Usually I don’t indulge in fun making of English translations of Italian.  Not everything translates, as everybody knows.

But, sometimes it is just too funny to not make a comment.

I’m in the Archeological Museum in Florence, just minding my own business and looking at art and artifacts and reading an occasional label, sometimes in Italian, sometimes in English.

And, for some random reason that I will never truly understand, I read this particular label, maybe because it comments on the path I’ve chosen for this lifetime of mine.

And, usually when reading English labels of Italian originals, my mind starts wandering while my eyes try to find the real information hidden amidst the tangled, mangled translation.  But this time, I stuck with it through at least the first paragraph.  When I got to the final sentence of paragraph one, I thought for a moment that someone would call a museum guard to pick the hysterical woman up off the floor.

Because, here’s the funny truth about not only the objets owned by the Archeological Museum, but indeed about everyone and everything on earth.  In truth, we are all purchased or donated, and should be considered as a part of the collections themselves, while at the same time

“being of uncertain provenance and without context.”

Which I think will be the title of my next book. :-)

Generic hardware store from Google Images but with double the space you’d find in an Italian hardware store. Just sayin’.

Plus, don’t forget to factor in the second layer of merchandise hanging from the rafters.

So, naturally I was standing in the hardware store in my Santa Croce neighborhood in Florence, experiencing pure happiness because I had finally found the rope department.

I was looking for an especially delicate kind of rope for a very specific task.

I needed to tie down my duvet.

Don’t ask, but I wanted to make my pretty finely-made duvet smaller. It had something to do with my obsession at the time, which was all about packing lighter and smaller. And that is all I really want to say about that obsession at this moment.

Finding the hardware store in the first place is what deserves a toast with a prosecco. It had taken me weeks to notice this small negozio near the Sant’ Ambrogio market.  If you’ve ever been in that part of Florence, you know what I mean. There are a lot of distractions.  Every store, every person, every cobble stone vies for your attention.  At least they do for mine.

One of the first things that you must adjust to, if you want to live in the historic center of any Italian town without a car or bicycle (think about that. Where will you park your car, never mind manage the drivers, medieval streets, in Italy? [It is almost beyond comprehension once you start thinking about the details.] Your bike? Have you heard of this crazy little thing called theft?), is getting over the idea that there is such a thing as one-stop shopping.  As in, I’ll just be gone for an hour and check off everything on my shopping list in a couple of quick stops, in my car, then I’ll grab a quick latte at Starbucks, and be back home in time to watch the latest episode of TRHNY on Bravo.

Because you ain’t ever gonna do that here. Even though I do know how to get Bravo, but that is another topic for another day.

As I was saying, there is no one-stop shopping in Italy. And, even though coffee is off the hook here, and after all the Italians invented caffe lattes, there are no Starbucks in the boot. Grazie a dio. It’s a really refreshing break from American culture.

But, back to the rope, etc.:

Repeat after me. There is no such thing as one-stop shopping in Italy.

There might be.  But you can’t count on it until you don’t need it. Let’s say you are after a particular item, such as a battery (have you ever thought about how many kinds of batteries there are in the world?  Right. Neither had I) or a light bulb.  Or delicate rope.

Because as soon as you have figured out where to specifically buy your battery or a certain kind of light bulb, and you have successfully negotiated that particular negozio, and stocked up on your favorite item for say the next 12 months then, and only then, will you start to see that type of battery or light bulb for sale every where you go.

But, if you hadn’t already purchased those items, you wouldn’t see them anywhere you went.  You with me? Because, it’s complicated.

I had been on the hunt for a nice, light-weight rope for several weeks.  I like to plan ahead.  I  never was a Girl Scout but I was a Brownie.

And so, naturally, on this one fine winter’s sunny, but chilly afternoon, I stumbled upon the hardware store on a street I had walked down, oh, I don’t know, maybe a hundred times before, but on those other occasions I might have been looking for tomatoes, or an ATM, or maybe a converter/adapter so I could plug in my hot rollers without tripping my palazzo’s electrical line.  And obtaining each of these seemingly quotidian items requires a specific establishment, requiring you to be on the look out at all times.  It’s helpful if you have had explorers in prior generations of your family tree, but not everyone is that lucky.

So, on this particular winter afternoon, my brain registered for the first time that the unlikely (to me) conglomeration of the snow shovels (there is no snow in Florence that I have ever seen. You talk about your planners…), bird cages, and rolls of plastic sheeting like you put down over a carpet to protect it from foot traffic meant something notable.  That seemingly random cluster signaled a synapse in my brain to think hardware store and–ipso facto–rope.

You get that, right? snow shovels + bird cages + plastic sheeting = hardware store.  At last! Va bene!

Naturally I made a beeline to the front door (it turned out later that there were two front doors on two different streets, but that is yet another story for yet another day) of the hardware store and, I might be mistaken, but I thought I heard a chorus of angels on the sound system.  It could have just been in my brain.

But of this much I am sure: I was immediately overwhelmed by sheer number and variety of goods on offer.  This hardware store had become my everything in less than five seconds.

And I wanted to buy everything.  There was the cheese grater I had been missing; there was the bar soap that I like; there were an amazing variety of tandoor and other ceramic cooking vessels that would put any American Williams and Sonoma to shame.  Please understand that I had shopping bags on both of my arms, not to mention a little cart to wheel stuff home, from my previous stops that day. And we are not talking Dolce and Gabbana, but like bread and milk. Life in Italy is a lot of work just to keep your head above water.  If you think Italians are all busy with la dolce vita all the time, come spend a month in Tuscany in winter and then get back to me.  Try life here without il sole e il vino and then don’t forget to email me.  We can talk.

And hardware stores, like every other place in Italy, are necessarily compressed into really tiny real spaces that bend the mind. History, it turns out, requires real estate and Florence has a lot of history.  Let’s just say I had to duck to avoid hitting baskets and the like hanging from above.  Not only are my feet longer, but my entire body is taller than the average Italian shopper. And maneuvering your body and parcels through a tiny space requires a lot of attention on the part of the hand/eye/leg/foot coordination if you don’t want to bring the entire production down to a crashing halt, which would be super embarrassing for somebody trying to be invisible or at least someone who really really tries to blend in.

And, as I wandered through this wonderland of every imaginable kitchen gadget and electrical appliance and nut and bolt, I remembered the reason I was there.  Which is a small miracle in itself, if you really think about it.

First I saw the chains in big round bundles, big circular bundles such as you might find in a butcher shop in the USA back when there were butcher shops.  And, somehow my brain knew enough to send my body in that direction.  And I forced my brain to slow down and study each shelf as if it were a library with the Dewey decimal system from A to Z.  Or whatever that system was based upon.  Mr. Dewey on acid, I presume? Even the Library of Congress eventually realized something had to change.

Eventually, I spied the rope.  Or, close enough.  It required zeroing in on specific shelves and looking carefully, longingly, for just the right rope.  I had a lot to think about.  Such as: did I want to buy rope from a bolt which would mean interfacing with an actual human, therefore speaking and betraying my heritage.  Because I try to look Italian.  And most of the time I can pass.  As long as I don’t speak.

So, I was really busy on the inside, even if it might have looked like I was standing in front of Michelangelo’s David on the outside.  Like maybe I got mixed up and I had suddenly found the true Accademia dell’ Arte that everyone else has bypassed. Like I had discovered the face of David in a metre of Chinese-fabricated prepackaged twine in the Sant’ Ambrogio neighborhood of Florence.  Forget il Duomo.

I don’t think so.  I mean, I taught art history for god’s sake.

Did I want to buy rope from the bolt? thereby asking for molto assistance?  Or, should I just take one of the prepackaged rope products and what exactly was that rope made of and would it cut my duvet instead of shrinking it?

And, if I did choose the prepackaged rope variety, how many packages would I need?  How long is a metre or a centemetre anyway.  Why didn’t I pay attention in math class instead of trying to be invisible.  Oh, yeah, that’s how I got in this predicament anyway, the not paying attention part.

And how big was that duvet anyway? If I stand here longer, will it come to me?  Or should I just cry and leave?  Which at times seems like a perfectly viable option.

Kidding.

Plus, I have this modern habit of preferring not to talk to anyone when I am purchasing things.  Just me and my credit card and the merchandise, per favore.  Or, I can use cash if need be because you have to plan for these things, but please, no talking.

And it was just about at the same moment that I noticed a small in stature but large in personality signora who was talking to a clerk who was obviously trying to help the rather demanding Napoleonic lady (have you ever noticed how true that truism is?  The smaller the person, the louder they talk?) find what she wanted.  And the signora did not look at me or make eye contact with me but, at that same moment, she spoke about me as if I weren’t standing right there listening.  She said the item she wanted was just behind my head and she referred to me “as that foreign woman standing there.”

Totally fair, I am a visitor in her country and I am certain that I appeared to her as uncouth as the Visigoths who rained down on Italy centuries ago.

But I really thought I was being invisible.

And, what she didn’t know, but I really wish she had known, is that I have just enough command of the Italian language to understand what she was saying, even if I don’t have the skills to interject unexpectedly with the shrinking sarcasm that I would normally apply in such a situation, if there were a similarly tiny hardware store filled to the brim with every imaginable object in my native land, the lovely and truly amazing enterprise known as the United States of America.  I thought to myself, va bene, wait until you are in Seattle in a hardware store and I want the paint thinner behind your head.  Like that will ever happen!!  (Once a woman on a Manhattan bus warned me the next time we sat together I had better watch out for something. I’m like, yeah, because that is going to happen in your lifetime).

Now, honestly, that Florentine hardware store in and of itself is worthy of a short story. You don’t often pick up a paper or magazine or book and see the three words “Florentine” and “hardware store” stitched together, but basically I am here to tell you that the should be. Because that hardware store was a marvel.  You could buy handmade local ceramic dinnerware, a plumb line weight for architecture or sculpture, and electric blankets as well as every kind of nut and bolt known to man.  Or woman.

And then there were the two owners; twin men roughly my age who were very handsome and i swear to god it took me 10 minutes to realize I wasn’t hallucinating, but that there were two middle-aged and kind of amazingly handsome men in such unlikely (to me, at the time, although as I write this it seems utterly obvious) environment, not to mention that it looked like the same man was in two places at the same time. These guys seriously looked alike and were even dressed alike and I gotta say, who does that at my age?

Actually, the more I think about it, the sight of these twin men alone was worth a trip to the hardware store in my neighborhood in Florence.  And this isn’t the tourist b.s. that you read 90% of the time when you pick up a book on Italy.  It’s a truth.

Not the truth.  But a truth.

Because that is all any one of us can ever know, yes?

But, I digress.

Another generic hardware stored because I need a little visual break.

Okay, grazie, and btw, I got the rope I wanted and then some.

Ciao ragazzi!

Con amore, L

Quick, somebody get me a latte!

Hate that feeling!

Love this photo of Houdini. :-)