My Italy is Changing

The attempted taming of my slightly feral village

Thanks again to all of you. Some lovely new subscribers are along for the ride, and several new paid subscribers, including another at the founder level. Yikes. Good thing I have a lot of ideas in the queue. The world feels like it’s falling apart, but somehow this chance to connect with you, and with my corner of Italy, still feels life-affirming. Sometimes, I feel like I should put all this on hold until the world is sorted. But, it never will be, and perhaps a small spark of joy will help.

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The feral nature of life in our Italian village is changing. At least there are some attempts at getting it to tolerate chin scratches. Part of the reason I still love living here is that there’s a different texture and spirit from what I’ve encountered in any other place. I understand how most major U.S., Italian, and international cities function. I may not get the nuances right, but the basic unspoken rules are at least usually on a game board that I’ve seen before.

In my Tuscan valley, the combination of being rural, and mostly undiscovered by the outside world, results in a life that often reminds me of what I’d imagine the 1950s were like—with no girdles and daily Valium. But nowhere is immune to change. Beyond the new McDonald’s, and Pilates studio, both unimaginable here a decade ago, the local powers that be have decided that parking, as we knew it, needed to be drastically overhauled, attempting to crush an important part of the Italian spirit.

I park, therefore I am.

Parking is elevated to an art form here—expressing freedom, self-expression, and common sense, with a chance to demonstrate one’s mastery of geometry. After nearly 13 years here, seeing the new rules bump up against a core right of human existence—the freedom to park—is amusing, and a little sad.

The norm has always been that if there’s a large section of pavement across from your favorite bar, which happens to be a striped traffic island, it’s a perfectly good place to park. After all, no one is supposed to be driving there, anyway, and a traffic island is a waste of good real estate.

As a general rule, the lines painted on the pavement of parking lots are only vague suggestions of where cars should go, or how many cars fit in the lot. Many, many more can fit in as long as there are good manners and common sense used about never blocking someone in.

When we first moved here, there were a number of parking lots I noticed with no exit. The only way out was to back up the length of the lot, hoping no one was coming in at the same time. This system accommodated more cars in a lot, and everyone just worked around the inconvenience for this reason.

This is one of my favorite parking moments, for so many reasons. It’s a car from the driving school (the one John and I took driving lessons from, which is a whole other story…). This parking lot was full, so the driving school instructor decided to park illegally in front of the trash dumpsters. What isn’t in the photo is that there is a huge lot right next to this one that is nearly empty, but you have to pay 70 cents to park there. Clearly, it’s much better to ignore the no-parking zone and park in front of the dumpster.

But the real story is that all of this somehow works. The driving instructor knows when the trash truck comes by and will need access to the dumpster, and that it is fine to block it for now. The police wouldn’t ticket for the same reason—you can’t really expect someone whose office is across the street and who is constantly in and out of their car to park in the pay lot.

About a month after we’d moved to our village, I’d parked the car in the square overnight, as we often did. When I returned the next morning, I was surprised to find that it was now the only car there, and that the weekly market had sprung up surrounding it. Even more surprising, we hadn’t been ticketed. It turned out the police knew the car of the new Americans in town and cut us some slack because we weren’t yet up to speed on the fine points of village living, like what days the main square is emptied of cars for the market.

I love all of this, and it makes me frustrated when I come back to the U.S. and the rules of parking lots feel rigid. In any given parking lot, there is so much wasted space because people are parking only between the lines. I see parking opportunities everywhere, just ripe for seizing.

About a year ago, our mayor (the first one who isn’t a Communist since WWII) who has taken another civic job in a nearby town and seems to have little attention for us, did have the time to decree that parking needed to change. Our village accommodated a lot of cars pulled into nooks and crannies in the square and along the sharply descending, long, straight street that is a hallmark of the town. He had large planters put along the sidewalks of the steep street to block rogue parking, halving the places to park. As a result, several small businesses closed, including a newsstand/tabaccheria which had been in business since 1945, in the same family. When customers couldn’t pull in conveniently for two minutes to grab a paper or cigarettes, they went elsewhere.

The parking in the square, which had been an honor system, suddenly requires payment, and is enforced by two very grumpy men who seem to be omnipresent and never make eye contact.

In the next town over, the happy chaos of the parking lots I photographed above has now been removed and replaced by new lots that accommodate only a third of the number of cars that could have parked previously. This is in an economically challenged town where the number of vacant storefronts seems to grow by the day in the historic center, where the shops are accessible only by parking in these perimeter lots.

But parking dissent bubbles just under the surface. The minute the parking guard leaves the square, cars rush in to fill empty spaces like the tide. I was writing part of this post in a caffe, and when I left I had to pull in my mirrors to squeeze between two cars—the edge of a line of six abreast that were all parked illegally to take advantage of some shade. And just now, writing in my new favorite writing caffe in a small piazza, I am looking out at this illegal parking chaos in the middle of the square. All is well. Now about that McDonald’s… And sorry, I’m late for Pilates.