This post has been languishing in my drafts folder for over a week. It felt too negative to press send. Too raw and ragged. Not so much like me. I live to laugh, and this wasn’t funny.
You see, we ignored all the stories, signs, and butt clenches that should have warned us away from foreign travel this summer—so I’m here to reinforce any trepidation you may be feeling about going abroad. Listen to it. And if you must travel, temper your expectations, pack your patience (in your carry on with an air tag) and steal yourself against disappointment, because if you’re at all like me—it will be your constant companion. XOX
In her novel Eat, Pray, Love, Liz Gilbert immerses us in her love of all things Italian, including the language and how gorgeous the words are in their full expression. At the end of her year-long journey of self-discovery, Liz chooses her favorite Italian word, attraversiamo—at that point a word dripping with nuance, (the literal definition being, to cross over)—as the word that best defines her.
That being said, while I’d love nothing more than to brag to y’all that we are one millimeter as deep, insightful, and self-realized as Liz—we are not. Still, there are a couple of more pedestrian things my husband and I do share with Liz— her love of Italy, and the act of defining ourselves with a single Italian word. Ours is scarpetta.
Now, by no stretch of the imagination is scarpetta as gorgeous, sexy, or fraught with hidden meaning as attraversiamo.
Nope, the Urban dictionary considers scarpetta Italian ‘street slang’. In Italian, it means sopping up all the sauce left on your plate (or in the pot) with bread. Italian waiters love the word. Basically, anyone who feeds us in Italy (oh, who are we kidding, anywhere in the world), takes one look at us, hand us a basket of freshly baked bread, and whispers, “scarpetta” to us like a prayer. They identify us as kindred spirits. People who love to eat. Foodies. We are their kind of people—and believe me when I say—we do not disappoint. And while I am simultaneously humiliated and proud to admit that no plate has ever left our table that we haven’t scarpetta’d so clean they didn’t have to wash it—upon refection I like to think it says more about us and our quest to savor “everything good in life”, than gluttony, so please humor me.
Normally I would just leave us here, fat and happy, reminiscing about savory sauces, clean plates, warm bread, and everything wonderful about Italy.
But we just returned from a short visit, and while we happily scarpetta’d our faces off all through Tuscany, I could not help but notice that just like the rest of the world, post-pandemic Italy is different. Travel sucks. Service sucks. The infrastructure is a gazillion times more broken than it normally is. Covid is everywhere, our luggage was missing for three days, and the locals, who are normally delightful, were all out of shits to give. Oh, and it was hotter than the any place without air conditioning has any right being.
I honestly don’t know what I was expecting, but I gotta tell ya, it hit me hard.
Hidden just below the surface was so. much. shit.
Chaos, turmoil, anger, and grief.
And Italy reflected mine back to me in spades.
I have a bestie, Steph, who is obsessed with the etymology of words, their origin, and how their meanings have changed throughout the years. Normally I leave that up to her, but she’s rubbed off on me enough that I remembered that the literal meaning of scarpetta is, “little shoe, or child’s shoe” which comes from thinking that just like dragging bread across a plate will sop up every scrap, a shoe will pick up whatever is on the ground.
You know, the dregs, garbage…dirt…shit. And since that sounds awful, I’d always ignored that definition.
That, and the one that says, ‘scarpetta was born from scarcity. That the poor were only allowed the scraps’. Gahhhhhhh!
Those just didn’t jive with the “savoring the good” parts of my narrative—until last week. And now, in this year of our Lord 2022, I regret to inform you that I must add the word scarpetta to my list of things that have turned more bitter than sweet.
The world is nothing like it was in the before-times. Not yet. And maybe,(gasp) it never will be. Don’t get me wrong, everybody’s pretending it is, they’re wearing their best Mona Lisa smiles,(possibly obscured by a mask) but it’s all smoke and mirrors with a cauldron of I’m-not-sure-what-the-fuck-is-happening roiling just below the surface.
Sometimes it smells like fear, other times rage, mostly it reeks of disappointment.
But you know me, I’m the eternal optimist, the perennial Pollyanna, so I’ll be giving the world like, a hundred more tries to get it right. And I suppose that after a shit-ton of trials and errors, I’ll know right when I feel it. Until then, I’m determined to stay closer to home, manage my expectations, and hold out hope for the best.
Who knows, we have a wedding to attend next year in Positano. Maybe by that time, Italy, and the world, will be more warm bread than shit-shoe to me again.
Carry on,
Xox Janet
