Here Are the 12 Things I Won't Miss About Italy

Some of them might surprise you.

On Monday, I broke my own heart publishing a Cappuccino that detailed some of the things I would miss about Italy. That list will grow exponentially after I leave this beautiful country of artichokes and palms, oleanders and courtyard fountains, lilac skies and cypress trees. There’s no way to recover from so much beauty.

In the years since I moved here in 2014, I have grown comfortable. Too comfortable, I fear. I doubt Manhattan, our next destination, will offer much in the way of comfort. If Italy is a land of senses and the soul, Manhattan is a city of the mind. It’s a masculine energy, Manhattan: ceaseless, restless, ruthless. And like all cities of the mind, it can be a little insane.

Still, it has been my observation that despite her soulfulness, Italy can be a tough place to live for non-Italians. There have been times, more than a few, where it felt as though she were trying to kill us. That certainly was the case with the 19th-century Romantic poets Percy and Mary Shelley, who lived in the Liguria area for six years. In Percy’s case, Italy literally killed him. Their lives were more fraught and desperate than anything I could imagine. There are letters written by his widow, Mary, who also lost two children here, divulging her love of Italy’s beauties alongside her staunch belief that their decision to exile to this country presaged all the sorrows of her “disastrous life.”

In our case, it’s impossible to live on beauty alone. And in some cases, Italy makes it impossible to live, period. In one of Cappuccino’s most viral articles, which you can read here, I gave an account of how difficult it can be to even run a few simple errands. But there are a dozen other things that, in the interests of fair and balanced reporting, I wanted to share with you. I mean no disrespect to our adoptive land; merely a look at the hardships of being an expat in Italy.

You get a mere 3 kilowatts of power in Italy, and that’s all you get—unless you want to pay significantly more and get a maximum of 6. If I’m running the space heater and John decides to make toast—BAM. Lights out. Then he has to trudge down all five flights of stairs to the fuse box in the entryway of our palazzo and flip the switch.

Sometimes I make that arduous trek as well, only I’m having to navigate the stairs in plushy unicorn slippers, which is twice the effort.

Here are some other appliances you can’t run together: a hair dryer and the toaster; the induction hotplate and the vacuum; the electric water carafe and the heater; the washing machine and the induction hotplate. Lemme tell you, it gets old. If the devil came and offered an elevator or unlimited kilowatts in exchange for my soul, I might be hard pressed to say no.

We all laugh about Italian bureaucracy, but believe me, it’s no joke. Just last week, John went to the ASL (local appointment-making place for healthcare services) to get a Covid booster. The woman had no idea where they were administering them. This was a healthcare professional. “Try the pharmacy,” she casually suggested. But of course when John went to the pharmacy, they said, “Try the ASL.”

End result? No Covid booster.

And this is not a one-off. It’s an every day blitzkrieg of dysfunction, learned helplessness, and indifference.

You can’t call ASL because they won’t answer. You can’t email because they won’t respond. Every region is different. Some manage to provide people with excellent service; others, like our beloved Amelia, are staffed with “lifetime appointment” folks that can never be fired. They’ve got you over a barrel, they know it, they know you know it, and they don’t care. Benvenuti a Italia.

Italian bureaucracy at its most daunting. Photo credit: Wanted in Rome.

And yet, the biggest reason Italy is a rabbit warren of bureaucracy is because bureaucracy creates jobs. In a market economy like the U.S. where “trim the fat” is practically a Biblical edict, if a job is redundant, it is immediately eliminated.

Not so, Italy. Here, the more pointless the job, the better. Just look at ASL.

Italy is massively inconvenient. What I love about Italian life (an abundance of mom-and-pop stores) is the very reason why stores in Italy don’t keep regular hours. Monday morning and Thursday afternoons, you can forget it. All national and regional holidays (there are many) are strictly observed.

The four major grocery store chains (Coop, which is a socialist, labor-owned store, EuroSpin, which is theoretically a “discount” store, Conad, an Italian stalwart, and the Superconti, a generic mix of brand names from other supermarkets) keep regular hours, but they’re corporations.

Everybody else shuts up shop for the pausa pranzo, or three-hour lunch break. So does the mechanic, the ceramics shop, the dry cleaners, the shoe repair place, the bakery, the library, and the printer. If you have to, say, print boarding passes for a flight, and you forget that it’s a Thursday afternoon and all the stores are closed, but your flight happens to be the next morning, you are out of luck.

Inconvenient store closings are the least of it. Italy is an old country built on the side of a hill. The whole thing is vertical. Its buildings were erected long before there were elevators, and most buildings can’t be retrofitted for them, which is why stairs are a major part of the Italian experience.

Additionally, Italian businesses get hit with high credit card fees, so many either don’t accept credit cards or their “machines” mysteriously go down every time you try to use one. To do anything in Italy requires reams of paperwork, all in formal Italian. To merely cancel a contract with your cell service provider can take months of phone calls and screaming.

There are car-swallowing potholes. If your suspension gets ripped clean off the car or you break an axel, there’s no redress. Why are the roads so bad here? Responsibility for the roads belongs to each comune (local municipality). Most are desperately poor, especially since their populations and tax base are dwindling. It’s up to each comune to spearhead the effort to apply to the provincia (regional government) for road-fixing funds. Some comuni are better at this than others. And during this process, the greasing of palms is hardly uncommon, what with the whole “ya gotta give a little to get a little” mentality that permeates all levels of government.

Yes, this actually happened. Photo credit: Wanted in Rome.

There’s a marked tendency in Italy to pass the buck. I suspect this ties in to that national bella figura obsession I wrote about earlier this week. If being Italian and admitting to dropping the ball makes you look bad, and by association your entire family, why admit to dropping the ball? So Italians don’t. Instead, they pass the buck and keep passing until it’s as far away from them as possible.

This means, of course, that nothing ever gets fixed or done. Better to blame someone else than to accept responsibility. For anything.

Rome. That’s all I’m going to say: Rome. I wrote a whole Cappuccino about the problem with Rome here. The Eternal City has a tragic history of mismanagement—trash that piles up in every neighborhood, buses that spontaneously catch fire, a hotel and hospitality sector in desperate need of an enema, hideously ugly postwar residential buildings thrown up to accommodate the influx of Southern Italians fleeing poverty. Rome isn’t being treated well, and no one I know actually enjoys going there anymore, including me.

Trash, trash, and more trash. Photo credit: Tiscali Notizie

Surprisingly, there’s a lack of innovation in the arts. Here is Italy, indisputably one of the most talented countries in the world, the hotspot of the Italian Renaissance, but the brilliant musicians, painters, choreographers, writers, and dancers who are her artistic legacy and her life’s blood are treated shabbily. Fresh ideas are ground out like a spent cigarette. Go to any jazz club, and instead of a night of original tunes written by Italians, it’s “An Homage to Stevie Wonder,” or the song stylings of some relic who had a hit back in the eighties.

There isn’t even a music scene anymore. Everybody teaches at state-funded conservatories, churning out musicians who then emerge onto an artistic wasteland, tuck tail, and become teachers themselves at local schools. What choice do they have? The same five technically-proficient-but-artistically-mediocre musicians have a lock on the music festivals. There’s nowhere to play, nowhere to go, nowhere to do something fresh or different or worthwhile.

Italy has a trash problem. A pretty sizable one. One of the most astonishing discoveries tourists make when visiting Rome is the mountain of stinking trash that piles up on city streets. Dumpsters overflow with trash bags, and more bags accumulate next to them. In the summer months, their stench is especially rancid. When emptied, the dumpsters are never cleaned or sanitized, making the odor even more overwhelming. Rats frolic amongst the waste, as do cinghiale (feral hogs) which now boldly scour Roman streets in search of food.

Typical garbage dump in Rome. Photo credit: Wanted in Rome.

Entire bags of trash are thrown out of car windows where they accumulate along the highway. Plastic bottles bob listlessly at the shorelines of beautiful lakes and rivers. There are informal land fills where items such as sinks, mattresses, soiled clothing, and butt-sprung couches are left to rot and then ignored by the local authorities. We took a wrong exit once and drove past an entire graveyard of garbage, a quarter mile of it, and were rightly horrified.

Italy deserves better. Unfortunately, too many Italians—fastidious housekeepers, all—believe their civic responsibility ends the minute they set foot outside. No one understands this, least of all me.

There are way too many cars. Like, thousands too many. It’s understandable that Italians love their cars like they love their mammas, but this country is too small and too densely packed for all that vehicular traffic. Plus, cars are getting bigger. In keeping with Italy’s tradition of adopting American habits about thirty years after they first started, Italy has now discovered the SUV. The streets here are too narrow for cars that size, and when pedestrian traffic has to compete with SUVs for road space, it’s time to rethink the entire issue.

Dear Heavens, Italy is noisy. I’ve written about it before, which you can read here. During the summer months when windows stay open or you suffocate to death, kids on unbaffled dirt bikes come roaring up our street of Via Repubblica, and it’s like all the devils in hell brought their pitchforks. Additionally, people yell, trucks gun their motors because of the steep incline, dogs park, and couples fight. Increasingly, it would seem, peace and quiet are the exclusive province of the rich.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the economic fallout from the pandemic, Italy has gotten terribly expensive. One trip to the grocery store is almost twice as expensive now as it was two years ago. There was a time when the essentials (rent, food, medicine) were relatively cheap in Europe, and luxuries (smartphones, computers, cars) were expensive. Now, everything’s expensive, and the war in Ukraine only accounts for part of that.

Biting midges. You may remember them from summer camp—some people call them no-see-ums—but come June, these tiny bastards put out an APB to others of their kind, alerting them to my presence. Their bite is so painfully itchy, I still have faint scars where I scratched last summer. And since they’re hard to see, one can suck you drier than the Sahara before you realize what’s going on. It’s a full six weeks of hellfire and torture. By the time they leave, usually in mid-July, you look as though you have leprosy.

Biting midges. Aren’t they prosh?

And there you have it! Twelve things I will miss about Italy and twelve things I won’t.

Do you have an opinion on the subject? I want to hear it. Be sure to leave your comments in the comments section below.

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin