Lobstergirl's Full Review: Beppe Severgnini - Ciao, America: An Italian Disco...
America is a land where the beer is always too cold and the coffee too hot, and where parking signs (unlike in Italy) are more than merely suggestions. Americans are implacably cordial, optimistic, and huge-assed. We have the need to divulge the most intimate details of our lives to strangers as we invade their personal space. From our geopolitics to our immediate environments, we have an overweening urge to contain, control, and overcome the outside world – witness Bosnia, air conditioning, the Weather Channel, diets, RV’s, and the entire self-help genre.
Such are the findings of Beppe Severgnini, a well known Italian author and journalist (for Corriere della Sera and The Economist) who spent 1994-95 living in Georgetown, Washington D.C. (at 1513 34th St., between Volta and P, should you wish to check it out; you won’t be the first). The comic little drawing on the inside cover sleeve reveals him to resemble a middle-aged Harry Potter. His writing in Ciao, America! An Italian Discovers the U.S is in somewhat the same vein (and falls into some of the same ruts) as popular travel writer Bill Bryson’s.
Some of Severgnini’s observations don’t ring quite true: the cable TV company specifies precisely at what time their technicians will arrive the following morning (has this ever happened, anywhere, to anyone?) Certainly local “bureaucracies” are much less byzantine than in Italy, as he notes, but as most Americans in large cities can probably attest, a trip to the DMV will bring on sentiments approaching the homicidal. And who told him that “the merest glimpse of a can of Spam sets American gastric juices flowing”?
Other observations are accurate, but tedious in their obviousness. Americans are not very interested in soccer, unless small American children are playing. We take more showers than Europeans, and we take our water pressure very seriously. The author’s sense of wonderment and awe at the novelty of online shopping is grotesquely stale seven years later.
Still other assessments bespeak the obvious but charm with their delivery: “While the British like drinking their lukewarm coffee in porcelain coffee cups, Americans take theirs at volcanic temperatures in those deadly polystyrene beakers or in mugs decorated with hobgoblins, cartoon characters, superheroes, or snappy one-liners. In America, government ministers see nothing embarrassing in sipping their coffee from a receptacle with I BOSS! YOU NOT! written on the outside.”
What’s the verdict on our gigantic butts? Well, it’s mixed. “The American didietro, or bottom..…has a hypnotic and vaguely soothing effect on foreigners. If that’s the price for being the world’s number-one nation, then no thanks.” Still, the threat of the large ass doesn’t prevent Severgnini and his wife from purchasing that notorious ass enlarger, the easy chair: “After rocking-chairs (which made the restless American dream of being on the move while sitting still actually come true) there were easy chairs, patented in the mid-19th century and immediately established as a rich sources of moral dilemmas.”
Like every newcomer to Washington, he learns quickly about the Social Safeway and the Soviet Safeway (the first named for its aisles supposedly clogged with yuppies looking for love, the second for its spartanly stocked shelves). I smiled fondly at his mention of Rodman’s, a cluttered mom and pop drugstore that sells expensive imported chocolates next to wilted lettuce and electronics. I always look forward to visits to Rodman’s, where I am sometimes overcome by the feeling Salman Rushdie missed so much during his fatwa captivity – that feeling of going into a store to purchase something and suddenly realizing that what you really want is the thing next to it.
Shopping, of course, whether at Safeway, Fresh Fields, the used car lot, the Gap, Restoration Hardware, or Mattress Warehouse, is a prism through which you can learn almost everything you need to know about America. A visit to Potomac Mills, a massive mega-mall, demonstrates that “in the immense stores that sell female underwear, the newcomer can begin to take stock of American sexuality, and suspect that something may be wrong with it.” I think he’s referring specifically to the Wonderbra, as if America was the first civilization enraptured by the ability to push breasts up and out.
And yes, many Americans don’t like the practice of tipping any more than foreigners do, but it’s less of an insult than the mandatory coperto, or cover charge at many Italian restaurants. The author does a lot of complaining about American errors of the Italian language in newspapers and menus—all either irritating or amusing, I’m sure. I would like to show him the menu I saw in Rome that boasted, “We serve our fish frozen.”
This book was originally published as Un italiano in America. The translation is mostly fine, although I still haven’t found a source for the verb “to gen up”, as in “In preparation for our purchase, my wife and I had genned up on the various bargaining techniques with a manual we had bought specially….”
I am always interested in what outsiders think of America. Severgnini (who, it should be noted, has been here many times) doesn’t mock us, even when he’s pointing out our ugliness. His generosity of spirit comes through as he describes his fascination with the sameness of motel rooms, the ridiculousness of two tiny pensioners traveling in a 30-foot RV, and the tragicomedy of our overweight underclass stuffing themselves at a pancake house. If only he had genned up on some of Bill Bryson’s works, maybe he could have avoided some bothersome “foreigner in America” clichés.
When Beppe Severgnini and his wife rented a creaky house in Georgetown they were determined to see if they could adapt to a full four seasons in a cou...More at HotBookSale
Now In Paperback: the celebrated, coast-to-coast bestselling chronicle of a year in the United States by the Bill Bryson of Italy.More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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