Friday 28 February 2014

Italians: mixing love and hate in a messy recipe



Glad at this time I won’t talk too much about my immigration issues: I got my work permit, and for a couple of years I should be ok.
I need a work permit for the obvious reason I’m not Canadian. It doesn’t happen often to me to think of myself as an Italian in Canada: I just live my life in Vancouver, mixed with thousands of other people who do the same and that probably come from somewhere else. That’s actually something it’s always fascinated me: the number of accents and languages you can spot when for example you go to a supermarket.
Yet, something that happened some weeks ago drove me to think what it means to be Italian.
Not to me, but to others.

I was with some colleague at an Ethiopian restaurant: chats, laughs, food of course, whatever you can expect from a lunch with colleagues.
I had paid my bill and I was about to get out when my attention was caught by a paper hanged on the wall,  close to restaurant entrance.
I didn’t read much, but the title was meaningful: “Graziani, the butcher of Ethiopia”.
Graziani was the commander in chief of the Italian army that invaded Ethiopia in 1936 and used toxic gasses against Ethiopian troops.
Italians therefore, at least to some, are not just the people with love for stylish clothes who always waive their hands when talking, messy, noisy and unreliable, but funny after all.
What has recently happened in my home country, with the 4th Prime Minister in the last 3 years can just confirm Italians are messy and unreliable, at least when they have to stay together.
It doesn’t come as a surprise that from a badly managed country thousands of people are fleeing (in few hours the 2000 places available for the WHV in Canada got finished).
Being Italian abroad, especially nowadays, I think it means somehow to love and hate your own country at the same time, because when you look at it you probably look at yourself, what you actually are and what you don’t want to be.
It’s probably a mixture of pride towards a concept of quality and way of enjoying the life unknown to Canadians and rage for the absolute lack of cohesion and civic-mindedness that afflicts Italy.
It’s love and hate, good and evil all together, with a result that’s not always a masterpiece like a monument or a square in an Italian city, not always tasty and healthy like a real pizza (where you do NOT put ketchup on), not always a dolce vita, rather than a difficult situation that has brought many to leave the country.

I wouldn’t be in Canada otherwise, would I?