#9: The Capofila and Italian Efficiency
Ciao Nonni!
The long awaited (by me) first week of proper, full time childcare started this week ... with Leo catching a cold. Il poverino (the poor thing) developed a perfectly-timed fever and runny nose on Sunday and was not even close to being able to plausibly take on Monday morning, or even Tuesday. Honestly. Luckily with a few big naps and quiet days, he has finally recovered enough to start again this morning. Here's hoping for no phone calls requesting he be collected again! I'm currently sitting in the excellent public library in Lucca, enjoying the first moment of quiet in quite a while. It is an amazing facility and I can envisage spending plenty of time here.
Raffy is settling in very well. She runs into school each morning without so much as a backward glance at me as I shout goodbye in her wake. I can't tell how much Italian she has picked up, but honestly the first word she came home talking about at length encapsulates perfectly so much about her personality. It's capofila. It roughly translates to 'leader' or 'first in line' and is used at school to describe the child who is chosen to lead the rest of the class into the lunch room / garden / bathroom etc. She came home and complained that she hadn't been capofila yet but that her best friend Aurora had been capofila twice already. Since then thankfully she has been capofila a few times, but she's now obsessed with the concept and every task that we need to complete at home must have a capofila and unsurprisingly she is ALWAYS it.
There are a few nuances of the Italian psyche that I feel are slowly revealing themselves to me. One of the aspects of general attitudes here that I appreciate greatly is unabashed efficiency in tasks that aren't inherently enjoyable. Efficiency bordering on laziness, some may say, but aren't those two concepts very close and rather subjective? For a small example, cutlery isn't replaced between courses here. You are given one knife and fork at the beginning of the meal and this is what you will use throughout, regardless of whether you are having a single course, or a feast of antipasti, primi and secondi. Instead of arranging the cutlery on the plate at the end of the meal, you put it back on the table.
For my birthday dinner we went out and both forgot this rule. The waiter, with whom we'd had some friendly conversation with earlier, told us to keep our cutlery as "here in Lucca we don't like to waste time washing cutlery all night" and honestly I loved it. An Italian will spend hours working on or appreciating something of beauty, but will find the most ruthlessly efficient way to minimise time spent on anything else. Bravo.
I hope you're keeping well. Go the mighty blues!
Lots of love,
Kate
