guide
to rome
in pictures
Take the second left off the alley behind Via Peretti. You need the fourth door on the right. Ask for Tony - He'll have what you're looking for...
That
is, if it's crusty rolls and fresh baguettes that you've got in mind.
Because the address in the photo above ain't the kind of shady joint
it appears to be - It is in fact a bakery. What's even more amusing
to us, is that all bakeries in Italy look like this!
Italians are pretty freakin' good at making bread, They're so good at
it in fact, that the stuff sells itself. So Italian bakers don't waste
any time or money bothering to make their shops look nice, In fact,
like this place, many don't even bother putting a sign over the door!
In
a way, that's kind of nice, a reflection of the simple, old, non-commercial
'country' ways that still prevail in the modern culture of even cities
in Italy. But in another way, it's not so nice, as it's indicative of
that streak of retail inefficiency that runs deep in Italian culture.
Italian business culture is roughly summed up in the phrase 'Just enough
service to make the sale, and no more'.
They're really not interested in making shopping a fully pleasurable
experience, or going that extra mile to give a customer something uniquely
memorable, some reason to return to buy their product instead of going
somewhere else to buy.
Italians have for too long traded purely on their innate talents as craftsmen and artisans - Their gifted abilities in the areas of design, architecture and engineering have earned them rich rewards on the international stage, yet on a domestic scale, this is contrasted with shabby, parochial, pennypinching business-practices which can often seem offputting and even hurtful to visitors from abroad unused to such slapdash service.
However, this doesn't bother native Italians of course, and most of them don't buy their bread in soft, homogenised, sliced and plastic-sealed loaves at fixed and competitiive prices in local supermarkets - Instead, 99 out of a 100 Italians worth their salt prefer to come to places like that pictured above, (this one's in the Trastevere district), their local family-run bakers, early in the morning, to buy gorgeous hot and steaming bread and all kinds of other delicious doughy delicacies such as ciabatta and focaccia as it comes straight out of the oven and shoved across the counter at them, The quality of the product just makes up for the quaintness of the premises.
Romebuddy's
barber at 53 Via Nomentana.
The best deal in Rome! Nice part of town, elegant traditional decor and
fittings of marble, leather and oak and huge ornate mirrors, good old-fashioned
attentive service, and only around fifteen Euros for a basic haircut or
only slightly more if you want a shampoo as well. That's less than ten
dollars or just over six quid. But I seem to be almost the only customer
who's ever in there! How they make it pay, I've no idea...
This
shop is in a top-class real-estate area, a stone's throw from the British
Embassy. Every time I arrive, the barber is standing outside in the street,
leaning on that lampost smoking a cigarette, chatting to other local tradespeople
and passers by while he waits for that evidently rare thing, a customer,
to turn up.
It can only be an indication of the incredibly stable and conservative
Italian domestic economy - Most shops and businesses are family-run and
based in buildings that have been owned by the famly for perhaps a generation
or two. With such low overheads, it appears they hardly need to worry
about making money.
This may explain why service in many shops in Rome is so poor compared
to American or British standards. They don't NEED your custom enough to
be polite, efficient or competitively priced.
Happily however, this barbershop is the exception. Who want's a high-speed haircut anyway? The guys here go about their business in an unhurried, relaxed, polite and gentlemanly way, and at those prices, I heartily recommend you pay them a visit next time you need a cut, shave or shampoo at extraordinarily good value for money in genuine traditional Italian barbershop style...
Most
Italian women have absolutely no qualms about wearing furs. In winter,
nearly everybody wears them. This store-front is in Via del Tritone, not
far from the Trevi Fountain.
These coats are real furs, the genuine article - Thus, there's three or
four hundred dead animals in that window.
For
along with standard expressions of conjugal fidelity and love, such as
a diamond ring and a fitted kitchen, every Italian wife expects her husband
to buy her a real fur coat at some point in the marriage.
Even if modern American and English attitudes towards the fur trade were
reversed, fur-wearers woud look out of place in most American or British
cities, for we tend to dress so scruffily compared to Europeans -
Not so in Italy. Italians have a tradition of strutting their stuff dressed
up to the knives for even routine shopping trips, but especially on weekend
evenings and Sunday afternoons - They even have a word for it - the 'passeggiata'.
This goes on all year round, but in winter, the furs come out on the streets
of Rome.
Thus, as early as September and as late as April (for in spite of comparatively mild winters, Italians feel the cold more than we do), you will see the fashionable streets of central Rome filled with extravagantly arrayed women - The young ones wearing very little at all, flirtatiously showing off as much of their olive-oil fit, summer-tanned bodies as much as they dare to brave the cold and their papa's wrath if he finds out, and the older women dripping with jewellery and furs, while self-conscious macho possessive boyfriends and husbands strut sticklike beside them, showing off the merchandise they have gathered unto themselves. For every Italian wife is property to her husband, to be polished and preened and cruised with the same attention as we in the west are more accustomed to giving to our cars.
Widows in Italy tend to travel in pairs, wrapped in their furs like big brown fluffy little bees waddling slowly down the street, gossiping profusely and at the top of their voices to each other in the open air, while hefting huge carrier bags from high-class but conservative department stores like Coin or La Rinascente, wrapped up warmly in and dragging the trains of their pavement-dusting and slightly motheaten golden brown fox and sables behind clattering Gucci high heels supporting their short, fat little calves on the marble-curbed sidewalks.
So why are furs still sold openly on any Italian fashion street? Simply because there's a deeply entrenched market for it here. Even working class, blue-collar Italians on modest incomes regard fur coats as being as traditional and necessary as buying bread or haircuts.
Although Romebuddy would be the first to admit that a woman looks good in a fur coat, in fact, so uncannily good, it looks like a natural combination for ultimate feminine style and beauty, nevertheless, I also have a very soft spot for our furry little friends, and if I think about it for too long, the sight of all those dead animals hanging off the backs of so many thousands of Italian women every winter is quite distressing.
The
international fashion industry is unlikely to ever cease producing fur
items for as long as half of the major design houses (the other half being
French) are traditionally Italian. The way to end the fashion fur trade
is not by boycotting furs, but by boycotting Italian designers, period
!
The potentially massive upheaval at the business-end of the fashion world
that such consumer action would produce would force the Italians and all
the designer-house grandees responsible for fur-wearing by omission, to
sit up and take notice.
The alternative to trying to change the minds of the furriers and designers themselves, is to attack the fur-trade's chief home market at its source, and that means trying to change the minds of Italian women... Not a task to be taken lightly.
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