Passionsspiele 2010

"I think I only have two things on my bucket list," says my mom as we drive north. "Other people may have more, but for me, I just have two. And we're going to do one of them right now!"

My mom isn't the kind of person who disguises her enthusiasm for something, and there's an atmosphere of excitement in the car as we cross the Po and start to spy the foothills of the Alps. Since I was a child I'd heard about a village in Bavaria that put on a play only every ten years, and while these ever-growing mountains may have posed quite a challenge to the likes of Hannibal, we'll cross them in just a few short hours.

The town of Oberammergau, population 5,204, is home to some fantastic artisanal wood carvings, a NATO school, breathtaking flower gardens that hang from typical dark wood Bavarian facades and, every decade, swarms of ancient tourists creaking off tour buses, finally checking the Passionsspiele off their bucket list.

In 1634 the town of Oberammergau was plagued with, well, the plague. The townspeople came together and put on a play about Jesus' death and resurrection, in a desperate attempt to show their devotion to a God who, they thought, had forsaken them. It must have worked, because from the time of that play, no one in Oberammergau has died of plague. They now put the play on every ten years to keep the memory alive and, perhaps, to keep the protection from the plague alive too.

We worry about how they'll change the story, or what they'll do to Christ's divinity. Germany (and indeed, most of Western Europe) is famously skeptical, with abysmal church attendance and a strong influence not only of modern progressive humanism but westernized incarnations of Buddhism or spirituality in the most nebulous, uninvasive forms. It's really only the Catholic PIIGS countries that have any measurable church attendance or active religiosity anymore (ideas, after all, have consequences). Can an ancient story of an outdated religion survive in such a climate?

We sip our radlers--a mix of Sprite and beer that, we hope, will allow us to savor the tastes of Oktoberfest while not knocking us catatonic during the first three hours of the six-hour play--and discuss our concerns. We hope these people can get it at least mostly Right. Sip.

We are about to find out just how preposterously small our minds really are.

"Jesus, the Jew, sought to renew the religion of the fathers, a religion built on the foundation of the law and the prophets, by showing that the personal relationship to the Eternal Father-God represents the core of all religious activity," my Passionsspiele 2010 textbook reads. "Religion is meant not only to give order to human life but a lasting inner connection with the realm of the divine."

They've given us textbooks in English to follow along, because the play is, naturally, in German. Julie and I share a booklet, even though they gave us two, because while it may be a bit inconvenient to have to accommodate another person's reading speed or desires, sharing a booklet allows us to share the experience, to read along together.

But how can I tear my eyes away from the stage? A crowd, all in blue, more people than I've seen attending most other plays, swarms the stage. Sheep, donkey, goats, horses, camels, all leaving their mark behind to be cleaned up during intermission, are led or ridden by actors from age one to ninety. When the crowd roars, my heart stops with the sound. I've seen fewer people on the field for a Super Bowl halftime show than the multitude to whom Jesus preaches. He turns over their money changing tables, their oil jars. He smashes a cage with doves, and they fly out into the open sky to make a home in the Bavarian Alps.

Recent iterations of the play have incorporated more and more of the Jewish traditions from the period, and the fabulous costumes worn by the priests and teachers of the law, the Last Supper based more on an actual Passover meal and less on Da Vinci's fresco, and the constant acknowledgement of a simmering tension between a people both socially and politically oppressed and their Roman occupiers shows the depth of thought the committee put into the show. The miracle unfolds itself on stage as additions to the sparse gospels play out flawlessly and seamlessly. Jesus' words repeated by Nicodemus as he quarrels with his colleagues in the synagogue. The pomposity of those Jesus called "whitewashed tombs," and their elevated intellectual dialogue. Third-Reich Pilate, a no-nonsense military man in complete command of his post, but who also asks, jarringly, "What is truth?"

My favorite is the living images, the live stills of Old Testament episodes that introduce each scene and ground the story in its ancient past. And how apt (and sometimes obscure) the references: the anguish of Cain before the anguish of Judas, the mocking of Job before Jesus' trial in front of the high priest, Joab's betrayal at the rock of Gibeon before Judas' kiss in Gethsemane. The sacrifice of Isaac and the raising of the bronze serpent before the way of the cross and crucifixion.


(from the trial of Jesus before the high priest):

3rd witness: He said: I am going to tear down the temple built by humans and replace it in three days with another that was not built by human hands.
Ezechial: What an impudent boast! It took 46 years to build this temple, and he wants to rebuild it in three days?
Nathaniel: What do you have to say to object to this testimony? Can't you think of a response? Contradict, if you can!
Annas: He neither speaks nor gestures. The defiance he has shown against me has not yet left him.
Nathaniel: I see: you think you can save yourself if you keep silent. He doesn't dare confess in front of the fathers of the people, in front of the judges, what he has boasted before the common people.
Caiaphas: Jesus of Nazareth! Impatiently I have waited for this moment. Whence do you assert this claim? Who has appointed you leader of Israel and judge over us? Speak!
Jesus: (is silent).
Annas: Should reverence not protect us foam being made an object of his derision?
Nicodemus [to Annas, Nathaniel, Caiaphas]: He is a living reproach to your basic convictions.


The scene continues and Jesus does claim to be the Son of God. He does physically rise from the dead. He does preach the Beatitudes (though he might have said "Blessed are the poor" vs. the “poor in spirit”), He is wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The feared theological "flaws," such as they are, mostly aren't. Jesus has blonde hair, and Judas looks much more Jewish than any of the other disciples. For all the strides forward in German-Jew relations these past six decades, you'd think someone might have noticed. The former charge, about poor vs. poor in spirit, may be the insidious influx of progressive socialist theory into the text, or just a translation slip-up, or whatever. Certainly heaven and the Christian life are dependent on subjecting one's individual will to the Divine Will ("In his will is our peace," as Piccarda Donati says), whereas one's relative economic class may have far less influence on actual salvation, but as the choir sings Hallelujah and the crowd envelops the risen Christ and we weep in the cold night air, not much matters but Christ and Him crucified.

Haarlem

It costs about half as much to stay in Haarlem as to stay in Amsterdam, which is why we spend our two nights in Holland there. That, and the great sage Rick Steves says that if you have two days to spend in Amsterdam, spend one in the city and one in Haarlem. I know, enough with the Rick Steves already, but I wish I paid even more attention, because he gives the hotel we booked indifferent reviews. There isn’t much wrong with it, except that it’s a bit remote from the train station and breakfast isn’t included, so our 20 minute train ride to Amsterdam Centraal takes longer and cost twice as much because of cab fare and our stay costs more than advertised because of the costly—albeit delicious—morning buffet. That 20 minute commute from Haarlem to Amsterdam would make an excellent bike ride, though, through the beautiful Dutch countryside.

The town of Haarlem, home of Corrie Ten Boom, is like a Dutch Bruges with fewer tourists. After getting past the obvious comparisons with the Harlem of New (Amsterdam) York, the town offers serene walks along the canals, winsome shopkeepers and museum guides, plenty of pedestrian-only areas, and (sniff sniff) a few of the other delights this country is famous for.

The Corrie Ten Boom house, we find by accident, is just off the Grote Market square. A pilgrimage for many, including the Van Dykes, of Boston, who make up the other half of our tour group, the house is restored to look like it may have in those horrible days when she had to hide Jews in a false wall (aka “the hiding place”). Pictures of family and friends line the walls and the piano is in good repair (the Ten Boom family and guests kept busy by singing and staging plays during blackout hours). The refugees in her house certainly led a better life than Anne Frank’s family, 20 minutes away by train. Fun at night and sun during the day (an enclosed area on the roof allowed them to sit outside unobserved from the street below—or the Gestapo headquarters 200 meters down the road), they were the ones taking heroin from clean needles. Corrie Ten Boom’s story during the war is compelling, and her thirty years of charity work and evangelism after speak to the passion alive inside her. She died on her birthday, as did so many other saints.

Also highly recommended is the Adriaan Molle (or, you know, the big windmill). It’s reconstructed in the old style, with wooden pegs keeping the all-wood gears, pulleys, shafts, and brakes together. We learn how the position of the sails sent messages across the town and how they can turn the turret to face directly into the wind, and enjoy the warmth of all-wood construction after spending so many months living in marble. We also have a wonderful view of the town and the yachts sailing up and down the main canal.

Within sight of the windmill is a playground on the banks of the canal. For a sitting fee of fifty cents, we eat our packed picnic of cheese and fresh bread, tomatoes and olives and an inexpensive merlot. Aryn plays and plays as the sun trickles through the boughs of a great willow tree.

As the sun sets, Aryn settles into bed and Julie rests her legs in the bath with her book. Jake and I have a drink and discuss the incredibly long twilight this far north. The conversation turns, as it does when someone like me talks with someone like Jake, to politics, poverty, development, literature, economics, God, and Garrison Keillor. Someone once told me that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. I took issue with it then, and I still do. Not because ideas aren’t discussed by great minds, but because it implies that an amiable and edifying conversation among friends about this person’s pregnancy or that person’s recent trip to Barcelona is somehow inferior to an angry and divisive dispute about integrating Muslim immigrants into European society or whether six-day Creationism is the only possible interpretation of Genesis. Here’s an idea: edifying conversation among lifelong friends strengthens the most important thing in heaven or on earth—our relationships. Discuss.

So thanks, @Jacob Steele, for the conversation and the memories. May we meet again soon in another corner of this wide world.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam has an interesting personality. The pot and sex tourism color the whole of the city center.

“Why do they have to play it up so much?” asks Jake, my friend from school who is interning with an NGO in Brussels and also the impetus for our trip to Benelux. “Why can’t it just be like, ‘pot and prostitution are legal here,’ and that’s it?”

Money, I imagine, if the swarms of hairy hippies humping their backpacks off the train with a wild excitement in their soon-to-be-glazed eyes are any indication of the scale of its share of this city’s tourism.

“I just think they’re selling themselves short,” Jake concludes.

“Not entirely my favorite city,” Julie agrees, as we dodge every conceivable form of transportation: bus, tram, taxi, construction truck, bike, bike with huge box on the front like a wheelbarrow with pedals, and bike rickshaw.

Our concierge in the hotel in Haarlem agrees. “You were in Amsterdam?” he asks us as we check out. When we nod, he snorts, “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

We visit the NEMO science museum (which looks like the prow of a huge ship sunk in the canal), hoping for an awesome toddler-geared exhibit. We are disappointed—first by the amount of kids there, then by the target age of about 8+. Aryn lacks the patience required by the exhibits, and we don’t linger. The VOC Amsterdam, an old Dutch East India ship collocated with the NEMO, is more exciting. Aryn, aka “captain Jessie,” a riff on her current adopted character from Toy Story, learns to fire a cannon, steer the ship, and cook and eat the hardtack and gruel enjoyed by the ship’s crew. The captain’s mess has roasted chickens and wine in bottles shaped to be very bottom-heavy. She loves it and doesn’t want to leave.

We walk. She falls asleep.

It turns out to take less time to walk back to the Centraal station from the NEMO than it did to ride the bus. Most of the city center is like that. Better, even, to take a bike, which we do later.

But Julie yet again proves her skill at locating the best café. Note: in Amsterdam, “Coffee shops” sell pot, and cafes are cafes. We sit amidst a record market and watch old metalheads browse the vinyl discs for buried treasure. The sun, surprisingly blazing, kisses their grateful northern European skin. We came north to flee you, sun, but the breeze is cool and the Amstel cold and much is right in the world.

Our walk, unexpectedly, takes us through that staple Amsterdam walking experience: the Red Light District. Shine on, sun.

Julie gasps, “There’s a naked woman in that window!”

I smile. I’m happy she gets to see this, and I say “I’m happy.”

“You’re happy about this?” she asks, with her uncanny ability to cut through equivocation. “You think these girls are willing?”

Well some are, of course, but I remember that it was on a previous trip to Amsterdam that I was first awakened to the world of human trafficking.

“It’s got to be better here,” Jake offers, “with regulation, enforced condom use, access to healthcare…”

“Like using heroin from a clean needle, you mean?”

“No, I mean the regulation should keep the trafficking and exploitation side down.”

But when I stayed with the YWAM guys in the “Jesus loves you” building overlooking Centraal station and we discussed their ministry, they told me, “If a prostitute ever accepts Jesus, we have to get her out of town immediately, or she’ll be killed.”

And, in fact, Amsterdam is one of the top destination cities in the world for human trafficking. While it is difficult to know which women initially chose to work in the sex industry, seventy-five percent of the prostitutes are foreign (most from countries identified as “source countries” in Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia). Routine medical checkups are not required. The U.S. Department of State confirms 909 trafficking victims in 2009 (that’s one for every 18,091 people in the country, as compared to 1 per 182,343 in the U.S. and 1 per 118,221 in Thailand), and in 2007 and 2008 the government prosecuted and convicted 152 traffickers with an average sentence of 15 years.

When a Christian organization called Scharlaken Koord (in English, the Scarlet Cord) surveyed 439 prostitutes they had contact with, 380 had been introduced into the business by a supposed “lover” or boyfriend. That sounds a great deal like the classic tale of a trafficking victim: an offer to a desperate citizen in a poor land that sounds too good to be true, and it is. Upon arrival in their promised land, they are informed of the massive debt they now owe (transportation and visa costs, etc.), and they must work off their debt however their captor demands. Usually this debt comes with crushing interest, making it impossible for the victim to ever pay down the debt at all, and they die in captivity. The two competing gangs of pimps in Amsterdam are known for seducing new talent into the profession, so one can conclude that the majority of the prostitutes here are, in fact, slaves. Roxanne, you DO have to sell your body to the night.

We walk.

The mood passes. We ride our bikes out of the Amsterdam of snickering pothead fantasies. We cross canal after canal, the houseboats quietly moored to city streets. Every street has a red bike lane, and we stay safely in our lane and accelerate. I hear Aryn over the wind and the traffic, “Be careful daddy! Mas dispacio.” We discover the magic of the Museumplein, a giant square surrounded by the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh museum with huge “I amsterdam” letters we could climb on and a playground—plenty of people but plenty of space. We ride from there to the Vondelpark. A park within a great city is one of life’s finest things. The feeling not quite of herbs and stewed rabbit, but rather of calm amidst a lively chaos, of plunging beneath the surface in a waterpark, refreshes like an acre in the country never does (or, one wonders, never has to??).

Dinner under the NYSE and other financial buildings a few blocks from Centraal station is an urban dream. Initially unsure about the food, thinking a place with such incredible outdoor ambiance couldn’t excel also in the kitchen, we are surprised by an outstanding dinner of couscous salad, tomato and red pepper soup and a cheese plate with that rich, northern European bread. Also beer, and another order or two of fries (how many is that today?). Aryn chases the pigeons as we pass the plates around, savoring a fine meal in the mild evening air. Big banks, drugs, human trafficking, heaps of dreadlocked Rastas on the Haj, and I’m still in love with edgy Amsterdam.

Brugge

We had to buy our tickets last minute, but thankfully flying to Brussels from Rome was the cheapest flight I could buy for those dates. So we land in Brussels after an easy drive up to Rome Ciampino, where the parking lot is closer to the gate than the check-in counter is at FCO. Also the airport code is CIA, and the first syllable sounds like “champ,” and I think that’s awesome.

Sitting on the train from Brussels to Bruges, we both comment how similar the countryside is to Wisconsin. The buildings, of course, retain that European flavor—that distinct foreignness to remind us again that (pinch) we’re in Europe, in Belgium. Deciduous trees growing in thick, rich soil brings a feeling of home while the thin, watery sunlight is a welcome relief from a Mediterranean August.

The Flanders hotel, in Brugge, is the best hotel we’ve stayed in yet. The beds are soft, the breakfast enormous, the pool sufficient for a windmill-weary three-year-old who left her house at 8 and took a series of cars, airplanes, buses, trains and taxis before sitting in a stroller for a while.

Our sunset windmill walk calms Julie’s and my frenetic pulse. Julie falls in love immediately. Old historic Bruges has a trail along the surrounding canal, and on the north eastern path you find four giant windmills all in a row. A lawn stretches between them, inviting picnics, Frisbee or, today, a group of dog lovers exercising their pets.

How much is our impression of a place colored by the weather? London, in the sunlight, like when we visited, is unspeakably amazing. Pisa, in the rain, was worth a few pictures and a swift exeunt stage left. Brugge, with her cool summer showers, horse-drawn carriage rides past “God haus”-es where medieval nobility provided free lodging to peasants willing to pray them into heaven, sunny boat rides beneath the bridge leading to the swan-filled convent Julie will join if I break our agreement and die first, and her winding streets filled to overflowing with chocolate, waffles, beer, French fries, and chocolate, ranks easily among our new favorite places on earth. We are definitely in the right place at the right time.

Rick Steves told me that Bruges is a touristy place where you don’t mind rubbing elbows with a bunch of other tourists. If I do nothing more with this blog than to validate the recommendations of this incomparable traveler, from where I sit that would be okay. For you, dear reader, if that happens, just go watch his PBS shows.

About half the streets are bumpy stroller rides. The convent I mentioned earlier is open to visitors, but Aryn is sleeping and the cobblestones are too uneven to stroll through. So if I die and Aryn is grown, you can go visit Julie there and see for yourself. You may not recognize her, because she’ll have gained about 200 lbs by the time you catch up with her, and she’ll probably have finished the whole chocolate statue of Barack Obama.

Our dinner, at an Irish pub staffed by real Irishmen, is fantastic. They serve us delicious food with salad such as we haven’t had in quite some time. My Leffe beer has a pleasant aftertaste, the fries (a food invented in Belguim, which is why we call them French fries) are divine, and the whole culinary experience is totally lost on Aryn. But she manages to eat enough to “earn” dessert (parents, don’t judge me), and wouldn’t you believe it, the chocolate mousse steals the whole show. We have to physically restrain our child so she doesn’t inhale it so fast she chokes, and I have to strain myself to remember much else about that dinner, so consumed is my mind with swimming in that heavenly confection.

Dependapotamus--part 1

Everyone claims to have met one. Everyone says they know about someone who has never left the base, or never gone anywhere their whole tour here. We all talk about that pitied and piteous creature who cannot acknowledge that they live in Europe, and cares nothing for the lifetime and more of joy and wonder at their fingertips. A mythical beast stalks the faketown of Gricignano, and its name is dependapotamus.

I first heard the term probably on my first night here. It’s cropped up here and there ever since, and every time it makes me smile and cringe together. Dependapotamus. Oh, it’s hilarious. The image of a military spouse, swollen to hippo proportions, waddling about a house she’s terrified to leave, makes me laugh every time. But that poor girl, that poor husband.

I’ll carry the stereotype further, and get almost inexcusably, irrevocably mean, but [spoiler alert] all shall be redeemed. The term bears lingering over, like refried beans or sausages. Disgusting as you see it constructed, but quite palatable afterward. She doesn’t have to be fat (yes, it’s always a she. The male equivalent is usually a servicemember himself and we just ridicule him to his face). She doesn’t have to be mean, or overbearing, or lazy, or any of the above, but the term in the Naples context (that is, talking about Naples-area military spouses) always implies a terror of leaving the house. That terror keeps her from leaving the base, and it clouds and colors her impressions of Italy unfairly. She hates Italians because they’re unhelpful at the Commissary on base. She hates Italians because they’re loud in the pool on base. She hates Italian drivers, and is terrified to drive off base. How could anyone like it here, she asks. Italy is home to 70% of the world’s art, but for vacations, she wants to go to America (that is, “‘merica”). Or just stay at home.

Dependapotamus describes someone who didn’t want to come here, and doesn’t want to try to like it here, is too afraid to take a chance and explore, and therefore hates it here.

Now, clearly there is no one who ever fits this description completely, or at least not for a very long period of time. If someone spent their whole three years here like that, that is a person above all to be pitied. Because no human being is static, and no one’s attitude toward one of the great destination countries on earth can remain 100% negative forever.

In reality, among real people, I wonder if the term simply describes someone in the throes of culture shock. I know these people who are terrified to drive in town. I know these homesick full-time moms who were wrenched from a comfortable life and support network and thrown into one of the hardest overseas assignments in the U.S. military (don’t ask me, ask the guy who’s lived overseas with the military 27 of the last 35 years, in all of the locations available. He’s the one who said if you can live in Naples, you can live anywhere). If you’re grieving for the life you had, and you encounter minor hardship after minor hardship, and your patience wanes and wanes until it snaps completely, you will begin to behave like a dependapotamus.

But how precedented is the feeling of distaste for a foreign land, especially from the spouse of the principle traveler? Abigail Adams, that paragon of servant wives, the one any military wife during times of long absence aspires to emulate, writes the following of Paris (Paris!), to which her husband had dragged her for his diplomatic service: “You inquire of me how I like Paris. Why, they tell me I am no judge, for that [living outside the city] I have not seen it yet. One thing, I know, and that is I have smelt it… It is one the very dirtiest place I ever saw. There are some buildings and some squares, which are tolerable; but in general the streets are narrow, the shops, the houses, inelegant and dirty.” She goes on to talk about how hard it is to meet, let alone converse, with French women, and then when you do meet them (in this instance one of Ben Franklin’s “most intimate friends”): “I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast.”

The wife of a senior diplomat said these things. The wife of a future president, who raised children, one of whom became another president, without much help from dad, gushed about the DISpleasure of living abroad in a palace outside one of the greatest cities in the world (though, to be fair, in this historical context, “the worst of times,” maybe Paris then had more austere and hostile qualities than we modern travelers see).

This too shall pass, as they say. Abigail did eventually look back at her time in Paris with fondness. But the shock in the moment is undeniable.

“To have had Paris tolerable to me,” said Abigail Adams, “I should not have gone to London.” Now there’s a sentiment I can commiserate with.

Living in Naples

I’ve decided that everything I hear about Naples is true. I love it here. I also hate it here. Both equally true. But mostly I love it here. A small town crowning a tiny Italian mountain is infinitely more fascinating than a small town back home. The evening, Italy at twilight, when the Mediterranean sun has set but hasn’t finished shining, holds a magic no swarm of mosquitoes or pack of stray dogs feeding on roadside trash can truly quench. Hiking up the rim of an extinct volcano and looking over the bay of Pozzuoli, the islands of Procida and Ischia, the hydrofoils leaving for the Amalfi coast across the Bay of Naples—this is the sublime in the supreme.

But the robberies, the horror stories told and retold within the American faketown in Gricignano, are also true. A girl I work with has gotten robbed more times than I can count, likely because she is loud and has probably made enemies, so now her enemies know every time she goes out of town. I hesitate to say the gassing stories are true (allegedly thieves will gas people in their sleep so they sleep through the entire nighttime robbery), but I’m willing to believe.

And the pizza, the caffe, the sfogliatella, the seafood are to die for. And I can park at work for free and walk to the international airport. And I get gas coupons that make the astronomical European gas prices obsolete and I can drive around Italy paying what an American pays for his or her gas back home. And within eight hours of driving, I have access to 70% of the world’s art.

Ah, Naples. It’s no vacation, but it’s a chance of a lifetime. The mafia terrifies me. The gypsies terrify and fascinate me, and bother me when I park at Ikea. They stole my friend’s car when she was in it.

Napoli is a condensed Italy, an Italy without hospitality, or at least a pre-tourist Italy. Neapolitans are an intense variety of Italian, or perhaps an unconquered breed. Individuals have been extremely hospitable and friendly, but as a group they repel the casual tourist. There are very few “touristy” places in Naples. It’s for the varsity team—all others need not bother. There is treasure here for a seasoned explorer to find. It requires more than mere receptivity. You’d hope the next sentence would read “…and rewards more than the more immediately pleasing tourist destinations.” But it’s never that simple. Maybe I’ll be able to say that, eventually. Maybe not. That’s probably the wrong way to frame it, but I’ll have to let you know.

Driving part 2

The last time I mentioned driving I was somewhat shellshocked at the way the Neapolitans have taken to cars. Italian driving in general is pretty wild, but Napoli is a distilled essence of Italy, an Italy without laws.

“Romans drive crazy,” says Maurizio, a Roman, “but we don’t like to drive in Naples.”

There’s rarely been a better example of a pot and kettle, but it speaks to not only the disdain anyone north of Naples feels toward this city, but also to the reputation of the Neapolitan man in a Fiat.

First, the disdain. Northern Italians say that Africa starts south of Rome. Indeed, Rome is as far south as most of the tourists come, except destination travelers looking for a day in Pompeii, Amalfi or the Royal Palace in Caserta (and then only to film something they couldn’t get permission to film in Rome). If you’ve been to northern Italy, from Tuscany and Florence to Venice and the Dolomites, from Milan to Torino to the Cinqueterra, there’s enough to explore for a lifetime. Why bother striking south, into the harsher land with sharper wine and fewer road signs? Why spend valuable vacation time wandering lost through the rough city, risking pick pockets in a region with 30% unemployment? There are answers, and there are reasons, but most don’t stop to hear them.

Second, the reputation. I call all drivers here men. It’s a very male world. Even in Bahrain, I saw more women out in public (one exception: malls). Walking through our little town’s piazza, Julie wonders if women are even allowed outside here. The only ones we see are behind registers, in courtyards gossiping around plastic glasses of wine, or naked on billboards. Oh, I forgot the prostitutes. One hazard of driving is the old man who stops to pick up a prostitute (all of them African, most of them carrying their kids around, most, one assumes, slaves). If I want to smash into any Italian drivers, those are the ones.

But I categorize the drivers as young rich men, young fashionable men, old rich men, and old men. These drivers can be either male or female, but female drivers here usually fall into the young fashionable men or the old men categories.

Young rich men drive very expensive cars, impeccably shined, and yield to no one. Their car could be an enormous BMW SUV* or a tiny BMW sports car, and we have no idea what they do to earn this kind of money (though at least out where I live, one assumes, unfairly, it’s either the Comorrah or Casalesi clan). They are extremely special, and therefore extremely impatient and will cut you off at any opportunity. In fact, how dare you even presume to “share” the road with them? They will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever stop or yield the right of way. If they are within 100 meters of your intersection, either stop or consider an alternate route.

*(no SUV here comes close to the size of the average American SUV. A VW Taureg looms larger on the road here than a stretch Tahoe does in the U.S.)

Young fashionable men may be extremely poor and barely able to afford their Fiat 500, but that thing is spit-shined and they are prouder of it than of their new sleek purple popped collar. They yield to no one. Because Italian youth live with their parents well into their 30s, this car is also the proverbial basement couch for the amorous young couple. The fashionable young men are extremely special, and therefore extremely impatient and will cut you off at any opportunity. Being the most creative category, they may even create opportunities to cut you off, for example by passing you on the right and cutting you off, then zipping to the left lane and answering their cell (which, on Italian freeways, requires a 70% reduction in speed) and then coming up from behind you and cutting you off again. How dare you even presume to “share” the road with them? If you can beat them into the intersection, you may continue on your way in relative safety, until you meet another one.

The old men drive extremely slow. Not slow like an old person on a U.S. highway, trailing the speed limit by five or ten in the right lane. No, old Italian men drive 20 in any lane. 20 kilometers per hour, or maybe per day. They are the greatest hazard on the road, all the more so because they’re probably 50% of the johns stopping to rape the slaves on the narrow street corner, too. They are terrified of driving, but what the heck, all the kids are doing it nowadays, and they’re at least as special as any of these young ruffians. Probably more so, because he remembers when this whole town was nothing but a couple of fields and a café/bar. At an intersection, assume this old guy doesn’t know he’s on the road, let alone where he’s going, and just go around him.

Old rich men are like the young rich men, but their range of cars will include a Mercedes with blacked-out windows or a Mazerati. One assumes they own this particular strip of road, to include all the businesses on either side, the slaves working every corner, and the utility companies employed to repair the road and pick up the trash. They’ve grown patient in their old age, but are probably more special than any other Italian, who is more special than anyone else. They may grant you the right of way as an act of munificence, but pretty much most of the time they are impatient and will cut you off at any opportunity. In fact, how dare you even presume to “share” the road with them? If you don’t yield them right of way, tomorrow that intersection will be gone.

I’m not sure what the protocol is for passing a horse. I guess just wait for an opening. The same goes for a scooter, the driver of which is holding the reigns of a white pony. I let that guy go.

I’ve concluded that driving here is about asserting your manliness, or your specialness, or somehow convincing the entire world to bow down to you. Honor is supreme. Yielding is dishonorable. “I am special,” everyone insists. “It shouldn’t have to be ME that backs up.”

In the States, the most impatient and self-absorbed drivers are the rich suburbanites. They are in fair supply, and they drive even bigger SUVs than anything to be found in Europe. A New Yorker profile of one of the super-rich suburbs of New York City said that money, while it may not be able to buy happiness, certainly buys impatience. But there are enough semi-courteous people, or at least community-minded people with the barest hint of suspicion that they may not be the most important person in the universe, to keep the rudest among us in check on the U.S. roads.

The advent of the Euro halved Italy’s wealth and impoverished an entire generation (probably more). Maybe these “new poor” Italians still feel as special as the American rich. There’s a pregnant concept.