Summer Vacation

After mid-June, schools start their summer holidays, and company workers and shop attendants -- everyone, in fact -- talk about nothing but the long vacation. For Italians, the question of how to spend the one-month-plus summer vacation is the biggest problem -- and the biggest pleasure -- in life.  Even the country's most popular sport, soccer, takes a holiday, Each team is busy with preparations and practice for the next season. Of course, all my readers know the soccer player Nakata Hidetoshi. He's no longer in Rome, having been transferred to Parma. His popularity is really something. Even the Italian media pay a lot of attention to him: he's featured in newspaper articles and TV news all the time.  A Japanese friend of mine who lives in Rome tells me that people who pass him by in the street often ask him if he's Nakata. Nakata used to have an interpreter, but he's graduated and these days speaks to people in splendid Italian, full of wit -- this may be one reason for his popularity. Yet in Japan he disliked the mass media. As someone who is still a beginner at Italian, I feel a little envious. In spite of the fact that there are many other sports, such as volleyball, bicycle racing, skiing, etc., at which Italy is at the world's top level, soccer is far and away the most popular. It gets special treatment.

This is a story of an occasion when some friends had gathered at someone's house and were enjoying go. Late at night there was a great swell of applause, and the apartment building shook, the windows rattled, and the stones rolled off the go boards.  I was convinced it was an earthquake, but no. The local soccer team had won a match and the excited residents were making a great hullabaloo. I was really surprised. In the inner courtyard of the apartment building, there was a snowstorm of confetti and fireworks, and we could hear the national anthem being sung to the accompaniment of a trumpet: this celebration was the real thing. Since everyone was joining in all the noise-making, there was nobody left to complain. When there's an important match, friends get together to watch it on TV -- with glasses of wine in their hands. This is enjoying soccer the Italian way. In the midst of all this fanaticism about the game, my family is a real rarity: none of us is interested in soccer. My husband prefers, as he puts it, the more relaxed pace of baseball and he's become a real fan of the baseball games shown on satellite TV. By the way, this seems to have nothing to do with Ichiro's popularity.  Another thing I look forward to at this time of the year is the bargain sales. They're held twice a year, in January and July, and everyone waits for this biannual chance to shop cheaply.  One of the things I find interesting about Italy is that, supermarkets aside, you must never touch the goods in specialist shops; what's more, you mustn't even enter the shop if you don't intend to buy something.  So what do we do? We creep along the shop windows like frogs comparing the goods.  Once we've decided what we're going to buy, we enter the shop and tell the shop attendant what we want: this is the proper etiquette. It's taboo to handle goods just to see what they're like. You can't touch anything without the shop attendant's permission.  Italians with a highly developed economic sense (the stingy ones?) creep around the shop windows before sales checking out quality and prices: you see throngs of these people getting ready for the sales.  The same is true of greengrocers' shops. You can say, "give me that one" or "this one is bruised", but the shop people will look really annoyed and complain if you handle the fruit or vegetables. It's not easy when everything is left up to the seller like this and even Italians sometimes get cheated. This happens to me all the time, but I just can't get used to the Italian way of doing things. It's funny how different things are in different places.  How were your summer holidays? I plan to attend the European Go Congress in Dublin and a go camp in the Czech Republic. I'll report on my trip next time. (September 2001, Monthly Go World)