Eurotrip: Italy - Alpini!
When I landed in Turin, Italy I saw two amusing things.
1. A nun.
2. A gentleman at bag claim wearing a Swiss Alps-looking hat with a giant feather sticking out of it.
I looked at this guy’s hat like, “Ha! I wonder what that is! I’ve never seen anything like it before! I bet I won’t see another one for quite a while, too!” And I took a picture for my files.
I’m amused by headwear, I guess.
Then I went out to meet my friends Gianna and Enzo, who informed me that no, actually, the guy I saw was one of 85,000 (THOUSAND!) past and present members of the Alpini (the elite mountain unit of the Italian army - rowr!) descending for the weekend upon Turin for their annual reunion. I really needn’t have wasted energy snapping a photo of that one hat. They were EVERYWHERE.
Hi, guys. Nice jeans!
EVERYWHERE. Any patch of grass was occupied by Alpini. Tents, campers, grills, makeshift decks. Some of them had a pretty sweet setup.
Shoot, Alpini like gelato too.
Any group of single men sitting together were invariably Alpini— you just had to look around to find the hats (in bags, under seats, hanging on hooks). EVERYWHERE.
I just got busted! (Look how cute the nuns are!)
Hat parade floats. This isn’t even a good one.
A hat boat. (That thing across the picture is a zip line. NO THANK YOU.)
My friend Gianna and I took the ferry up the river Po, and guess who else was on the boat? Some Alpini! Can you believe? One wouldn’t accept that Gianna was American because her Italian is so good, even though she showed him her New Jersey driver’s license, and I got her to tell him for me that I know she is in fact American because a) I’ve known her since college, 2) I’ve been to her parents’ house, and d)* when I got up that day I found her watching Shania Twain on Oprah (she figured out how to slingbox it from a TiVo in New Jersey. We live in the future).
For the record, he asked me for the picture. (Sidebar: He looks exactly like my entire family. It’s weird.)
(The other one said we could get a discount from him to rent his house on the Amalfi coast, and then conveeeeeeeniently couldn’t remember his email address.)
Here is a thing I learned: in Italy, they don’t do leftovers. No one ever takes home food from a restaurant (even at home, they usually just cook enough for that night) and when I wanted to, they looked at me like “aren’t you a little bit too old and female to be a 1918 street urchin?” I conned Gianna’s boyfriend Enzo into asking for a container for me, because I had just eaten an entire burrata. AN ENTIRE BURRATA! (Not the only time that weekend.) Even I can’t put away a full bowl of pasta after that.
Does this not seem completely stupid? Out of all the food in the world that I would rather die than throw away, Italian is at the top of the list. But it’s socially taboo there. Really, Italy? Your food is delicious, and your country HAS a RECURRING GARBAGE PROBLEM. What’s Italian for “get the fuck over it?”
Anyway, that is necessary background information for the Alpini-related story I will post next week. Anticipation!
*this is still my favorite joke from Home Alone.
