It Gives Me Fever

Just thinking about some stereotypical Italian things is enough to make some of us woozy.  A handsome, well-dressed man zipping by on a Vespa, an extra large piece of tiramisu, a moonlit walk on a canal in Venice or a pair of handmade, shiny blue shoes might make even a non-sentimental American's temperature rise.  But can these quotidian events really be the cause of so many Italian fevers?

In the two years that I've been living in Italy a week has seldom passed that I haven't heard about someone's fever.  Friends can't have dinner because of fevers.  Students can't come to lessons because of fevers.  Walks on trails, after-dinner coffees and ice cream dates have all been cancelled due to fever.  In addition, exact temperatures are reported, including hours and increments. What people don't know is that degrees mean nothing to me.  If I still haven't learned how to quickly translate the temperature of a beautiful day from celcius to fahrenheit, you can bet I'm not going to waste time translating one's body temp.  Until today, that is.  Most research seems to agree that a normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees fahrenheit or 37 degrees celcius, "give or take a degree depending on individual differences."  And experience indicates that a normal cancellation body temperature (i.e. fever) in Italy is anything above 37.5 (which if you agree with the "give or take a degree" might actually be normal).

Strangely, when someone cancels plans with me because of a fever I spend a lot more time infuriated by this fever phenomenon than sulking about my solitude.  I don't think about lost wages or missed outings.  Instead, I contemplate why Italians are so concerned about their temperatures.  A while back I started wondering if it was just me.  Was I really the only one that didn't have a thermometer in the house when I grew up?  Was it only my mom who felt my face with the back of her hand to tell me if I got to go to school or not?  But then I remembered that my neighbor's mom used to gently put her cheek on Lisa Jean's forehead to see if she had a fever. Albeit a cheek instead of the back of a hand, it wasn't a thermometer.

I needed some reassurance.  It's hard to go on my "you Italians and your temperatures are crazy" spiel without something good to back it up.  So I called an American friend and asked her how many times she'd checked her temperature in the past year.  She replied, "Do you mean in the past twenty years?  None."  My Italian friends are incredulous.

Last week I asked a student about her long weekend in Rome.  She said that they'd had to come home early because she'd had a fever.  I asked how she knew she'd had a fever and quickly added, "Please don't tell me you took a thermometer to Rome for the weekend."  She just smiled.

I'm sure that if I had to cut a weekend short I'd simply say that I came home early because I was sick.  But how would I know without a thermometer?  Easy.  I wouldn't feel good and I'd want to stay in the hotel room.  And choosing a hotel room instead of the "piazze e pallazzi" of Rome would be a pretty good indication that I was sick even if I didn't know my temperature.  If I'm sick, I'm sick.  I lie around a couple of days until I start to feel better.  Then I try to eat some chicken noodle soup and crackers with grape jelly.  If I feel okay, I probably don't have the fever anymore and I can get on with my life.  If I'm not myself for four or five days maybe (just maybe) I go to the doctor. Then he checks my temperature and confirms that I'm sick.  I go back to bed and wait until I get the urge for the chicken noodle soup.  And then maybe (just maybe) it will all happen again in another 5 years or so.

I don't think I'll ever get to the bottom of this Italian fever frenzy.  (Or any of their other ailments.  See blog, Living with a Bunch of Old Wives).  I'm still trying to learn that I don't really have to.  As with most of these cultural differences that are beginning to drive me mad, I have to accept that that's just the way it is here.

I asked a friend what he thought about his culture's overuse of the thermometer.  He said, "It's interesting that you Americans are still alive even though you never check your temperatures.  On the other hand, it doesn't seem to have harmed us for checking."  What a calm and uncritical response.  Will the day ever come that I can say, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" even on issues that make my blood boil?  Which in turn, I know, may cause a fever.
 

This is Some Good Weed and the Mushrooms aren't Bad Either

Taking a walk with Gemma takes a while.  She has a bad back, she can't walk and talk at the same time and she uses a cane.  Sometimes she even uses two.  We move along slowly and accomplish three quarters of a mile in about 45 minutes.  We could get it done a little more quickly if she didn't stop to teach me about every edible thing along the way.  Everything has its season, and its seasoning.  I've heard lengthy descriptions on how to cook a variety of green leafy stuff that grows in the ditch on the edge of the road.

The only thing I can offer on these walks is how to suck the sweet stuff out of the ends of little purple flowers.  I learned it when I was growing up in Michigan.  I don't know what the plant is called but I call it "Cowyflower".  It grows in fields with other weeds and wildflowers.  I thought the fields were just waiting to be replanted with corn or potatoes.  Then I noticed that a few times a year they're cut and the flowers are rolled into giant balls of hay.  It's awfully pretty cow food.

Anyway, cowyflower is a weed with small purple flowers.  Each flower is a ball made of a bunch of little tubes, like petals I suppose.  You can pull them out one by one (and do the he loves-me-he-loves-me-not thing if you have the courage) and then softly bite the white ends and a little bit of sweetness comes out.  I taught Gemma how to do it, but she didn't seem very interested.  Now I only do it when I'm out alone and in need of a little something sweet.

When Gemma's feeling good and it's the right time of year we take a little spade and a plastic bag on our walks. We veer off course into fields looking for what seem to be the leaves of dandelions.  I bend down and say, "Is this it?" and she says it's not, so I keep looking.  Then she pokes her canes around a bit in another little patch of something that looks identical to what I'd discovered and tells me to bring the spade and dig it up.  I never argue that it's the same stuff I'd found.  I just follow orders.   She says we have to find a lot because it shrinks when you boil it and then there's nothing left to eat.  Fortunately, so far I've been able to avoid these weed dinners.

The good news is I haven't avoided everything.  I don't know why I ever decided to try fiori di zucca fritti, but I'm glad I did.   Maybe the fact that fritti means deep fried was enough to convince me.  After all, I used to order onion rings (Mmmmm...I wonder if I can order those in Italy)  and I don't like onions.  I liked to break the ring and try to pull the onion out in one long piece.  If the batter on the outside was thick, the onion would slide right out.  The ones that weren't breaded enough got stuck along the way and I'd have to break the onion again.  Then I'd fill my dinner mate's plate with the onion guts and I'd enjoy the deep fried shell.

Back to the fiori di zucca fritti, fried pumpkin flowers.  For some reason I'd thought I'd heard that they were zucchini flowers, so I asked Gemma.  She said they're the same plant.  I've never considered a long, thin green vegetable to be the same as a big, round orange one but I'm learning to trust Gemma when it comes to the kitchen. 

The first time I tried the flowers, I thought I might be able to use my onion ring technique and just eat the batter off the outside.  Then I realized the flowers aren't really slide-outable.  I was forced to take a bite.  And guess what?  Flowers taste better than onions.  But I guess already knew that.

Gemma's been trying to teach me a bit about mushrooms, too.  I live in an area filled with what seems like a lot more mushroom hunters than mushrooms.  Yesterday on my run in the woods I came upon a tiny little man wearing a hand-knit vest, rubber boots and a straw hat.  He was carrying a basket like Little Red Riding Hood's and it had two mushrooms in it.  Who knows how long he'd been searching.  In my opinion it's not a very gratifying hobby, but maybe that's because I don't like mushrooms.  Last month on my mushroom hunting expedition in the mountains three of us found six mushrooms in four hours.  I had better luck finding 5-millimeter crinoids buried in the sand on the shore of Lake Michigan than 5-inch mushrooms in a rainy Italian forest.   

But one thing is for sure, the thrill of finding a real red mushroom with white spots was worth the trip! The only place I'd ever seen them was on the pages of fairytale books or ceramic versions alongside the giant wooden butts bending down to pick flowers in the yards of American country folks.  I'd always thought all mushrooms were brown, like the ones in my backyard that the ballerinas danced on (see blog, Believing in Ballerinas and Butterflies). I didn't know pretty red mushrooms with white polka dots were real, but they are.  And the best part of all?  They're poisonous, so they don't get picked.  They're left to be discovered and enjoyed by a silly American girl learning a lot about life in Italy.  I'm sure it won't be long until I meet the seven dwarfs.