Rabelaisian Musings Under the Tuscan... Drizzle.

Does summer exist anymore? I ask you.

Vancouver is having the coldest June on record, last year England HAD no summer, and here in Tuscany, they're having the coolest, wettest June in 200 years. Coming from the Pacific Southwest as I do, it was not the promise of dampness and grey clouds that drew me to Italy.

Now, of course, I wrote that on June 17, and on the 19th, summer arrived and hasn't stopped. It's hot, it's sunny, it's Italy. Hallelujer.

So! Last I wrote, I was in France, soon to leave for Italy, and ranting at the state of the keyboard world. There is, however, more to the French than frustrating keyboards, and this had me musing (the Rabelaisian parts come later)...

The French - at least, those with whom I stayed - are very much attached to the ideals of their Republic. They mean it when they say Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood. When I described the award ceremony in which a French couple was posthumously recognised for sheltering a little Jewish boy, what I didn't mention was that the phrase "Jewish community" was used by more than one person, and that didn't sit well. The idea that there is any kind of community - gay, Muslim, Chinese - apart from the universal French one is not in keeping with the ideals of the fiercely secular republic.

This does not at all mean that the French don't want to tolerate gay people, Muslims, or Chinese immigrants. It means that they believe that one's individual choices of religion, sexual orientation, etc., are just that - individual. That means they are personal and belong to the private sphere of life, rather than the public.

What they are after, here, is the removal of anything that could serve as a means of discrimination. If I don't know you're Muslim, then I can't discriminate against you on the basis of your religion. What matters is that we're all French. The fact that you're gay cannot serve as a division between us. Hence the passing of the law a few years ago prohibiting external signs of religion in schools, such as yarmulkes, headscarves, etc.

Now this is very different from multiculturalism. In fact, it's about as opposite as you can get, and yet still aspires to the same ideals of tolerance and equality for all. And this gives much food for thought.

Canadians, of course, have our model of Diefenbaker's cultural mosaic. There's room for everyone! You can get married in the religious ceremony of your choosing, you can wear whatever is in accordance with your faith, you - I think? - don't even have to speak French or English to come here. In short, you have the right to be different from the establishment.

Now I still like this. The shortcoming of the French way, in my view, is that by not allowing difference in public, you run the risk of intolerance of difference when it does come up. If girls aren't allowed to wear headscarves at school, then how do non-Muslim girls learn that a girl in a headscarf is still like them? And I don't know how French those North African young men who set Paris on fire a few years ago would consider themselves.

And yet. And yet we have our own problems. We can be so eager not to force anyone to have to change, that we find ourselves in these legal tangles where we aren't sure whether we might not like to draw a line here, except that we're so worried about being intolerant. There was the instance - in Ontario, was it? - where the idea of allowing Muslim couples to divorce in accordance with sharia law was floating around. In some ways it makes sense - if we're going to respect a religion's wedding ceremony and authority, should we not also respect its divorce proceedings? Well, maybe, except that, as a large number of worried lawyers and women's rights groups pointed out, sharia law might then allow for what we consider discriminatory proceedings, such as placing more value on the husband's testimony, or not allowing the wife access to the kids. And that's illegal, according to our constitution.

So what do we do? At what point do we say, "Sorry, you're in Canada now, and this is how we do things here in Canada"? And do we, in fact, not have divisions in our society based on ethnic and cultural background? Since immigrants are not asked to conform to a particular way of life, do we not end up with these pockets of communities in cities, speaking their own language and living an insulated existence?

Is it, perhaps, my responsibility, as a Canadian living in a society that professes to be multicultural, to actively seek out the communities that are not mine and to try and find common ground?

I don't know. I know that I am proud to be a Canadian, and I know that I do believe in our cultural mosaic. I don't know how we meet the challenges of living thus, in such a way that pays more than lip service to multiculturalism.

So France was, as you see, very educational and thought-provoking. But Italy, ah, now, Italy...

Italy is glorious. Despite my English/Welsh/Irish/Scottish heritage, I feel more at home in Tuscany than I do in the U.K. I'm certainly not planning to pull up roots and settle here, but I have no doubt that I'm going to be back.

I arrived in Florence at 8:30 in the morning, having taken an overnight bus from France (I gotta tell ya, Italian border officials are the easiest on the eyes I've seen), and promptly set about freshening up in the washroom of the Santa Maria Novella train station. Now, I had purposely washed my hair late in the day before leaving, so that I wouldn't arrive in Italy with greasy roots. But this, apparently, was not up to the standards of the washroom attendant. Nope, he made it quite clear, with his unhappy looks and doubtful noises as he fingered the ends of my hair, that some more grooming was needed. Well. Who was I to argue? If the washroom attendant thought I wasn't up to par, then pretty Italian boys probably wouldn't, either. So it was in to the baby-changing room with me, to wash my hair in the sink. And I wasn't allowed to leave until my hair was fully dry. Then I got a big thumbs-up, which made it all worth it.

I wandered around Florence for a few hours, inspecting the Duomo from the outside, attending Mass in the Santa Croce church (which wasn't a good idea - sitting down is nice when you're tired, but sitting down and trying to look as though you're paying attention to a sermon in a foreign language is hard work), threading my way through the throngs of tourists on the Ponte Vecchio and sighing over the cashmere-lined leather gloves.

Then it was off to get lost in the small sidestreets on my way back to the station in time to miss my train, and then park myself resignedly in the waiting area for an hour.

Now, by this time I was not a little tired. I had slept on the bus, but even with a reclining chair, pillow, blanket (I do love that purple and green Alpaca wool blanket, thanks Mum), and kicked-off shoes, you can only sleep so well on a bus. Add to that the stimulation of a new city in which I didn't speak the language and a few hours of being on my feet, and, you will not be surprised to learn that sleep kept sneaking up on me on my train journey, so that I would be staring determinedly out the window, and the next be surprised to discover that my eyes were closed, my chin was on my chest, and I was dreaming in French. I guess the lack of REM on the bus meant that my brain wasn't wasting any time getting to that sleep stage.

Then came the not-so-fun part of the trip. Disembarking in the small town of Borgo san Lorenzo (pop. 16, 000 and close to the farm, so you can look it up on Wikipedia if you want a rough idea of where I am), I set off to find the agricultural fair where my WWOOFing organic farmer host had told me I could find him. This actually was not horribly difficult, even though I didn't find anyone who spoke English until I came across the good farmer's wife. (I did wish I knew the word for "sheep," though, since he had told me he'd be around the sheep, and I didn't quite like the idea of "Mi scusi, signior, dov'e il BAAAAAA?")

And then, exhausted, sleep-deprived, dehydrated, and hungry, I hung around this fair, in the rain, for a good three hours. This was a big fair, and these farmers had a display up that they wanted people to see, and so they were going to be there as long as there were people there. I wandered round a bit and looked at sheep and cows and various stalls - and here, for all those of you who hoped that presence of the word "Rabelaisian" in the title meant that I was going to talk about sex, is an offering:

Have you ever observed a ram from the rear? I did, for the first time, and this was roughly my thought process: "What's that? That's not an udder, there's no teats - oh my God." Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it would appear that in the world of scrotums (scroti?), the sheep emerges the winner. It is a good six times the size, in my rough estimation, of a human one, but if we take into account the relative proportions of a male human and a male sheep, we can probably double that. Now why the sheep needs such a large sperm production facility, I couldn't say. The expression is, after all, "Breeds like bunnies", not "Breeds like sheep". Do we have any biology or veterinary students in the crowd who can explain this?

I also had the opportunity of observing cows lying down. (As in, the cows were lying down, not I. I won't pretend I didn't feel like doing so, but the straw between two beings four times my size with eight cloven hoofs between them was not alluring.) There is nothing quite like being presented with six feet of bovine back to make you feel small. Cows are very very big.

Finally, once they found out that I was feeling ill (I had made the mistake of eating an undercooked calzone, because I was just that hungry), my hosts took pity on me and took me back to their farm. And I was really not feeling well by that point, so my arrival went something like this:

"My, what a lovely farm you have here. And such a nice big house! Ah, and who's this charming little canine sidling up to me? Excuse me, won't you, while I step over here and deposit the contents of my stomach on your driveway for your dogs to sniff at."

Yep - I barfed. Didn't even make it to the bushes.

But then I felt much better, and Sergio, the farmer, wasn't the least bit fazed. I suppose when you've got two kids and 100 sheep, 10 goats, 2 dogs, and numerous rabbits, a little thing like vomit isn't a big deal. And he insisted numerous times that I sleep as late as I needed the next day. And so I did.

This is what my day usually looks like:

6:30 - get up. Brush teeth, wash face, make bed, dress. Breakfast of two pieces of traditional Tuscan farm loaf (not homemade) with organic butter and honey, or fresh homemade sheep's ricotta if there's any going, and glass of homemade apple juice. Apply sunscreen liberally, mindful of my sister's warning that her one-year-old science textbook reports that it only takes one bad sunburn to result in skin cancer.

7:30 - out to the apple orchard with two bottles of water, midmorning snack (butter and honey sandwich or little toast crackers with homemade sheep pecorino cheese), and alarm clock. Dress code is shorts, sports bra, thin cotton T-shirt, bandanna, and sunglasses. The bandanna is not so much to look cool (though I'm sure I do - West Side Kitsilano, yo) as to prevent my brains from frying in the sun. If I'm in an orchard whose trees are older and leafier, the T-shirt and then bra may eventually be removed. I'm still a little too inhibited for the shorts to follow suit.

7:30 to 9:30 or 10:00 - thin apples, with Disney/folk/country songs running through my head, or musing on body image issues.

9:30 or 10:00 - pause for snack and to contemplate insects having their wicked way with flowers.

11:30 or 12:00 - go back to house. Loll about, journaling or listening to music or taking a cold shower or having a siesta, until

2:00 - substantial lunch of pasta, salad, and bread.

3:30 or 4:00 - go back downstairs to my apartment. See 11:30/12:00 itinerary.

5:30 or 6:00 - head back out to apple orchard for another couple of hours.

8:30 or 9:00 - eat lighter dinner of salad and something else.

10:30 or 11:00 - bed.

And it is as great as it sounds. I have truly stumbled across the perfect farm for me: the work isn't physically exhausting or strenuous, the farmers are well off enough that they don't depend on WWOOFer labour for their livelihood, and the cooking is great. Every four or five days I take the day off to sleep in and be indolent.

There were three and a half other WWOOFers here when I arrived: two Aussies in their mid-thirties, one Kiwi about the same age, and her 12-year-old daughter. She was the half. They were all women, and we had a great time. I think the amount of giggling around the lunch table quite intimidated the 15-year-old son of the family. There were discussions on life choices to be made by women in the modern era (school? Travel? Career? Kids? When?), and there were discussions on our, how shall I put this delicately, regularity, given the lack of fresh fruit in the diet.

The Aussies were gone after a week, and then it was the Kiwis and I for a week, and now it is just I. Which is quite delicious. I have the entire little downstairs apartment to myself, and am revelling in arranging my belongings on the coffee table just as I like them.

The farm is beautiful. It is 50 hectares, and the main crops are hay, apples, and olives. They also have wild cherries (and it is a law of nature that the best cherries are by ravine edges, surrounded by brambles, or otherwise inaccessible) and plums, mulberries, figs, grapes, and walnuts. It would be paradise, were it not that...

Italy is very much not the sum of its parts, and corruption and the Mafia are still very much in evidence. The Mafia does not only go in for crude things like prize horse's heads at the foot of your bed, it also has more sophisticated means of going through the legal system. Fifteen or so years ago, construction was begun nearby on a high speed rail line. I have here in front of the computer a graph which compares rail line spending in Italy, Japan, France, and Spain. The last three countries spend about 10 million euros per kilometer on the infrastructure of a high speed train. Italy spends 60. And the line between Bologna and Florence is costing 95 million. Per kilometer.

Why? Because there are several levels of politicians who have their fingers in several pies, and there are several companies involved in construction who are answerable only to themselves. There are no deadlines or set budgets in the contracts, so what incentive is there to finish? And so they spend three years building a tunnel without the right percentage of iron in the concrete, so whoops, they have to start again. Or they finish it and then blow it up so that they have to do it again.

Sergio and Jacqueline used to have a field of peach trees. They now have a field of sticks, because the tunnel construction has destroyed million-year-old water supplies deep in the mountains. There used to be rivers running nearby, and there are pictures of dry riverbeds full of dead fish. They have been embroiled in a legal battle for seven years over all this, and are unlikely to win, because, as Sergio says, "The Mafia have bought the judge." If they appeal, that will take another seven years, and then if they get a judgement in their favour, it will be appealed, and so it could be at least 20 years before they see any compensation, if they see any at all.

Few people speak out about this, because this is how it works: the company/Mafia will go to the head of local government before starting work, saying "Give us a list of what you need, and we'll get it for you." So the cash-strapped municipal government asks for roads, parking spaces, and local infrastructure for which there is somehow no funding from higher levels of government. Having cleared the way, the company wreaks its havoc, with no one to gainsay them. And few of the taxpayers' euros find their way to schools, pipelines, or hospitals. North of here, people camped out in demonstrations to physically stop the construction of the tunnel, with the result that the military was sent in to beat them.

And so Italy remains a beautiful country, with glorious food, landscape, art, and people, but divided into individuals who have to take what they can get, unable to unite to bring about the common good.

But still I love it. And back I will come.

It is now getting on for lunch time, and so I will have to put off my explanation of the techniques of apple thinning until next time. But before I go, can anyone tell me why the 17-year-old daughter of Sergio and Jacqueline might mistake me for being 20 or 21? Not, of course, that this fazes me. Nope, I am secure enough in my sense of self that being thought to be four or five years my junior has no impact. (Is it my big eyes?! My baby cheeks? Does my naieveté come through the language barrier? What, WHAT?!)

I hope to also post pictures soon!

Arrivederci,

Francesca