Living Abroad - Charlie in Italy

Living Abroad

Charlie in ITALY

Every month we interview someone who has lived in or visited a foreign country. This month we are talking to Charlie, an Irishman, about his time in Sicily. What were your first impressions of Italy? I was on a train travelling down from the north of Italy. In the morning, I woke up to see a Carabinieri come into the carriage. He stood beside my seat with a cigarette in his mouth and his pistol almost touching my shoulder. I thought, “Oh, my God, I’m in the Wild West”. Later, I arrived at Catania and the first thing I noticed was the traffic with hundreds of Vespas, and the air heavy with their fumes. The buildings impressed me too with their black-walled Gothic designs. Apparently, after the city was flattened by Mount Etna in the late seventeenth century, they rebuilt everything using black lava rock. What did you do there? I went to study classics. My contact was Professor Romano. On our first day there we went to his office and told him who we were. He just smiled and told us to go to the beach, find some nice Sicilian girls to teach us Italian, and to come back after Christmas. And that’s what we did. For the second year I worked. What job did you do? Getting work in Sicily is difficult. Sicily is a very traditional society where the family network is fundamentally important. Businesses are mostly family affairs, and many small firms employ all three generations of the immediate family, with the grandmother at the till and the grandchildren lifting boxes. During my first year the only job I got was washing dishes in a restaurant. The only real options are as an English teacher or as a waitress; I say “waitress” because in Sicily they only hire girls in bars. Eventually I went to work in an English academy. What were the best things about it? Culturally Sicily is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Normans, Bourbons... you name it, they’ve been there. Cities such as Taormina and Syracusa are beautiful and full of history. By day you’ve got the beach, the volcano and great surrounding towns and cities to see. Sometimes you look up at Mount Etna smoking away and wonder why there is a city there at all. You can go up and check out the lava flows. You could even ski there until last year, when the latest eruptions destroyed the ski station at Nicolosi. At night, we did a lot of drinking. Catania’s got great nightlife, and it’s much better compared to many other Italian cities. This is mostly because it’s full of university students.

Was it easy to meet people?

Sicilians tend to socialise in large groups, which I hated. I made great friends, but it was hard to get them to go out on an individual basis. Sicilians are also old-fashioned people. They are very warm and sincere, even when they say things like “let’s go out sometime”, which in Ireland usually means you’re never going to go out. But Sicilians are different and they take this very literally and will get offended if you don’t phone them. They are also very welcoming and love to bring you into their home and dish up a plate of pasta.

What were the worst things about being there?

Waiting for a group of Sicilians to decide where they want to go out.

Sicily

Did anything funny happen while you were there?

Oh yes, lots of things. I remember once there was a slight communication problem. When I first got to the hotel it was late, so the old woman in charge just gave me the key and let me go up to the room. The next day I went to fill out the forms with my friend, Justin. This was no problem and we wrote in our details and handed the form back. But then the old woman tried to tell us something, and I couldn’t understand a word. She kept repeating it over and over, getting louder and louder all the time, but it was impossible. Finally she called in an Italian guy who said that he would translate for her. So, she repeated her phrase and the man translated it for her, saying: “Today, Etna has a big ‘erection’!” And Justin turned to me and asked: “Who is Etna?” at which point we both laughed. Of course, it turned out that Mount Etna was actually going to have a big “eruption”. What a relief! Would you go back? Yes. And with a decent job I’d stay a long time.

OK, Charlie, that was really interesting. Thank you very much.

G L O S S A R Y

a Carabinieri n an Italian police officer a shoulder n the joint at the top of your arm between your arm and your upper-body fumes n the smoke that comes out of vehicles as they are driven the city was flattened exp “the city was destroyed and all the buildings fell down” the till n the computer in a supermarket or shop that a cashier works with and in which all sales are registered to lift boxes exp to do the physical work in a shop or business to wash dishes exp to clean the dirty plates to hire vb to pay money to use something for a limited period of time to smoke away phr vb if a volcano is “smoking away”, smoke is coming out of it continuously to check out phr vb to see, to explore, to investigate to dish up phr vb to serve (a plate of food) to fill out phr vb to complete in writing to hand back phr vb to return something to someone to turn out phr vb if something “turns out” a particular way, it happens like that in the end