I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.
|
Yesterday I was writing to a friend of mine in South Africa, Des. (Des, if you're reading this newsletter, I'm not putting your last name so I don't violate privacy normsss.) He's in one of those periods where everything happens at once. And while I was writing to him, I thought about a quote. A quote that stopped me for a solid five minutes in the Formula 1 room of the car museum here in Torino. Five minutes. Standing still. Staring at a wall. People walked around me. I'm fairly sure a couple of them thought I was having some kind of crisis, or that an ictus had caught me right there between a Ferrari and a Lotus. "If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." Mario Andretti. Born in Istria. His family lost the house, the land, the name of the street they lived on. Seven years in a refugee camp. Then a boat, and Nazareth, Pennsylvania, with almost no English and less money. He had every reason to keep things under control. Instead he drove at 200 miles an hour for thirty years and became the only man to win the Indy 500, the Daytona 500 and the Formula 1 World Championship. Why am I telling you this? Because most people's Italy is very much under control. It's the two-week trip in a good year. The photos of the grandmother's town, never the town. The someday, when the kids are older, when work calms down, when the passport thing gets sorted. Safe. Scheduled. Going nowhere. That version of your Italy deserves to be taken out back and shot. Not tomorrow. Now. Because the Italy you belong to is not a holiday you book. It's a language your kids argue in, a butcher who knows your surname, a table where nobody explains anything to you because you're not a guest anymore. That doesn't happen under control. It happens when you go faster than feels reasonable. Which brings me to the second thing. My friends: I moved to Torino. Not visiting. Not "spending some months". Boxes, keys, a new bar where they already know how I take my coffee. So consider yourself warned. You're going to hear a lot more about this city from me. The Alps sitting at the end of the street like they're waiting for someone. The porticoes. The Egyptian museum that has no business being here. The chocolate that ruined me. And the cars, apparently. Torino is where Italy quietly built the things the world thinks are Italian. I want to show you the version of it that doesn't fit in a guidebook. Hit reply and tell me one thing you want me to go find here. I'll go find it. Fabiana, la torinese PS. Andretti also said the crashes are part of it. |
Fabiana Stringa
I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
I moved to Turin in August, and for six weeks the city said no. Not for the money. Here is the thing no relocation guide will tell you: Italy does not check whether you can pay. Italy checks whether it likes you. Now let me tell you about a man I work with. Mark is thirty-two years old. Moved to Turin this year. An emergency room doctor, a professor of medicine at the university of his town. Married. Ring, wife, the whole arrangement. He found the apartment he wanted. Deposit ready, documents...
In 1853, in Budrio, a town outside Bologna, a seventeen-year-old named Giuseppe Donati was trying to build a cornet out of clay. It broke. He kept what was left. Cut ten holes into it. Named it in Bolognese dialect after the animal it resembled. Ucarèina. Little goose. Clay whistles had existed for thousands of years before him. China, South America, Africa. Beautiful objects. Toys, mostly. None of them could play a proper scale, which means none of them could play a proper song. Donati's...
Jonas is Brazilian, and Jonas is brave. Brave enough to walk into a trattoria alone, in August, in a town where nobody speaks a word of Portuguese, and order in Italian. He had practiced. Word for word, in the mirror, for two days. "Buonasera. Per me, i tortelli di zucca." The waiter stopped writing. Then came the pause. The kind where the pen stays up in the air, the tea towel comes off the shoulder, and a man decides how to break the news to you gently. "Signore… la zucca? Ad agosto?" At...