Italians can turn a handful of courgettes and aubergines into a five-star lunch, and serve fish 100 different ways without resorting to the deep fat fryer, writes ORNA MULCAHY.
AN ENGLISH friend who’s an old rocker complains that these days at parties he’s more likely to be offered a pair of laying hens than a line of cocaine. He finds it difficult to accept that his old stay-up-all-night mates are turning into Worzel Gummidges, boring for England about their champagne rhubarb and wild garlic pesto. To him, lettuce comes nice and clean in a supermarket bag, if it has to come at all, and wild garlic is a horrible weed, not something you eat. Now he’s disappointed to find his Paddy friends are heading in the same direction, tending to their tomatoes of an evening instead of going down the pub for a pint. It’s just a silly fad, he says, and look at all the time it takes and all the pesticides you have to use and all the snails that are dying!
It’s displacement activity, I say. With the economy shrinking, we’re trying to get back to basics and grow something, anything. Our shares have tanked, there is nothing in the bank, but our portfolio of spuds is doing nicely and we’ve hit paydirt with a chilli pepper plant that is heaving with fruit. August will surely find us bottling them in oil for the long winter ahead, like your woman from Under the Tuscan Sun.
We’ve met up with this friend in Italy, where a few days in the sun has me brimming with notions of the kind of simple, self-sufficient and stylish life one could lead if only Ireland were 10 degrees warmer. A cheap flight to Naples, a taxi to the port and a 45-minute ferry took us to Ischia, where lemons the size of footballs hang from trees or sit in piles at people’s gateways for passersby to take. The islanders are endlessly inventive with the lemon – it makes its way into every meal, or ambushes you afterwards in a lurid digestif called Limoncello. Artistry is worked right across the food groups. Italians can turn a handful of courgettes and aubergines into a five-star buffet lunch, and serve fish a hundred different ways without resorting to the deep fat fryer. Our lovingly tended toms at home will properly never reach the size and sweetness of those we came across daily, piled up in the village market.
As always though, in Italy, it’s the beachwear that take my breath away. Italian women must be born wearing kaftans. They can carry them off without looking like Demis Roussos. They don’t allow their shoulders to slouch, or their bottoms get too big. They favour handkerchief linen and cotton over jewel-encrusted polyester, and length varies strictly according to age. Lissom teenagers wear the bottom-skimming ones. After that the hem drops, all the way down to the floor for the elderly. An Italian woman will not shuffle along self-consciously in her kaftan, worrying that there’s too much leg emerging from the sides. She will stroll down to the beach or the pool, carrying nothing but a miniature handbag to hold her phone and her sun cream. She will not arrive like a pack donkey with a huge basket of books and snacks and gadgets. She will quickly strip down to a bikini, anoint her body and recline, talking all the while into her phone and smoking. There is no unseemly struggling in and out of bathing suits under a towel.
Occasionally la signora will take out a hand mirror and minutely examine her face for blemishes. She does not bother with reading material. Sunbathing is not leisure; it is a task. She may stretch out one brown leg after the other, and rotate it at the ankle, all the while carrying on a seemingly angry conversation involving a lot of hand movements and clutching of her hair. Or she may fold herself up like a ruler and paint her toenails. Newcomers will be scrutinised and dismissed.
For exercise she will wade into the water to thigh level, and walk up and down still talking into her phone, while allowing the sea to battle any cellulite that has had the nerve to dimple her thighs. She may give herself a vigorous massage, using sweeping movements learned at mother’s knee. Total immersion is not the aim; if she does swim, the head is held high for fear of salt damage. It’s all very elegant to watch. Naturally these women never burn, though eventually they do get to look like crocodiles.
Footwear is either gracefully high, or dead flat and strappy, is neither Jesus nor gladiator but somewhere in between, and cannot be found in Dublin, but is available in every colour in tiny shoe shops in the back streets of Naples, staffed by scary women who lurk in the back talking into their phones.
There’s a code for men too, that I will come back to another time, but nowhere does it allow socks to be worn with sandals . . . or a hat that you might find, well, on a scarecrow.