comunque, hai mangiato bene?

I remember this conversation with a student from my first month in Reggio.

‘I worry about my daughter. All she has for breakfast is two chocolate biscuits.’
‘Well, that’s teenagers for you.’
‘I know. She should be eating at least five or six, wth a nice big cup of hot milk.’

Breakfast biscuits are an Italian institution. They have an aisle to themselves in most supermarkets. My favourites are shaped like the ABC logo, with cane sugar on top and flecks of something that gets stuck in your teeth. I’m also quite a fan of the ones with the picture of a basket of eggs stamped on top. In Reggio, when I was routinely working fifty or sixty hours a week and flinching every time my boss walked into the room, my daily diet consisted of as many biscuits as I could stuff into my face as I was getting dressed in the morning (quite a lot, as it turns out), and then a take-away pizza at 11pm, washed down with a big bottle of Moretti beer. I never had the spare time or spare change for a lunch break, and my students got used to the rumblings of my stomach, as if they were a family who shared their home with a restless ghost. I was size eight and I had a butt of steel. In retrospect I like to think of it as my ‘verge of nervous collapse’ diet, and am thinking of marketing it to Hollywood.

Now that I have a nice job and time for cooked lunches at home, I am finding I have to rethink my eating habits a little bit. I’m experimenting with strange, fibrous things that I believe are known as vegetables, and am less likely to offer my guests tinned tuna, tinned beans, Moretti beer and breakfast biscuits when they come round for dinner. I’m not size eight anymore, and my butt stops dancing a second or two after the rest of me, but neither is adrenalin churning everything to cement in my stomach. Sometimes I look around my little heated home with its well-stocked kitchen and marvel at how far I’ve come.

I find myself well-positioned to appreciate my successes. Now that I’m no longer surrounded by an artificial world of the super-rich, I’ve become more aware of how hard life in Italy really is. The people I met through the school last year were the type who bought their eggs pre-boiled, and described a ten-thousand euro blow out at Max Mara as ‘a bit of me-time’. In Arezzo I’ve met many people who seem to be closer to the norm. Forty-year-old mothers who work days in shops and nights tending bar in discos; environmental engineers who schlep from Trieste to Reggio Calabria for endless rounds of job applications, in anticipation of the end of their six-month work contracts; law graduates who stuff envelopes in gold factories. I’ve seen the future of enterprise bargaining agreements, and it isn’t pretty.

Financial hardship means increasing numbers of young Italians are living at home well into their thirties. Of course, their parents are rightly anxious about their ability to stay solvent, and generally see marriage as the viable course to adult independence: it goes without saying that a situation like this will rapidly make a society more conservative. Then, of course, there’s the fabled bureaucracy, and the very high taxes imposed on anyone trying to make a permanent legal contract of any kind, from tenancy to employment. The result is that everything gets done through unofficial channels, which rather saps people’s political will to improve the official ones. Most Aretines will never leave Arezzo, and the reason they give me is that the quality of life is so good. If that’s true, I shudder to think what things must be like for the people in all those other cities and towns I’ve breezed through on weekend trips. But then, at least they still have functioning public medical cover.

And at least they know how to enjoy themselves. Last weekend I was invited to dinner by an ex-student of mine, to meet her architect husband and her friends, a pianist, a singer and an ornithologist. There was fondue, there was dessert wine, there was chocolate bread-and-butter pudding (the singer is English, but has an admirable grasp of Aretine—it wasn’t until she cast around for the word for ‘chicken stock’ that I realised she wasn’t a native). It was a proper grown-up dinner party, with dirty stories and b&b recommendations. There was even the boring bit at the end where the most voluble of the guests gets puddly and starts complaining about electricians and planning permits: it was perfect. I think I made my first proper joke in Italian. It was the most fun I’ve had in months.

I’m generally easing into the rhythms of Tuscan socialising, which seem to involve squeezing an equal number of women and men into a few warm cars, driving to pubs and restaurants in other towns which are unaccountably superior to the many pubs and restaurants in one’s own town, getting tipsy, and driving home again. When I want to be around a familiar sense of humour, I spend time with the Brits from the school. When I want to be alone I go and see classic Italian films at the arthouse cinema. It’s not bad at all for a European winter in a small town on a small salary. Aretines love to run themselves down, and are forever telling me how ill-mannered and parochial they are, but I think most of them are very nice. In the next few months I’m expecting visits from several old friends who will love this place, and the trees will soon be budding green, and just as I’m finally decoding those last elusive dinner party jokes, it’ll be time to go.