Belli.Īmerican cowboy movies filmed in the Spanish sierras and often badly dubbed, the Spaghetti Western is one of the most endearing products of Italian cinema. Every man is Michelangelo's David, every woman a Bellini Madonna or Botticelli angel. What you see, and unless appearances are truly deceptive, is a people at home with itself.
It's impossible to have enough of the passegiata. A time to stop every so often in the middle of the street to address your audience, even if it consists of just one person, with grand shrugs and expansive gestures. A time to practise hand language of a complexity that might baffle a top code-breaker.
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This is the time for men to show clodhopping foreigners how to walk with fine tweed jackets draped immaculately over their shoulders, for men and women to demonstrate how to tie a canary yellow jumper around your neck without it looking anything less than studied. This is the time of day when Italy struts its own stage, when people, with the exception of a few teenagers and students trying hard to revolt (pretending they prefer McDonald's to what is without doubt among the world's finest food, whether fast or slow, cooked or raw), dress up, look good and go on show. Sit in a café in any Italian street just before sunset and watch what must be the world's only daily carnival pass by: the passegiata. Like the great cities it is performed in, Italian opera offers high art and low camp, magnificent voices and pitiful acting, great music and banal dialogue. The musical equivalent, at its best, of a Brunelleschi church, at its worst of the Vittorio Emannuele monument in Rome (the 'Typewriter' as Romans know it this vast 19th-century white marble conceit was used as a spectacular prop in Peter Greenaway's Belly of an Architect), opera is both glorious and kitsch.
Imagine an Italian audience's rapt reaction to Pavarotti singing 'O Sole Mio'. Watching opera in Italy - Aida at the Roman arena in Verona and Tosca at the Opera House, Naples have been my favourites - means being cento-per-cento involved in the drama, music and song. Italian opera is the ritualised chorus of Italian cities at their full-blooded, baroque best. For all its beauty, Italian football can be an ugly game. It is riven by racism, besmirched with the fag-end of fascism. Italian football, although operatic, exciting and played increasingly in magnificent stadia like the San Siro (pictured above) that resemble the Colosseum brought up to date, is not as civilised as it might be.
It's about the beautiful pass, the beautiful goal, the beautiful result. Football in Italy is about the intense, age-old rivalry between cities. The Italian game is driven less by business goals or the work ethic than English football. Italy is the land of the stiletto-sharp suit from Armani, stiletto-sharp haircuts and the stiletto-sharp and much sought after furniture of Gio Ponti and Carlo Mollino. On the other hand, the stiletto heel is also genuinely sexy, as is the sharpness of style it gives shape to. This device is used by women (and men in drag) to make holes in wooden floors at cocktail parties, and to rick their own tendons and toes. It applies, too, to the spiked heel that goes by the same name. The word stiletto derives from stylus, a sharp point or pen. It is designed to cause maximum effect by minimal means. Sharpest of all is the stiletto - small and tapered, sneaky and treacherous. Sharp dressing, sharp talking, sharp design. They put us in a holiday frame of mind, transport us on overcast mornings, along with the smell of good, strong espresso, to Piazza Navona. Api are used as mobile coffee bars in London. Where the Vespa (wasp) is for play and display, the Ape (bee), its droning three-wheeled sibling, is for work and delay. How, like wasps, they evoke Italian holidays, all wind-in-the-hair switchbacks along the Amalfi coast in search of the perfect ice cream, coffee and beach. How they buzz like the wasps they are named after. I am spirited into any number of narrow streets where these characterful vespines create an urban soundtrack as Italian as any by Verdi. I think of Nanni Moretti's curiously touching film Dear Diary, in which the director stars, riding his scooter in search of the subtopian wasteland where Pier Paolo Pasolini, director of the provocative Pigsty (1969) and Decameron (1970), was murdered. When I hear the word Vespa, I think of raven-haired girls in fashionable sunglasses perched pouting on a vespiary of motor-scooters in the Piazza Navona.