Wrong Turn: Italy
La Bella - Brutta vita
The people of Italy are more attuned to beauty than the rest of us. All Italians bellow out their heartfelt appreciation for all that is that is ‘bella’ or ‘bello’. No matter if they’re a stay-at-home shotta, a tubthumping ultra, or an irascible old bigot.
Even the menliest men’s men openly acknowledge beauty whenever they see it. Not that much intensive gratitude practice is needed to find the beautiful in the every day over here.
Italy’s beauty is immeasurable. That said, thanks to centuries of oneupmanship between former kingdoms, principalities and duchies, the Republic of Italy leads the world in Unesco heritage sights. Back in the day, the Papal States, for example, would spend millions on frescos to surpass the duchy ‘pon the left-hand side (Moderna). In the let-ups in their grave-stocking neighbourly squabbles, each fiefdom was bragging over the ramparts about their latest patronage.
Yeah, we got Leonardo in to do our ceilings, actually…
Cutting out the becrowned middlemen, God’s direct handiwork is just as impressive. The scenery of Italy has the make-believe diversity of a kid’s landscape painting: sun, sea, mountains, beach, snow, lakes, supervolcano. Shaped like a thigh-high boot, the country is even the best-looking from space.
Italians will call beautiful people beautiful. A supermarket butcher might greet a teenage girl with “ciao bella.” The feel is nothing like the swooping catcalls of a noncey scaffolder, as best as I’ve been able to tell. All my attempts at underage drag have, so far, not yielded a single compliment across the meat counter. Not so much as a sliver of adulatory mortadella.
There are so many hot people in Italy, they even staff supermarkets. The more I travel and see the obvious attractiveness of people - Italy, Brazil, Denmark, Thailand - the more I realise, we, the fair Kingdom of Great Britain, are just an unloved outpost of inbred trollfolk. Myself included. The origin of my family name is “lives near or under bridges.” Anyone who's borne the brunt of my thickwristed oafishness could tell you, I didn’t descend from toll booth operators.
Italy exists in a state of eternal Spring. The national fallback conversation isn’t the weather*, because constant heat goes without saying. The sun is so shiny that, over generations, Italians have conditioned themselves into wearing pleated jackets at 25 degrees Celsius - just so they get full use out of their seasonal wardrobe.
However, should any aspect of life fall, even a degree, short of these unrealistic, but, largely, met, standards, Italians announce ugliness with a passion - the only way they say anything. The binary scale of Italian aesthetics goes from beautiful directly to ugly - bello to brutta - with no shades of averageness in between. Italy is no place for moderation.
Those few greying days of mizzle a year are brutta. A perfectly pleasant hillside on a 24-degree day is brutta. Compared to Italian people, the rest of us are…
Italians will tell you, to your face, that your face is ugly. Not necessarily in an unkind way - though, as a prissy Brit, how would you have me take it - but more as a matter of bland fact.
The Italian people who’ve called me ugly, include: my friend’s ex-ex girlfriend, a stranger at a 3-day-long satsuma battle, and a mean-spirited lady who my girlfriend overheard calling me an old-timey “trunk”.
I’ve been compared to worse luggage.
Anyhow, although Italians are well accustomed to beauty, they never lose sight of it, which is kind of - after spending enough time here, I am now comfortable to say - beautiful.
* That’s “What’s for dinner tomorrow?” I’ll cover that in part 2.
Infatti! I've never had people call my dog beautiful as often as in Milan. Hilariously one of the first words I picked up in the office was 'brutto', because all our results were constantly brutto (and 'magari', because people could only hope for better results)
As an artist, a painter ,mainly of portraits, I have a love of beauty, what I call beauty. Yet there is a universal beauty by design that many people are seeing but may not realize or be aware of.
The golden mean, proportion , vanishing points of line, symmetry and so on.
However today in the America I live , theres a clamp down of the admiration of beauty. You express your love of what a beautiful child is, a young school kid, or someone much younger than yourself , man or women, (once you have arrived at that perplexing decision) , and the police are notified.
Its a shame what we have cornered ourselves into . We are asked to lie, to speak under our breath and to deny such beauty. However, green light ahead when expressing love and attraction to violence, killing, torture of others. Add up the movies of guns, killing and crime .
Sad reality that humans cannot share their admiration for beauty without others attaching an agenda to it. At least as of now, I can still compliment a dog or cat.
My two cents for now. t y