eat pray love and how italy lies to the world

ok.

so i’m at the sun a few months ago and i see the preview. i think it looks kinda cool.

mum buys the book. stops halfway through it in malaysia (while in the book itself it’s up to india… yoga coincidentally. freudian slip of sorts on mum’s behalf to stop at that point…).

we get back to melbourne, i start reading.

i throw the book from my bed to my floor multiple times, night after night. she’s pretty much had a diary published, with the worst editing i’ve ever seen. i read it and kept screaming ‘what mother fucking style guide IS this shit?!’ i also keet on cursing Oprah, who repeatedly makes stupid women (like myself and partly my mother) read pieces of crap cos she thinks they’re ‘amazing’ and that we should ‘take a look for ourselves’. grr.

eventually, i got the hell over it. you have to read between the lines in the book, cos the words themselves are crappy, for the most part. i don’t dislike the woman or her experiences, but i feel that the hype didn’t match the fact that it was merely a typed and bound diary.

i’m nowhere near the point of this post yet.

i went to watch the movie this arvo with my friend. i’ll be brief with what i thought of it; nowhere near as bad as it’s been rated, skims the surface but it’s a movie, i expect no more. it was still more than enough to inspire me to check out bali.

my problem is this:

ITALY ISN’T LIKE THAT! italy is always shown as this beautiful place, with people enjoying themselves, kissing, dry humping in piazze, happy nuns, plates of spaghetti, sitting at tables to eat (this is probably the most ludicrous thing that was portrayed), people that speak english, italians that want to become friends with strangers, big old apartments, insane amounts of flirting and love on show, that napoli is safe (ha! ha! ha!) etc etc.

now, i understand that it’s a diary, so these things actually happened to her… but there were some parts that were downright lies in the movie. i shall only use one example.

from the book:

…the romans on the street aren’t really giving me any second looks. or even many first looks, for that matter. i found this kind of alarming at first. i’d been to italy once before, back when i was nineteen, and what i remember is being constantly harassed by men on the street. and in the pizzerias. and at the movies. and in the vatican. it was endless and awful. it used to be a real liability about travelling in italy, something that could almost even spoil your appetite… one must wonder, what has changed here? is it me? or is it them? so i ask around, and everybody agrees that, yes, there’s been a true shift in italy in the last ten to fifteen years… maybe it’s just simple embarrassment on the part of young men about the infamous lewdness of their fathers and grandfathers. whatever the cause, though, it seems that italy has decided as a society that this sort of stalking, pestering behaviour toward women is no longer acceptable.

is there a general consensus that people in the rest of the world don’t WANT to see italy in another other light other than that of decades before?  in the movie there was a fleeting scene, merely a 2 second span introduction into a shot, with a few girls traipsing through a piazza with a couple of boys at their heels, literally chasing culo (chasing their asses).  like, not the girls themselves, following the backsides, hands out, gesturing at them and talking to them.

it’s not fucking real!

italy 2001 – 9 years ago.  i went on a contiki tour, and my god, it was like that.  and know what, you complain… but that constant flirting and chasing (as in… literally, physically CHASING) is something we still talk and laugh about today.  it was FUN!  end of story.  and other than some unwanted groping here and there, overall it was old fashioned harmless flirting.  and it always served it’s purpose; one doesn’t feel guilty if you kiss a guy you met the same day when he’s spent the last 3 hours following you, buying you bracelets and fresh coconut and a rose.

italy 2009- last year.  fucking sucked, not for me because i was too busy with my own eat pray love journey, but i looked around the piazza and and clubs and just saw what i see in australia, which is a truly sad state of affairs.  i wasn’t sure who was to blame for the flirtlessness state of florence, but be it feminists or society or travellers… a great big fuck you from me.

when you compliment someone, you feel good.

when you receive that compliment, you feel good.

when you’re politically correct… you’re bored and restrained and AFRAID.  we need to learn when it’s ok to be totally inappropriate and run from being PC.

fin.