Professor Grimaldi and I ignore the ruins of Pompeii

Rosa Grimaldi is a professor at Bologna whom I know from a brief stint she did at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor around 2000. Veronica and I met her on a couple of occasions and we became friends. I kept up that friendship when I came to Italy last time, and I met up with her and husband Isacco. On this trip, she happened to be near Napoli. When I e-mailed her with my travel plans, it worked out for us to have a short visit. To meet up, I took the Circumvesuviana train from Sorrento to Pompeii, (her parents live in a small town nearby.)

Rosa picked me up at the station and we headed for the city center. She only had enough time for a drink and a chat. She is taking care of her two little boys and helping her mother with her aging father. Rosa is a little overwhelmed right now.

So, we ignored the famous archeological site. I perversely enjoyed that I had come all the way to Pomeii, but was not going to see the ruins. Instead I was going to visit with a charming Italian friend, sit in the piazza and have a Compari. I did glimpse some ruins while speeding past the site in Rosa’s little eurocar from the road. That’s really the best way to see ruins (see exspectata peregrinvs entry).

We batted conversational shuttlecocks back and forth: her family situation this summer, what’s happening with Veronica, each of our careers, why I’m traveling. But I was distracted by the wicker chairs at the outdoor café. I kept having to change chairs, because they were all broke in some way. I still thought they were preferable to the injection-molded plastic chairs that many outdoor places in the states have. Settling on an acceptable, but still broken chair, I then noticed that the wait staff were constantly tilting and leaning empty chairs on the edges of unoccupied tables. They were so into doing this that the service suffered at times. We speculated. Was it to keep pigeons off the chairs? Were they signaling that some tables were off-limits? Was the café about to close? I got so curious that Rosa finally asked one of the waiters about it. Turns out that the wind blows the table cloths off, and the wait staff used the chairs to keep this from happening. They did this day after day.

It gave me an insight. Italians enjoy celebrating the way of doing a thing. Americans just enjoy getting the thing done.

These Italian waiters had their way and they turned it into a kind of daily ritual. They didn’t care if it was the optimal way, they made it the best way by celebrating the way they did it, with a florish and with style.

A typical American (I’ll include myself here) would see the problem and would change things and consider things to come up with the most efficient solution, or the most elegant, or the least annoying, etc. They’d get out the restaurant supply catalog, order some of those metal clips they use on tablecloths throughout the world, make sure they were the right size, etc. And they’d get the satisfaction of another job well done.

Ideally I would learn to enjoy the moment of doing, the act of whatever it is I am doing, and value that more than either the ritual of doing something or the satisfaction of checking jobs off a list.

We talked about this and related ideas. Who cares if these ideas have any weight? It felt good to have a real conversation, in complete sentences, with someone here in Italy. And Rosa felt good about being able to talk to someone without having to take care of them at the same time. We enjoyed the adult break, but it was over almost as soon as it started. I caught an early train back to Sorrento, and Rosa went home to care for her family.