The Days of the Door

Lorenzo, hoping for early admission to sainthood used his day off two weeks ago to completely empty the cantina as part of our ongoing saga of redoing the storage room. It sat empty for a few days while Lorenzo drew plans of where all the shelves, the dryer, and his not yet bought weight bench would go. He also met with Eugenio’s dad to talk tiles, and one morning they drove to a tile “outlet” where they got some pretty terra cotta tiles based on my request for something matched what we have on the garage floor. Eugenio’s dad lives on the other side of our fence in his little white villa on land that he bought when our neighbourhood was just fields and is now worth about 20 times what he paid for it. He tiled our bathroom for the previous owners, tiled the kitchen for us, and now would be tiling the cantina floor.
For reasons lost in the mist of time I call him Babyface, not to his face mind you, but behind his back to Lorenzo. Even Lorenzo calls him Babyface when referring to him in conversation and it is difficult sometimes to keep from calling it out when I see him across the fence tending to his lawn. His is a spry man, slightly stooped and always busy, either chopping wood for his fireplace, tending to his plants, or driving up to the mountains at the crack of dawn to hunt for wild mushrooms and returning home before 10am. In other words, Babyface is a true Old School Italian. Though he looks rather frail, appearances are deceiving because he tiled and chalked the cantina floor in less than two days, including splitting tiles to make the baseboards, and without so much as a sore back. On Sunday, the day after taking my mom who was visiting for the week to Salò , we left her with the kids and Lorenzo and I painted the cantina with white paint leftover from 3 years ago when we painted our apartment when we moved in. Lorenzo washed the floor four times, twice with regular floor cleaner and twice with vinegar as Babyface told him it is the best way to get all that cement grit off the floor. Suddenly, with its new tiled floor and white walls the cantina was transformed. Sunlight poured in through the window. No longer a dungeon filled with dust, it was suddenly light and airy, and best of all, clean, looking more like a monk’s cell, though certainly bigger, or at least a pleasant basement apartment.
(Sorry, the mention of the monk’s cell made me think of something. Years ago when I was living in Rome, before I was married or had kids I had a job where I helped company execs relocate to Italy for work. I had this rather difficult client who wanted a beautiful home in the center of Rome, something unusual with a large terrace and didn’t want to pay more than 1000 euros a month for it, back when the euro was 86 cents to the dollar. Anyway, I called agencies all over Rome looking for an apartment to please this woman and I was nearing despair when I stumbled upon an apartment in the center, just off of the Circus Maximus, with the requisite number of bedrooms and square meters that this woman had requested. Once upon a time it had been part of a convent for nuns, but with the nuns long gone the remaining part had been turned into an apartment, and my boss told me it was the fabled unicorn of apartments, rumoured to exist, it would briefly appear on the market only to be immediately snapped up and disappear again. The client went to see it, she loved it, loved the location, thought the place was beautiful. In the end however she decided against it because, as she told me over the phone, the bedrooms were too small! Unfortunately for her most nuns don’t go in for large bedroom sets.)
I was pleased with our sunny monk’s cell and went to bed optimistic. On Monday Lorenzo had the day off and the plan was that he would put together the shelves that would go in the cantina and start organizing where we wanted to put things. Then he read on-line that IKEA was having a super sale, large plastic storage containers at 2 euros a pop, something that he couldn’t stop himself from driving to IKEA and buying, taking my mother along for the ride. I knew it would be tough to do all the things he had planned for one day, but I knew Lorenzo could do it. After all, what were some metal shelves and a trip to IKEA in the face of my husband’s raw determination? I found out at 5:50 when Lorenzo pulled up in front of my office. His fingers bandaged in two different places he told me that they had managed to get to IKEA but that he had only finished putting together two of the four shelves, had cut himself twice while doing so, and that he would need my help with the last two. I got home, took Livia upstairs to my mom, threw on some work jeans and headed downstairs, where I spent the next hour kneeling by the metal shelf twisting the little screws in as fast as I could trying to avoid the same fate as Lorenzo with his cut hands. We got the shelves up, and Lorenzo was whistling which is always a good sign but then we had to screw them to the wall with the drill and it was here that the whistling stopped. The walls, as all the walls in our house seem to be weren’t completely flat and involved one of us pushing the shelf against the wall while the other marked the holes with a red marker. Then Lorenzo would drill into the cement foundation to make the holes where the screws would go, the noise was awful, and then with the first shelf the holes didn’t match up and it took all kinds of moving and flipping them around and pushing them against the wall to get them right, and while the other three sets went in OK, Lorenzo was cursing under his breath and sweating and I was hating home improvement projects with every ounce of my being until finally we had all four shelves bolted to the wall so neither Giulio or Livia could ever pull a storage shelf down on top of themselves.
Then a dash upstairs to wolf down dinner before heading down again, it was now around 10 o’clock and the kids had been in bed for hours, my mom helping us move things into the plastic containers and onto the shelves. Despite the weeding out I had done the week before there was still a lot of things to get rid of, so much so that in the end when we got everything inside the cantina was half empty. Not the shelves, but there was a lot more floor space, just as well I suppose since we have to factor in the weight bench. The cantina looked good, and my mother made some comment about how Italian it was to have this beautiful room with tile that most Americans can only dream about for the purpose of storing winter coats and a surplus of shower gel.
The last thing to do was re-hang the door, something that is really easy to do in Italy, all the doors lift off their hinges and can be removed with some straining and then delicately put back in place with a lot of straining. Anyway, we strained and lifted to put the door on. It had been removed last week so the floor could be tiled and then cut down so the tiles would fit underneath and still allow the door to open and close. But the door didn’t fit anymore, it leaned heavily towards the right side of the doorframe so it would not close properly, let alone lock though if some thief would like to relieve me of 50 pounds of baby clothes, more power to them.
Italians are famous for their doors. You know those cop shows you see on TV where the cops give the door a hearty kick and it gives way? Or the SWAT team shows up with an iron pole, they pound on the door a few times and the whole thing collapses? Well Italian cop shows don’t bother with that because everyone knows that all front doors have steel bars in them, you can hear them moving into place every time you lock or unlock them. Lorenzo’s biggest concern when he came to visit my parents was how flimsy their front door seemed, alarming my dad so much that he had the door changed for something sturdier, though nothing like what we have on our modest apartment in Italy. But our basement door was of the standard wooden variety, the same door that was put when the building was built. Apparently about 15 years ago after several break-ins to the cantina, the former owner had added along with the basic door lock a heavy lock with a steel bar that the runs the length of the door and was held in place by a hole in the basement floor at the base and by a metal latch at the top when the door was locked.
But suddenly it no longer could be locked. Too exhausted to do anything about it as it was nearly midnight we trudged back upstairs with Lorenzo saying he would talk to Babyface and fix it tomorrow.
Thus began The Saga of the Basement Door. On Tuesday and Wednesday I came home from work hoping to find the door fixed and instead found piles of tools, drills, and Lorenzo and Babyface standing around the door. On Tuesday they said it would be fixed Wednesday, on Wednesday they admitted that the situation was grave, Thursday we took a break to go to Genoa for the day and forget about the stress of the cantina and it’s cursed door, but then Friday morning found Lorenzo down in the cantina again trying to put it right. It seemed a bit like herding cats. He would measure and drill and fix one thing only to find another problem and each set back seemed to push us deeper in despair. We couldn’t get new door, as that would involve ripping out the door frame and would set us back thousands of euro, but the longer it dragged on, longer than it had taken us to empty, tile, paint, mount shelves, and refill the entire cantina. Friday night Lorenzo came upstairs tired and defeated, with the tool box in his hands, a sign that the work for now was done. Apparently the door now closed, the bottom lock locked, but the big metal one would no longer close properly, no matter how many times he took it apart and oiled it. He was leaving it be, in fact, he would be doing no more home improvement projects. When our blinds come for the porch he is going to let their guys put it instead of taking care of it himself. It seemed like the end of an era.
After a day’s reflection Lorenzo decided that he would remove the old lock and put a new one on, but not yet. Right now we are still recovering from the draining four days that I call The Days of the Door. In the meantime we have taken all our winter clothes down to the cantina in clear plastic bins so that the contents are visible and as the room is no longer filled with dust I have no qualms about our comforters staying down there as well. There is something very satisfying about seeing all our items neatly stored and put away, yet having them easily accessible that I have almost forgiven Lorenzo for the havoc this project ended up causing and I can almost enjoy the cantina and take pleasure in using my dryer in a room fit for a monk.

50 Random Things to Know if You Plan on Living in Italy

1) You can buy real maple syrup in Italy, but you cannot find the fake imitation Aunt Jemima kind.
2) Italian supermarkets do sell Jiffy peanut butter and some places also sell organic peanut butter.
3) What we call bread, they call toast, or Pan Carre. Their bread is much better.
4) I have never been able to find Zip-Loc bags.
5) Fresh milk goes off after a few days, though lately you can find longer lasting fresh milk. Otherwise buy UHT milk which lasts for ages, and I honestly think tastes OK. It's in a cardboard cartons on the shelf, near the dairy freezer.
6) Skim milk ( scremato) can only be found in the UHT form.
7) Whole milk is called intero, while 2% is called parzialemente scremato.
8) They sell Philidelphia cream cheese, Honey Nut Cheerios, and Kraft cheese slices.
9) Kids clothes are expensive, so unless you are ok paying 30 euros for a sweater, you do better buying them in the States.
10) Never go the gym and then dash into the supermarket. The Italians will be weirded out by you looking disheveled and sweaty in their midst.
11) Never drop the kids off at school looking like you just came from the gym, the other well made-up mothers will look at you funny.
12) Your stroller is your friend.
13) Italian women really will look after small children in 3" heels and immaculate white suits and stay clean. We non Italians lack the genes to do this.
14) It is OK to go two or three days without washing your hair. It is not OK to have hairy legs.
15) Your child needs to keep his undershirt tucked in at all times. Otherwise other women will do it for you, telling you that your child risks having a stomach ache or that you have left his kidneys exposed to the elements.
16) Children's colds are not treated with syrups but with liquid drops of medicine mixed with sterile water and then blown out in vapor form through a mask by an aerosole machine. It is your responsibility to hold the mask over your screaming child's face.
17) Italian children don't have bedtimes. People will assume that the fact that your child goes to sleep at 7:30 it is because he asks to go to bed then.
18) Italian children are welcome at all restaurants at all hours.
19) Italian children are welcome just about anywhere at all hours. And it is OK if they make some noise, they are children, that is what they are expected to do.
20) No one wears all white gym shoes.
21) Women don't wear baseball caps.
22) Italians always wear slippers or flip flops when they are home. Walking around barefoot is kind of a no-no.
23) When at home, most Italians change out of whatever they were wearing and hang around the home in sweatpants and t-shirts, especially when cleaning.
24) Men only wear white gym socks when they are in the gym.
25) Italian women don't drink to get drunk.
26) They are also good at resisting dessert.
27) At movie theaters you get an assigned seat when you buy your tickets. People will ask you to move if you are in the wrong one, even if the rest of the theater is empty.
28) Movies also have an intermission half way through.
29) Most stores are closed on Sundays and Monday mornings, though that is starting to change at least among the big supermarket chains.
30) All phone calls from land lines, even to the person across the street are expensive.
31)The FAX machine is still a valid and popular way of sending documents.
32) People rarely, if ever, write personal checks.
33) It is completely normal to go to someone's house for dinner and they leave the TV on while you eat.
34) Always bring something when invited to someone's house. If it is for Sunday lunch it will be assumed, though never said, that you will bring pastries that you buy on your way to their house.
35) Italian network television is terrible. Walker Texas Ranger is a popular show. The Runaway Bride is a frequently shown film.
36) Get cable if you want to see something decent.
37) Always say "Buon Giorno" when entering a shop and say it again when you leave.
38) Don't expect an outpouring of help from shop assistants.
39) Waiters will never introduce themselves by saying, "My name is Paolo and I will be your server for this evening." Nor will he ask you if you are "still working on that?"
40) Sugar is just fine to give to children.
41) Italians tend to do things in droves. If you are going on vacation in the summer, probably 17 million other people had the same idea. If you go to IKEA on a Sunday, expect half of the region to be there as well.
42) If you plan to drive you need to know how to parallel park. Really.
43) It is hard to find a real Christmas tree, most stores only sell fake ones. The real ones will be small and most likely in a large pot so you can keep it for next year if you want.
44) Family always comes first, even if the members of the family don't seem all that fond of each other.
45) Italians fear strong breezes and drafts, especially in the presence of children. A breeze + sweating= certain illness.
46) When you buy fruit at the grocery store wear the provided plastic gloves before touching anything. NEVER start handling fruit yourself at a market or the fruit seller will go off on you.
47) At a supermarket you are expected to weigh your own fruit.
48) Italians are generally friendly welcoming people who tell you that you speak Italian well, even if it's not true.
49) The food is always soooo good.
50) You should always have a second glass of wine.