Essay on Italy

Italy punishes the anxious traveler and rewards the dawdler. That's why it is my favorite country in the world.

If you are an anxious, coffee-nerves-addled hype-case, cross southward through the Alps at your own risk. Your American, give-it-to-me-now mindset will run smack into empty hotel desks, shops inexplicably closed in the middle of the day and phones that ring dozens of times with no answer.

Invariably, when you get someplace, the only person who can help you is not there and won't be back for an hour, maybe two.

The Italian attitude is if it's not broken don't fix it. And if it s broken don't fix it.

Everything closes from about noon to 3 p.m. on weekdays. From Saturday noon to Monday afternoon, too.

This brazen disregard for schedules can get on my Nordic nerves. On one trip, I had spent 10 days amid the rigid order of Germany and Austria when one glorious afternoon I boarded a train and chugged through the Brenner pass into Italy. Stepping out of the train into the ramshackle confines of the train station in Bolzano, I was immersed in the chaos of Italy. There was a taxi stand but no taxis. A public telephone that buzzed and clanged but gave no dial tone.

I walked to the nearby Avis office where I was scheduled - There's that word - to pick up my little Fiat at 2 p.m. sharp.

The door was locked, the blinds were pulled and with a little help from a guidebook translation, I made out a handwritten sign saying the office was closed fur lunch until 3 p.m. an hour later.

I walked across the street to a restaurant, but the waiter told me I couldn't be served because it was past 2 p.m. and lunch was over. Somewhere between 2 and 3 was an inexplicable black hole. Lunch was on. Lunch was over. Time stood still.

I sat on a park bench underneath a tree rich with autumn golds and russet browns and dozed.

When I finally got my car, I headed into the Dolomites to the village of Suisi. The sign outside the tourist office said "cambio" - Italian for a money exchange. I wanted to cash in my Austrian schillns for Italian lire.

But the sleepy-eyed woman behind the counter said then no longer changed money because the back across the square had a new automatic cash-changing machine.

Which, of course, was broken.

By the time I walked back across the street, the information office was closed for lunch, which runs about 2 hours in small Italian towns.

On the following Sunday, I dropped off the car and took a train to Verona. At my hotel, I asked for directions to the nearest coin-operated laundry.

No such thing, I was told. It would drive the local family laundries of business. OK, where are the family laundries? They're all closed - after all, it is Sunday and the owners need to be with their children. Next stop: Rome. I joined a huge crowd lined up at a dozen ticket windows at the main train station. As the giant clocked overhead ticked to noon, one by one the windows closed until the crowd snaked around the sole clerk who wasn't off to lunch. Pasta waits for no one.

Wherever you are in Italy, hotels are always an adventure. When you step into a small German on English hotel, the desk person is behind the counter, looking efficient if not exactly exuding warmth. Many times as not, enter a small Italian hotel and the staff is in the back laughing and flirting - oblivious to your needs in the midst of a party you wish you could join.

When you do get to your room, it's often memorable - for the wrong reasons. Old Italian hotels have had their interiors carved and recurred. I've had the oblong room. The room with the three-foot hump in the middle. The room with a toilet but not a sink. The room where the entrance hall doubled as the coat rack for the hotel bar. The room with the shower and toilet next to each other and no wall so that everything gets soaked during the morning bathing.

To us box-shaped-hotel-room-loving, wristwatch-watching Americans, all this can be infuriating. Why can't the Italians be more like us? Why can't they understand that we are busy people with planes to catch, baggage to check, museums to see, meals to eat quickly, people to telephone?

But Italy won't let us. We are coerced - no, forced - to lie in a cafe or take a nap. We experience the horror of wine with lunch or a hotel room where the only thing to watch is the view out the window, or we negotiate purchases not with an efficient, servile clerk but with a rambling proprietor in the midst of an animated argument with his wife.

Then somewhere in the middle of an afternoon after a couple of glasses of Chianti, the truth flows to the brain. Maybe the Italian's shouldn't be more like us. Maybe we should be more like the Italians.

Go home for lunch. Put family before our jobs. Take a nap. Close the shop a little early. Play hooky.

After two weeks in Italy, it's hard to go back. Back to 9-to-6, bumper-to-bumper traffic, beepers, cell phones, memos. No more naps. No more tiny rooms without a telephone. When boarding your flight, think of Giuseppe Verdi, the opera bard of Italy.

"You may have the universe if I may have Italy."