Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Italy is so beautiful but.....

I have been avoiding posting on this thread, because it's one of those discussions that is bound to deteriorate, and because my reactions to your comments are hard to pin down--neither totally with you nor totally against you and a little complicated.

You went to some very heavily touristed places. You went either at the end of high season, or at the beginning of shoulder season, after a long high season. In some of those very touristy places, the locals may be sick of the crowds of tourists and longing for some peace and normal routine in their home city. That doesn't excuse anyone if they were rude, and it doesn't excuse people in the tourist industry for being less then helpful and hospitable, but it can explain why they may have been less than thrilled to see you.

I love Italy, and I have visited Italy more often than any other country--I think about nine times. (However, I travel much less than many people on Fodors, who have visited Italy many more times than that.) However, when I went there for a month with a friend the summer I was 25, we did not experience all sweetness and light. We DID experience some rudeness, especially in Rome, and some people trying to cheat us, I think only in Rome, and in Florence, my impression was that people were fed up with the crowds of tourists, though they seemed to have nothing against us personally, or as Americans, or as young women. We did, however, have many good, warm experiences with people NOT in the tourist industry, especially in the south, including fellow pasengers on trains, public buses, and a ferry, and even in the Naples RR station where we had a problem and some people helped us. It helped that I spoke Italian. I had learned it in college. Though I loved this memorable trip, overall our experiences with some of the people in the tourist industry compared very unfavorably with those in Greece and southern Spain, where we also traveled in the summer, also in the 1970s.

In more recent trips to Italy since the late 1990s I have had mostly good experiences. That may be because I've traveled in the shoulder season or in the off season, when locals don't seem to feel so overwhelmed by tourists. I have either traveled alone or on very small group tours (less than 10 people). I HAVE had people make comments to me about American politics. It didn't bother me, and I didn't feel like their dislike of the US's positions had anything to do with me personally, since I disliked some of the same positions, though I didn't want to get into an extended discussion. Politics is just not a taboo topic in Italy, and it's not abnormal for the owner of the agriturismo where you're staying or your seatmate on a train or a taxi driver or the hotel recptionist to initiate a discussion about international politics. It's also not abnormal for them to ask "personal" questions about your family or lack of family. On the other hand, it would be a little weird for them to pry about your professional and employment status, while small talk about what you do for a living would be more normal among strangers in the US.

About staring: I have some opnions about your observation, but I've been hesitating about commenting, partly becaseu I'm not sure exactly what kind of staring you're referring to. First of all, re Bellagio.... I wstayed briefly in Varenna (right near Bellagio), which I liked, and in Stresa, which I disliked. I experienced A LOT of incredible rudeness in Stresa on Lake Maggiore, but not in Varenna or elsewhere on Lake Como. But in both places, I encountered a lot of people who had a "blank" look, who seemed spacey, who didn't make eye contact. I found it very disconcerting. Then, after I returned home, in a discussion with some Italian acquaintances on the Internet, including one my age from Milan, I was told that making too much eye contact or "talking with the hands" is considered a little rude or boorish in northern Italy. So, I don't know, but maybe that explains the spacey, rather disengaged manner of some of the people in the lakes area.

My other observation about staring: In SMALL towns in the south, people are nosy. I don't say this as a negative. I think nosiness can be a good quality, becaue it shows an interest in people. In small towns they may not get a lot of foreigners, so they may be a little suspicious of strangers walking around twon until they know what they're like and why they're there. So, if I visit a small town in the south and take a walk by myself before I have been introduced to people by a local and the word has spread that I'm OK, I do expect to have people stare very openly and intently. The solution is simply to greet people politely when you pass then--no need to go beyond that. Then the stares turn to smiles or nods and all is well.

About the shirt: I think most Italians would find it downright weird. A shirt that simply showed the American flag might not seem odd. Nor would a shirt that simply had the name of some tourist destination in Italy. But this image with the USA and Italian flags and some message about being proud to be Italian-American--I think that wouldn't go over well.

If you're Italian-American, you really can't expect everyone in Italy to care. So many of us from the USA are of Italian ancestry, that there's no big novelty in meeting an American who happens to be of Italian heritage. In the north and in much of central Italy, the most common attitude is that Americans are Americans, and the ethnic background of an American just doesn't matter. Italians generally LIKE foreigners and LIKE Americans. But they don't have any SPECIAL feeling toward you just because you're Italian-American. Many northerners, especially, think it's ludicrous that some Americans, born in the USA, of parents also born in the USA, call themselves "Italian."

On the other hand, if you visit less touristed parts of the southern mainland and Sicily, there are many people who feel an emotional, physical bond with Italian-Americans. They are well aware that, if not their own town, often neighboring towns were almost deserted in the early 1900s when almost everyone left, driven by poverty, and usually destined for the USA or elsewhere in north and south America. They know that they may have more distant relatives living in the USA than in Italy. Therefore, if your ancestors were from the southern mainland or Sicily, and if you're visitng smaller towns or if you're in cities but chatting with taxi drivers and service people who are from smaller provincial towns in the south, the fact that you are Italian-American may be of great interest. If you're visiting the town or even the region where your ancestors were born, it is definitely worth bringing up in conversation the fact that your grandfather was born in such-and-such town, and people WILL be interested. However, even there, I think they might be turned off by the Sons of Italy t-shirt.