203. Italy and Back Part 4: Titles, Thee and Thou, and Italian Grammar
Apart from those minor hindrances expounded in my previous post , which no amount of bashing one’s head against a wall could ever resolve, there was also the social side to face up to; the first on hand was that you had to give the formal or more commonly referred to as the polite form of Lei to those older, richer, more qualified and important than you. Rather awkward to administer because not only had you to change all the verb declensions into the formal structure but you had to make a very quick mental judgement if the person in front of you was older, richer, more qualified and important than you. Fortunately there was one short cut in all this- a male stranger was rigorously to be addressed in the formal way as it was a thing unheard of to concede familiarity to a male, so I ended up with the rule, that if I didn’t know the person, he or she got the Lei bit treatment whether or not that person was a he or a she, older, richer or more important than me.
Learning Italian was not easy when you consider that an English verb will change four times at the most: present, past, past particle, the gerund and that’s it. I once sat down and calculated the times I would have had to learn to conjugate a verb in Italian and it worked out I would need to know how to conjugate verbs 108 times for every single verb I used- any wonder that Italian is reserved as only the language of opera and music.
I was lucky, however, because here in the North no one knows how to speak Italian properly anyway- they speak only in one tense- il passato prossimo or imperfetto, i.e. the present perfect.. which goes something like this: “I have been to the supermarket yesterday...” which in English would be totally incorrect. Down south too, they only speak with one tense- il passato remote, i.e. the simple past, which has more of an effect of the past perfect and sounds something of the kind: “I had been to the supermarket yesterday...” That too, in English sounds totally weird.
The only other difference between the north and the south, apart from accents, of course, is that only those who had gone to school as teenagers in the south speak Italian, the rest speak dialect which, unfortunately for strangers, is comprehensible to no other region but their own. Now, as fate would have it, in the famous Concorsi where teachers are selected to teach in schools throughout the country, you get a teacher from Naples or Palermo speaking in the simple past to teach kids in Padua and Milan who only speak in the present perfect- so no one really understand each other at all and in order to redress the balance, the Lega Nord party was born just as I was to place my first ballot in the late 1970s.
That settles the matter of talking to one another, the question of addressing Italians was another kettle of fish. I was soon to realize that no one was ever called a plain simple Mister Rossi. Even though the monarchy had been abolished just after the war, never the less, everyone had a title... it was Geometra Rossi, Ragioniere Bianchi, Architetto..., Dottore..., Professore..., Maestro..., Ingegnere..., Primario..., Avvocato... and here I stop because when it came to the lawyer bit I hit the record... there are more lawyers in Italy than there are bread-men. There are more lawyers in the city of Rome than the whole of France.
At this point it is imperative to mention the Justice system, or better, the lack of it, but since I was not able to make heads or tail of it at the time, and still can’t now, let it suffice that if you sue your neighbour for having blown up your house, you may see a sentence passed anything between fifteen years and half a century- no exaggeration. At the moment the Berlusconi Government which is trying to reform the system is getting the usual battering from the left wing with the usual accusations that Berlusconi is trying to manoeuvre the system for his own benefit... Italy has a funny way of getting rid of a legitimately, popularly voted politician who does something for Italy- prosecute him.
It happened before with Bettino Craxi as everyone today acknowledges, but which sent him into exile and a premature death at the time. And the Magistrate that prosecuted Bettino Craxi is thriving as head of a Party in the Italian Parliament attempting to do the same thing to Berlusconi. I shan’t even mention that person’s name because I promised myself it never would be mentioned- that name, in my opinion, is not worthy to appear, at least, not on my blog at any rate.
Yet, in spite of all these reverences due in addressing a person, what amazed me was I felt there was no real class distinction among Italians. When I met Italians in the market, in the street, in church- wherever – they all seemed nicely dressed, taking pride in their look and one could not distinguish the plain Mr and Miss from the titled ones.
Women in particular were neatly clothed, well combed hair, clean shoes and they even put their lipstick on just to slip out to get the bread from the baker in the square. Rather different from the curlers in hair, slippers on bare feet, fag in mouth of my next-door neighbours in Walsall who peered their heads round the door to drag in the bottles of milk delivered on the doorstep just as the dawn was about to spill its light on the horizon
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