Keeping an Open Mind About Italy

Keeping an Open Mind About Italy
(Why Italy isn’t what you think, and why you should come here anyways)
An expat’s guide to surviving your time abroad

I feel very passionately about describing Italy as she really is, and not as the media usually portrays her. So many times, tourists have told me that they experienced some level of disappointment while visiting here, that things weren’t what they were anticipating. But how can you be expected to do proper research if everything you come across is one giant example of instagram vs. reality? What if I told you that life in Italy isn’t what you think it is, what you’re picturing, or what you’ve been told? I’ll let you in on a little secret, if you promise to keep an open mind…

What not to do

Recently making the rounds on various social media platforms is a young American girl who, like me, moved to Italy without knowing what she was doing. Have you come across her story? Naively, and in record time, she agreed to become an au pair, traveled to Italy, and then, having found the circumstances of her stay unfavorable, escaped into the streets of Milan in the night and caught a flight back home. After posting a multi-part series to her social media accounts documenting her experience and explaining her somewhat uninspired motives for fleeing, the internet gobbled up her content… and then gave this gladiator a nearly unanimous thumbs down. It seems, predictably, that the audience would rather pass judgement and see her cancelled in the arena, than to encourage her to fight to see another day. She should have kept an open mind, they chanted in unison. Perhaps. 

What is it really like to move to Italy? 

I was an immature 19 years old when I first came to Italy by myself. I hope that I didn’t come across as an entitled brat, like the would-be au pair, but fortunately for me, the details from those years have largely faded into my past. You see, facebook had only just been invented and any cringeworthy remarks I might have made dissipated into the air, as is natural and good. Even still, there is evidence that I had no idea what I was in for. 

When I look back at the pictures, I see myself wearing strappy sundresses in chilly early spring, and posing to seem thin, a constant thought in my mind at that time. I hadn’t yet learned to be comfortable in my own skin. I was still becoming an adult and I was very, very far from home. The culture shock was palpable. They don’t tell you how exhausting all the new input is, that the very sights that had enchanted me about Italy would suddenly be a lot to process. I love to eat and what better cuisine than Italian, but there were times I just wanted to eat a familiar meal because I didn’t want to have to think about the new flavors. Along the way, I would grow accustomed to long commutes on overcrowded and unreliable public transportation, as well as dealing with the freefall of working with a contract that did not accurately describe the work I was doing, if I was lucky enough to have a legal contract at all. There would be a flurry of other so-called culture shocks at work, in relationships, at university, and beyond. Mistakes were made, tears were shed, but so were many, many versions of myself.

Would you describe yourself as open-minded? Would others describe you that way? 

I’m now a, possibly still immature, 39 year old. Although I’m not sure when, or how, twenty years have passed and I can assure you that I didn’t get this far because I arrived with an impartial and tolerant attitude. That is simply not realistic. As human beings, we are wired to scaffold, that is, build new knowledge upon existing knowledge. Plus, opening your mind is a process, something that happens during the journey, slowly, with daily practice, like learning to do the splits. If you want to succeed, you have to force yourself to open, just a millimeter more, an iota more than yesterday, one small decision more than last week, one risk more than you’d normally have taken. It is a cumulative operation that requires you to dismantle any and all preconceived notions.

In one capacity or another, I’ve worked in education for the entirety of my career, so I feel qualified to tell you that you’re probably not as open-minded as you think you are. An excellent test of this is to try to accept information that differs from what you thought you knew for a long time. One example that I always give is courtesy of former clients of mine, a lovely Italian-American family, whose recipe for chicken parmesan had been passed down through many generations. When I told them that chicken parmesan was actually an Italian-American dish, and not a traditionally Italian dish, it nearly broke them. I witnessed them go through several stages of grief: there was denial, anger, and even trying to explain it away, but I’m not sure we ever arrived at acceptance. If my family dish wasn’t authentic Italian, then what does that say about me, about who I am? (sounds of minds slamming shut).

Italy’s Big Secret, Revealed

So, am I open minded then? Daily, maybe. Sometimes, mostly. Perhaps by now you’ve arrived at the same conclusion as I have. Being open-minded has a lot less to do with accepting some new external thing, someone different from you, a new culture, some new information… and everything to do with what that new reality brings up about us. That’s right, like most things, life lessons always, peskily, come back to us. We can fight against the idea that, returning to my example above, our Italian heritage doesn’t run as deeply as we thought, OR, we can be proud of a newly discovered, Italian-American identity instead. The choice is ours. But that’s why it’s so hard to live abroad, and so hard to be open minded when we do. It brings up really difficult questions like, am I really so inflexible that I can’t eat something different for breakfast? Am I smart enough to learn a new language? And the big one - am I strong enough to accept that I’m no longer who I thought I was? But that’s exactly why you should come here and experience Italy for yourself, not the postcard version, but the real one. The gorgeous and inherently flawed one. To discover the gorgeous and inherently flawed you. That’s what it’s really like to live in Italy - it’s a constant confrontation with yourself. 

So, what’s the big secret about Italy? It’s that Italy isn’t at all how it’s been portrayed in the media because no one can predict what you’ll experience when you get here. Italy, just like every other place on earth, is both different from what you’re expecting and precisely what YOU make of it. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what the new reality is. It could be as big as adjusting to the culture in a new country or as small as adjusting to the new office culture at a new job. Being open minded isn’t about accepting others, it’s about accepting yourself, and every version of yourself. I guess the key really is keeping an open mind, or at least striving to do so every day. In my experience, this practice eventually leads to the best question and/or conclusion of them all: Isn’t it amazing how we can continue to surprise ourselves, accept ourselves, and hopefully fall in love with ourselves, over and over again?

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for my next entry, about how to stay open minded when managing moving to Italy, culture shock, and other lessons learned abroad.