Italian Ways: What is Indecent?

Italians…! They can be as colorful as their flag: go from afiery furious  red to acheerful flirty green, to a plain cordial diplomatic white. Incidentally, it does not matter if you were not born in Rome or in Italy, it does not matter if your ethnicity shouts out loud and undoubtedly that you are not Italian. As long as you speak it (and act it), you can play the Italian way.

1. Indecent dress. As you may have realized, I went twice to Trinita dei Monti. Not because I liked it that much, although it is no doubt gorgeous, but because the first time I was banned from entering. Why? My shoulders were bare. I was stopped by a black guy who even if I covered my shoulders with my oversized purse and shopping bags, and told him that that morning I had been in three other churches previously, he insisted in his “no”. “Go downstairs and buy a foulard.” Sure, downstairs they were selling polyester foulards –other black men- for the price that I would buy a silk foulard. Maybe it is not that he was jealous of his job, but that he had some perfect business with the street sellers….!? Funny dress code: Asian women in micro-skirts and hot-pants on top of their tights were OK to get into churches. But the aberrant skin of my shoulders was showing in this ankle-long flowing dress and I was indecent, unacceptable.

Trinita dei Monti by sunset.

Trinita dei Monti inside.

2. Indecent behavior. I went into one of the many shoe-shops with everything on sale. A pair of light, stunning flip-flops looked like the perfect replacement for that other pair I have about to collapse. Particularly when the price tag was €10! However, when I go to pay, it had raised to €15. “But I saw the huge price tag that said 10!” “Signora, it is 15, see?”, said the Chinese girl, in her very much “a-la-Chinese” Italian, and too much of an Italian attitude. To my surprise, when I turned my head to see where the cashier was pointing at, it said 15. Had my faultless visual memory collapsed? Was I so exhausted? When I walked towards the sign in disbelief, I see that it had been turned around: when getting closer, you could see-through the 10. So I showed it to the cashier: “See, it was turned around. And now someone came and flipped it again.” If this would have happened in the US, they would have apologized and respected the price I had seen. However, this Chinese woman lashed out in sheer insolence and running out of patience: “Signora, you are not forced to buy them. The price is 15. You take them or not?!?” “Scuzzi” and “Me Dispiace” are words she had failed in her Italian lessons.