
millennia, and one could finally discern a tiny indentation in your marble
block-not that one would be alive to see it.
The secondo momento attitude is rooted in
another entrenched reality as well: the vast majority of Italians were born
with an acting streak that runs quarry deep. In their daily lives, they are
most readily contented when performing a braccio, without rehearsal or
script, responding to the conflict of the moment at the moment, with all
the off-the-cuff cleverness of a Commedia dell’arte street actor who fashions a
story line based exclusively on who he knows himself to be. Often used to
describe the methods of an unprepared speaker, a braccio can also refer
to an imprecise system of measurement that dawned long before the meter and is
undoubtedly destined to outlast it.
Catherine sat straight-backed and listened to the
venue director’s welcome speech. Having appeared on the scene at the last
minute, the bombastic official strew flowery words all over the stage as if
he’d been busy crafting them for months.
‘No one lifts a
finger until two days before the event,’ my friend told me, with admirable
aplomb.
And because she looked so dependably English sitting
there, I couldn’t help but make a timid attempt at British humor. ‘Va a
braccio, vedi. But why worry about a finger when you can get the whole
arm?’
The effort was well rewarded. For the first time
during the entire soiree, our earnest event organizer gave an unplanned smile.
