Oh Italy: I Love You, I Love You Not

Italy was never on the itinerary. Although I often find myself saying that, this time it really was a surprise. 

I haven’t been to Italy since I was a child and I visited several of the major cities with my family. It is somewhere I have always wanted to return to as an adult, but I always assumed it would be for a weekend city break; somewhere to go as a break from the routine of work. It never struck me as a round-the-world trip type of destination, mainly because it is so close to the UK. But Scott was adamant that we should head there after Munich (I would find out why later) and so we jumped on a train to Bologna.

But visiting Italy as an adult presented some conflicting emotions that I would never have experienced as a younger, more naive visitor.

Firstly, the food. I love Italian food. 

Pasta, pizza, meats, cheeses – you name it, I love it. But as an adult you quickly realise that consisting solely on a diet of white breads, full-fat cheese, smoked meats, gelato and pasta in butter sauces perhaps isn’t the best idea. Yet you can’t get away from it. Particularly if you’re on a budget. Your only hope is a primi portion of pasta or a reasonably priced pizza. Then throw into the mix the croissants, brioche, toasts, nutella and other sweet things that are typically served for breakfast and you can guarantee you will feel like a weeble wobbling around the cobbled streets.

Oh Italy: I love you, I love you not.

Then there are the women. 

As stereotype dictates, Italian women are very stylish and tanned. But with this comes a very definite sense of bitchiness and comparison with every other female around. It wasn’t uncommon for women to stare at me from the other side of the street, look me up and down and assess my clothing. When purchasing some clothes in a store one day, the young sales assistant actually started bitching about us in Italian to the girls stood behind us in the queue, simply because we hadn’t understood that the shop had wrongly priced one of the garments. Talk about making you feel small. But I quickly realised that this was the general attitude to other women (and tourists) in general. You can’t take it to heart. (This is not a sweeping generalisation of all Italian women – this was simply my experience, particularly in Bologna where the tourist to local ratio was lower.)

Oh Italy: I love you, I love you not.

Thirdly, there is the dog poo. 

Dogs are everywhere in Italy and they are often allowed in many places including restaurants, shops and bars. We were already used to this, as that was also the case in Germany. The big difference, however, is that many people in Italy don’t seem to like having to clean up after their dog, meaning that you will sometimes find a little present on the pavement every few yards.

Oh Italy: I love you, I love you not.

Lastly, I don’t even have to tell you about the crowds in the popular Italian cities (more fool us for visiting in summer, though). 

It can become annoying, it means that prices are sky high and the presence of pick-pockets and touts increase ten-fold. But there is a reason why these places are so crowded. Because they are so beautiful. They are full of history. They hold a romance that cannot be explained.

I love Italy because it gets under your skin – the personality of the locals, the freshness of the food, the love for life. And for that, I am willing to gain a few pounds, be stared at in the street and have to dance around the dog poo.