As I leave Italy I realized that I’ve learned a surprising amount of things. Things that don’t just occur to you, but slip in aside you gently whispering their arrival. In a way I’m learning things I already knew; just tweeking their definitions and how absolutely applicable they are to my own life.
First, my complete love for food. Food as a catalyst for relationships, occasions, laughs, and journeys. Food as a companion, a comfort, and on occasion, a challenge. When we first arrived in Sicily I was overwhelmed with the markets. It was easily where I was happiest, I was all but invisible. I wasn’t the ‘stand out tourist’ or ‘the cloud’ in the locals day, changing all their lives with my foot traffic. I wasn’t anyone, because here, they had better things to do. Italians CARE about food. If they care about anything, its food. It’s as if it’s this governing body that speaks matter of factly of about meals, business transactions, and life long ties. it’s a silent unity that bonds millions of people.
Italians could easily go to supermarkets, they do have them. While I’m sure some do, I’ve noticed (more often than not) most prefer, plan, and anticipate their daily musings at the market. Everything fresh, right out of the back of their neighbor’s truck. Meat counters with carcasses. Could you IMAGINE a meat counter with a carcass in the States? I’ll admit my dinner was half way up my throat the first time I saw a pig’s face or a sheep’s head blankly staring at me with the long wiry eye lashes. But it’s important and natural to understand where your food comes from; not to mention a realistic look at the circle of birth to table. The fact that they are not only without a pepto-bismol tap prior to their meat gatherings, but relish in the choosing of going to a meat counter/butcher over a supermarket is something I’ve really gotten behind. It’s natural, and it’s fresh, and you know what? It sucks that these animals died, but it’s life (for the carnivorous folk). And it’s REAL. Why dress it up and call what it’s not? Why pretend that cow DIDN’T come from a cow, or a pig from a pig? There is no point. Truly… and I know this sounds like a weird, minute, and kinda creepy detail but it translates on a larger scale. Good bad or otherwise, they aren’t packaging a thing. Que sera, sera. What will be, will be. And it is. And generations and life experience have told them to cultivate what they know will be, and cherish it. (GOD I SOUND SO SAPPY.) Life. Life will be, and death will be, so they cherish life. They cherish each other. They look forward to going to the market and making deliberate, singular decisions that make their life their own. They take time and care in preparing the meat that came from an animal, they saw (and heck, could probably name), that died for them.
It’s an ownership that all of the sudden you realize is just part of you. I can't pinpoint it, only the difference of how I feel now and how I felt then.. . It’s a way of life that all of the sudden I‘ve found myself preferring. Not just preferring but cherishing. I cherish going to the market and seeing their lives so their own. It’s not rushed, but savored. Because when you’re that much in touch with life, I feel (cheesey AGAIN) that you have to in some capacity, understand death. The recognition of how temporary life is cultivates care.
I’m really hoping that Greece will be able to offer a similar and or unique difference on ways of viewing life. I am unsure if Italy has just had that large of an impact over me, if it was because that was where we’ve been the longest, or if the food (and all it’s companions) is just really that great.
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