Addendum

[deckardcanine]

Some other observations I made on my trip to Italy:

13. Even with a map and working knowledge of the language, you can get lost easily. Nearly every time my family walked out of a building in any city, there was a quandary on which way to go to our next destination, even if we'd been there before. This is partly because the streets are not well-marked, but also because they change names every two or three blocks. This seems true for each of the cities.

14. Some English menus list "buffalo cheese" and "rocket salad." These are mistranslations of bufala (cow) and arugola.

15. Romans eat breakfast at 8 and dinner at 8. It seems the only restaurants that open before 7:30 or so are catered to ugly Americans. But if there's one city to do as the locals do, it's Rome.

16. The archetype of the Italian with a mustache and no beard is outdated. I saw all of one Italian like that, and he was graying. The style might even be more common in the U.S.

17. At airports and train terminals, you can often find old-fashioned marionettes. They are identified with Pinocchio. Pfeh. At least they don't resemble the Disney incarnations (there was more than one, I'm afraid).

18. Webpage translations go word for word. At our luxurious first residence (it even had air conditioning!), we were allowed some Web access. I noticed that the message in the lower left corner started with "Apertura." That would be "opening" as a noun, not a verb.

19. Every hotel/bed-and-breakfast lock is tricky. Even when we'd opened a door half a dozen times before, we had a little difficulty one way or another. When in Florence the hotel clerk had trouble just getting us to our room, we knew we were gonna need a lot of patience.

20. Plumbing mechanisms differ. In no country before have I seen toilets operated by wall flap switches or floor buttons. Sometimes you have to apply more pressure than you'd think would be necessary. Shower mechanisms were also new to me, but not as consistently.

21. Angels in old paintings have multicolored wings. I had seen such paintings before only in the Cleveland monastery I visited in 2004. I must say, modern conceptions of angels tend to look boring by comparison, except in games like Tales of Symphonia.

Comments

Because Amerikans...

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

...don't travel much to places like Italy, and because they see only the highest quality Italian art in expensive coffee-table books, their idea of Italian art in general is that it's stately and solemn, like the Baroque or the High Renaissance. They don't know much about Giotto and the Carpaccios' sprightliness or those multi-coloured angels' wings you speak of. It's sort of like how the nineteenth century Brits were horrified to learn that the ancient Greeks COLOURED their statues!