Forgive Me Father For I Am About To Sin…..

I’ve been reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat,pray, Love about her travels to Italy, India and Indonesia in search of peace and contentment.  In Italy, at the start of her travels, where she goes to recuperate from a broken marriage, she decides that places have words attached to them.  Thus New York is Achieve, Los Angeles is Succeed etc.  Switzerland for me would be Conformity (!) and London would be Possibility.  In Italy, and in Rome in particular, it  is according to Elizabeth Gilbert, SEX.  This I whole heartily agree with.  But Sex, it appears to me having just come back from Florence, is only one of the pleasures that these Italians enjoy.  Everything they do is in the pursuit of pleasure; from drinking their espresso; chatting to their friends in the streets (loudly and with enthusiasm); eyeing up other women; talking on their telefonino; is all an elegant dance of joyful pleasure.  They dress well, especially the men (although they are a little too pernickety clean for me) and move their bodies with a lightness of step and confidence.  This is due to a fantastic diet as they are surely the best fed nation on earth and obviously a side effect of this, low body fat levels.  BUT  there is nothing like happiness to put a spring in your step and a glow to your skin and er…obviously that other thing…sex and lots of it.  I have no idea if this is lots of sex with the same person or with lots of different people as unlike the French there is never any cultural reference to a Camilla.  Italians have always been dark horses to me. 

I will now douse the flames of lust with the following anecdote:  Madre likes to collect small ornamental plates of the places she visits.  Finding the just-right plate can take more time and energy than you would reasonably think bearing in mind that her two daughters constantly inform her that “those plates are going straight to the charity shop when you go.”  Plate purchasing should not, I have learned since our previous trip to Rome, be left to the last day so on our first day in Florence we perused the gift shops and a miracle occurred.  We managed to persuade her, using all our filial pressure, to buy one of the first plates she came across. Thinking we had escaped lightly, our hearts sank when she said. “That just leaves Aunty Joan’s fridge magnet, I didn’t like any of those in there.”   Fridge magnets are a whole other trip to the charity shop. 

Naturally I, (yes I confess it was me) let the bag slip to the floor and thus smashed the plate, whilst lunching in the Mercato and making a boarding-house-reach across the table to spear the last carciofi.  Back we go, all the way past the Duomo, to the same gift shop to see if they have a duplicate plate picturing the same Ponte Vecchio.  Whilst I, the guilty one, go through the rigmarole of looking at them all, all over again -this time including weighing up the merits of purchasing the little wooden support stand after all – my sister lets out a sound that can only be mistaken for a kettle whistling or a pig screaming.  She had found the Vatican’s “girly” Priest calendar.  www.calendarioromano.org.

The cover photo is the Italian version of Matt Damon, cute.  January is a soulful Italian Richard Chamberlain – you remember he was the priest who fell for Rachel Ward in The Thorn Birds. March is a bearded and greasy Antonio Banderas. April looks weirdly like my son.  July has chisled features.  June is His Holiness Mr. Bean.  August is, well must be for the Grandmas and September is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, etc.etc.  As for October as featured above, he is very ,very naughty.

So yes SEX is the word in Italy, you can see it, you can breathe it and the Vatican tells us so. 

Copyright Jules Ritter June and so much for global warming 2008   

PS  If travelling to Florence in the summer months stay away from the Arno as Gilbert’s travelling companion from Texas says,”Man…They got mosquitos here big enough to rape a chicken.”