An Unchanging Place

Rome, Florence, Venice.  A typical tourist itinerary with a few days in each.  Clearly not enough to understand much about these places.  Especially when we've spent most of our time seeing the sights, and most of the people we see are foreigners, like ourselves.  But everything is run by the Italians -- or, as they may prefer -- by the Romans, Firenzians, and Venetians.  You get the sense that this society has been built up over several thousand years, including years when the Romans ruled the known world, the Firenzians paid for the Renaissance, and the Venetians created the gateway between east and west.  It's worked for all this time, so why should any ideas from the outside be any better?

It's easy to come from the U.S. and ridicule these entrenched ways.  We've done a lot of that, all while appreciating the culture that has resulted.  Try to imagine the people that lived amongst the ruins in Rome.  The emperors, senators, merchants, craftsman, servants and slaves.  The human and natural resources used to create the edifices that we see the remnants of today.  How were these used, and what were people's lives like?  If you wonder about this long enough, and do the research, I suppose you end up making one of those made-for-TV re-creations, which are probably 20 or 30 percent correct, but at least provide some exploration into life in those times.

Although life and society has progressed since then, in many ways it has not.  All the restaurants in Rome had the same menu.  In Florence, their own, and in Venice other variations.  No outside influences intrude.  No French.  No Spanish.  An occasional kebab.  And somehow, Chinese food has found a foothold, though we weren't brave enough to try.  Florence had three MacDonalds, one at the Duomo, and we definitely weren't brave enough to try that.  No experimental cuisine of any kind.  At all.  Maybe we're looking in the wrong places, but there's nothing that cried out for experimentation.  Just like in the 14th and 15th centuries -- there were two topics for paintings -- Madonna and Child, and Jesus on the Cross.  Room after room.  Church after church.  All in similar style that evolved ever so slowly through the ages.

Some things do change.  All the hotels we stayed in had wifi (pronounced wee-fee).  Few people took advantage of it.  We did not see a single laptop in a cafe or restaurant.  We aren't sure what the chicken or the egg is -- do people not have laptops, so the cafes don't provide wee-fee, or do the cafes not have wee-fee so people don't get laptops?


We didn't see much in the way of nightlife, but maybe we weren't looking in the right places.  There were few notices of popular concerts or bars with music.  We didn't see many bars at all.  Actually, we saw lots of bars but they were snack bars.  The snack bars served sandwiches, pizza, and beer/wine/liquor.  But not the kind of bar packed with people listening to loud music that you might expect. 

The slowly evolving nature of the place reminds me of Michael Pollan's writings about cuisine.  With cuisine, people have found that eating particular foods in particular order in particular ways led to healthy lives.  So, everyone eats the same thing.  And lunch doesn't start till 12:15, and can't be served after 2:00.  Dinner starts at 7:30, not earlier.  In the tourist zones, this is changing, and there's more flexibility, but this is how it is.

In the U.S., we have a hodgepodge of cultures, and there are no rules.  We relish our freedom and our choices.  But when we have no rules, it's easy to make poor choices, and as a result so many people have chosen unhealthy diets that lead to unhealthy lives.  Maybe after some more decades of experimentation our own society will settle on a cuisine that works for us, after healthful outcomes are demonstrated.

Perhaps there's a market for a Thai restaurant?

We're done with Italian part of the journey, but I've got one more post from there written but still to be posted.  In the meantime, here are the photos from Rome, Florence, Venice.