#70: Prosciutto-Coloured Glasses
Ciao Nonni!
I hope you're well, and that you're bearing up under the heat. It sounds like it has been a very long and hot summer down under this year.
I'm going to start this week with my new favourite Italian saying, which I learnt from a friend over a few glasses of prosecco on Friday night.
Avere le fette di prosciutto sugli occhi...
The literal translation is to have slices of ham over your eyes. Pardon, you ask?
It refers to when a person is blind to what should be absolutely obvious to them, whether wilfully or not. It can also be used in place of a phrase in English like rose-coloured glasses.
I was delighted at the visual this phrase conjured, and also at the pure Italianness of it. Of course it is food-related. And prosciutto, no less. Why would anyone have ham on their face? I don't know, but I love it.
Last week brought another bureaucratic entanglement, but thankfully this time everything played out alarmingly smoothly. I was faced with the task of registering the kids for school enrollment next year. Last year I managed it with the support of a team of experts.
David's friend from his office explained the procedure, and then my brilliant friend Ashley came to the administrative office with me to translate. Despite being late to the party, we somehow managed to snag a place for Raffy at an excellent state-run kindergarten in the centre. I was very lucky.
This year, I decided to test myself. I had a head start in that Raffy's enrollment (for primary school) was all done online, so I could take my time trying to figure out how to complete and submit the forms. Leo's, however, still needed to be done on paper at the central administrative office of the public schools in Lucca's centro storico. This involves going to the office during their opening hours (11:30am to 1pm three days a week) and filling out 12+ pages of forms on the spot, while they also pepper you with all sorts of questions about immunisation history, family set up, and immigration status.
This latter line of questioning, I think, will never go away. Despite the fact that all of our ID documents clearly state that we are Italian citizens, I'm always asked about visas, permits to stay, and residency status. Ahh well.
The real challenge with these forms is that they are (obviously) all in Italian. And not just Italian, bureaucratic Italian. Which is like a whole language of its own. It is so over the top. The Italians have certainly not made any moves towards making forms more accessible through simplifying language, like in Australia.
In addition to this, the office building must be made of thick stone walls that absorb all telecommunication signals. Phones do not work inside. So my usual fallback of using my phone to translate any unknown words or phrases is impossible.
In any case, I've done enough of these types of forms now to have a pretty good idea of what they want to know. I did my best, and handed them back to the signora behind the desk after about 20 minutes. She took pity on me, and checked them. I'd only mucked up one small section, and she helpfully explained how to fix it. She also let me know immediately that both the kids will be accepted into our first choice of schools, which is amazing.
And speaking of education, I'm on a mission to combine my resolutions to learn Italian and also generally read more. I have a target of reading 50 books in 2025, and am so far on track.
This week's book was in Italian. It is a collection of famous Italian children's tales, kind of like Aesop's fables. It's called I Viaggi Di Giovannini Perdigiorno, by Gianni Rodari. I loved it.
The stories describe the worlds that the adventurer Giovannini travels to on his various voyages. The destinations are fantastic places like the land of sugar people, the chocolate planet, the land where no one sleeps, and the land where no one ever says yes or no, they only ever reply with "ni". The final adventure is to il paese senza errore, or the land without wrong - a utopian place where everything is perfect.
My favourites were i pianeta degli uomini blu, where Giovannino was trapped in a cage by a team of 12 blue professors, accompanied by 200 of their students, and closely examined because of his skin colour. Eventually they realised he was the same as them (including the fact that he was suffering from a cold) and was released. They then invited him for a drink.
Il paese senza punta is a land where nothing is pointy. Even the roses do not have thorns. Fascinated, Giovannino tries to pick one and is caught by a passing police officer. His punishment is to slap the officer twice.
Giovannino is horrified, and asks to receive the slaps instead. He exclaims that this is unfair and terrible. Of course, the officer replies. It is such a hateful punishment, that no one ever commits a crime. Giovannino refuses, and is instead deported. He spends the rest of his life dreaming of being able to go back and live in the kind country, in a house with a round roof.
I've been re-reading the stories to the kids in the bath in the evenings. Aside from the odd comment on my poor pronunciation from Raffy, they are both enjoying them as much as me.
Sending all my love! Baci e abbracci.
Kate
