Elevator Philosophy (Esprit de l'Ascenseur?)

“Media terrorism”: Winter red alert! It might get cold! –Nicola Bucci

My husband and I took a stroll the other day to the Palazzo Merulana, a new museum housing the Cerasi family’s collection of  Fascist-period Italian art. We entered the elevator along with a well-dressed Italian who pressed “2.” We then pressed “4,” on the chance the museum might have installed a modern elevator, the kind that can keep several destinations in its brain at once. The commoner old-fashioned Italian kind, such as the rickety cage that carries us up the five floors to our own apartment, has to be spoon-fed one stop at a time.

Neither: the elevator flew past the second story, and headed straight for the fourth. An unprecedented variation on the theme of Italian collective transport. All three of us commented with amusement, but our elevatormate took it one step further with a touch of philosophical fantasy, turning the elevator buttons into a microcosm of Italian life: “That’s what life is always like in Italy. He who speaks last wins the argument.”

After viewing a hundred paintings and sculptures, many interesting and some beautiful, I was obliged to hunt down their well-hidden bathroom. On the way in I rubbed shoulders with an Italian lady of a certain age who forewarned: “It’s not very clean” (an understatement). She added, to forestall any suspicions, “I didn’t touch anything.” But, this being Italy, she too felt that wasn’t enough, and added, “We Italians still haven’t reached a level worthy of being called civilization.”

My adoptive countryfolk always rise to one more level of generalization and one more degree of flair. And they never miss a chance to acknowledge – and mock with resigned affection – their own national foibles. Nicola Bucci, a political cartoonist, is a particular genius at putting the brilliant Italian mix of invention and provincialism into captioned images. Now my fellow art-lovers had offered up two strikes in one hour…

Strike three was awaiting me at home, in the form of a friend’s Facebook post about the latest Roman scandal. In 2011 a landowner had paid off a €55,000,000 debt to City Hall by handing over, it was reported at the time, 200 kilometers of precious nickel wire packed into a bundle. This treasure has been sitting in a vault in City Hall ever since, under the watchful 24/7 gaze of armed guards hired for the task. Until a few months ago when city officials, tipped off about a fraud by the same characters in northern Italy, opened the vault and determined that whatever it is that’s rolled up in that stash it’s worth nowhere near what was claimed – maybe €20,000 at the most. Less, I’d guess, than what they’ve been paying every month to those rent-a-cops.

The heights of fantasy in the depths of financial scams. I love Italy.

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