.italiaball/puck.

Of or relating to the Byzantine Empire

Posted on January 11th, 2008 by Lango.
Categories: codogno.

I just returned from a trip back home to Boston for the holidays. It was great seeing fam and friends, the city of Boston, and being able to spend some of that green play money.

This was my first trip back home since effectively moving to Italy a little less than a year ago, and one question I got asked frequently while home was, “Are you going to stay in Italy long-term?”

Now, I really love the city of Boston. It has everything you’d want in a city, as far as I’m concerned, and every time I go back I seem to like it a little bit more. You can even confuse it for Europe (and Italy) at times. So why do I live in Codogno, a small town of 15,000 people, including zero other Americans?

That’s the question I get asked often here from Italians. “If you love Boston, why are you living here in Codogno?”

It’s not as easy to explain as you’d think. Italy can be impossible at times. I’ve completely given up trying to rationalize certain aspects of society here, lest I drive myself insane. Now I’m very fortunate I can still play baseball for some money here in addition to work, but that’s certainly not all that’s keeping me here. And of course there’s the people, the food, the wine, etc., but that doesn’t explain it either. There’s just something about living in Italy (at least in Codogno/Milan and Parma, the two areas I’ve called home) that makes it difficult to see myself somewhere else.

It’s not easy to put into words, though. At least my own words. Fortunately, Tobias Jones, in his excellent book The Dark Heart of Italy, finds a way to describe this feeling, which he shares (emphasis mine):

“I realise I have become something I never thought possible: patriotic and proud about being an adopted Italian. In more honest moments, I realise that I might never quite be able to leave the country. That longing to leave, and the inability to pull yourself away from the bel casino, the ‘fine mess’, has been written about for centuries. Using the usual prostitution metaphor, one of the country’s most important patriots, Massimo D’Azeglio, wrote: ‘I can’t live outside Italy, which is strange because I continually get angry with Italian ineptitude, envies, ignorance, and laziness. I’m like one of the people who falls in love with a prostitute.’ That, in fact, is precisely the feeling of living here: it is infuriating and endlessly irritating, but in the end it is almost impossible to pull yourself away. It’s not just that everything is troppo bello, ‘too beautiful’, or that food and conversation are so good. It’s that life seems less exciting outside Italy, the emotions seem muted. Stendhal wrote that the feeling one gets from living in Italy is ‘akin to that of being in love’, and it’s easy to understand what he meant. There’s the same kind of enchantment and serenity, occasionally insecurity and sadness. And writing about the country’s sharp pangs of jealousy and paranoia, Stendhal knew that they exist precisely because the country’s ‘joys are far more intense and more lasting’. You can’t have the one without the other.“

What he said.

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