It’s all here but sometimes it is hidden

The Italiano paese is a wonderful place but it’s not always because everything works beautifully. Sometimes it doesn’t work smoothly but the delight in living in this paradiso is that it always ends up beautifully! Yesterday Cinzia and I spent the day in Albano, a reasonably sized town, the principal town in the heart of the Castelli Romani, a region where the Ancient Romans fled from Rome during the hot summers to the coolness of the southern hills just twenty-five kilometres away. They established villas and castelli within a decent chariot ride from the heart of the Romani Fori. In the two-thousand years since, Roman residents haven’t been able to shake the habit so the exodus from Rome and the influx to the Catelli Romani continues each summer, albeit there are not so many chariots around these days but there are plenty of macchina that certainly bear the scars of battle. Anyhow, that’s a digression. We got stuck into the Castelli Romani by way of my explanation that we spent yesterday in Albano. The purpose of that explanation is that we spent all of our spare euros, Cinzia in the ladies’ dress shops (which abound) and me in a couple of bars along the main street. And that is by way of explaining the fact that we were fresh out of euros when I was sent on a mission to bet a bit of burro and pane from Roberto at the General Store and a few veggies from the Greengrocer man who brings his wares to the village twice a week in a large van – the vegies stacked in boxes five or six high along the two sides of the van. Regular readers of past resoconti will be aware that purchases of daily requirements is not an outrageously expensive exercise. In fact the shopping bill at the supermarceto is usually only about a third that which we are used to in Oz, even AFTER you make allowance for the exchange rate. It is not unusual to rock up at the checkout with a trolley full of goods for which you are expecting to pay about AUS$120 to find out that the actual bill they want you to pay is about 30 euro. So you can imagine that if you wander up Via Vittorio Emanuele II the twenty metres to Roberto and the Greengrocer you won’t be planning on spending much more than about 5 euro for the couple of items you are on a mission to obtain. But when all of your spare euro have been spent on bathers and birra in Albano all you have in your wallet is your debit card. You do the only thing you can do – you shuffle up the extra forty metres up to the teller machine (know locally and nationally as the Bancomat to withdraw some cold, hard cash (or, more likely, some “paper” cash). You put your card in the machine, do all the things they ask for in Italiano only to get your card returned with a message that required translation but clearly meant “Sorry sport but we can’t complete this transaction”. Of course you naturally assume that you have insufficient credit on the card and, having left your mobile in the casa, you retrace the sixty metres back to the apartment to recharge your card on-line with your banking application. You repair to the Bancomat realising that you actually DO have sufficient credit so you watch the locals at the machine suffering the same fate – they can’t squeeze cash out of the hole-in-the-wall either. You go into the Banco del Lazio on the other side of the “hole-in-the-wall” in an effort to convert plastic into euro only to find that they couldn’t possibly do something so complex on the cusp of closing for lunch. What was a man to do? Of course we were all presuming that a debit card would not be accepted at either Roberto’s General Store or the Greengrocer’s roving veggie van. After all Roberto’s was the only shop left in Christendom where you took a list of items you wanted and you stood at the counter while Roberta did a continual revolving trek around the store gathering together the items on the list and bundling them into bags ready for you to carry them home. I haven’t seen that

method of service since Nana took me to Eudunda Farmers in the main street of our home town back in the very early 1950s. The highlight of those shopping sprees was watching the aeronautical display when people paid. The counter assistant would bundle up the cash payment with the list and the cash receipt for purchases into a brass container the size of a large coffee cup which was attached to a cable that ran uphill to the cashier mounted up in the toft – a sort of flying fox for cash. Your change would come back the same way, on the flying fox. Now Roberto didn’t even have a flying fox – nor a cassa suspended from the ceiling – so I was quite hesitant about asking if my Ozzie debit card would be an acceptable method of payment for goods, whereupon I was not only surprised but quite sure I had misread his positive response. In six years of going to his store I had never witnessed a card transaction. Everyone put their hard cash (most transactions were for minor amounts paid for in coin) in a bright blue glass “whack your cash here” receptacle near the hand cranked cash register. My spirits lifted when Roberto took possession of my card and marched out to the entrata, put his hand on some contraption attached to the wall between the fridge and the door and manipulated it a bit then he snuck across to the farina shelf, moved a few items and fossicked for a machine upon which he placed my card, handed me the card with a “Grazie. Buona giornata” which is the locals’ way of saying “It’s all good. Thanks for your patronage and have a bloody good day”. Buoyed by my experience with Roberto I thought I would go for broke. I would try the same trick with the Greengrocer. Yes, he had a modern van but that was the extent of his conversion from his father and grandfather and their father and grandfathers who had established the business of taking vegies and fruit to the little hamlet high on the steepest hill in the district on the tray of a horse drawn open wagon. These businesses are two thousand years old! They date from the time that Julius Caesar’s uncles and aunts had run a farm at the foot of the same hill! I might have been pushing my luck a tad but, undaunted, I summoned up the courage to beg the question of whether my Macquarie debit card was good for payments for a couple of patate, due lemoni and a couple of carote. Like Roberto he had no hesitation in indicating “Si” and, stiffen my snorkel, he took my Mac card, flashed it up against something that looked a bit like an old daggy mobile phone located behind the scales on the top shelf, handed me back my card with “Grazie. Buona giornata” but followed very closely with “Aspetta, aspetta” whereupon I waited – while, having paid my 2 euro 30 cents for my vegies with an international debit card with foreign exchange rate appliable, I had overlooked the traditional sconto. The grocer gives every customer an undisclosed offerta – a bonus, usually a carrot and a stick of celery. I showed my appreciation accordingly and took my leave. Living in the Italian paese, and especially in a tiny medieval village, has its surprises on a daily basis. You often run around a bit sorting out how best to achieve an objective but in the end you get blown away with the elation that comes with getting the right result at the end of the day. You usually get a lot more than you were expecting and things happen in a quite unanticipated manner and you are continually amazed at the variety of ways that a job can be accomplished. Sometimes the mechanisms are well hidden, sometimes they take a quite strange way but they always get done. No-one ever goes home disappointed, or broke.