Coraggio, Amore

Italy is a boot-shaped restricted zone, you cant get in, you cant get out. The country suffering the most under Covid-19 feels like someone smashing a golden little pearl with a brutal big biker boot. It’s not fair. Italians being locked down takes the vivid and welcoming mood that is connected with Italy, it feels like it is being punished by an external power, for no reason, just to be mean. I miss it a lot, and even if I wanted to go there now (what I do), I couldn’t. So I made a little guide to survive the time until we can go back, in case you miss it, too.

Italy, I miss you – Survival Guide

Watch an almost touchable Italian summer

There are a lot of Italian-classics in the movie section, but my favorite for ever is Call Me By Your Name, by Luca Guadignio, which follows me since I first watched it, as soundtrack through my life. It made me fall in love with Italy, the country I had lived in before, on a whole new level and all I wanted ever since is living in summer 1983, somewhere in northern Italy.  The movie creates an extreme longing in me for being in Italy, even more than for having a dramatic love affair. The cast, the scenery, the costume, the music, the story – it all fits so incredibly well together. The friendship-bracelet and the black Casio watch on Elio’s wrist, the apricot trees in the spacious, park like garden, the noticeable, heavy heat of summer – you know how it smells inside the old Italian villa, want to spend time with Elio and Oliver at the river and drive with a bike through the little summer-empty city Crema. I get so touched by this movie, I can only watch it again when I find myself in Italy, otherwise I would miss it just too much.

Italian summer feels, represented by pastel colored towels

La discoteca

Listen to some soft Italo pop and pretend you’re moving on a little dance floor in an open air discoteca in a small Italian town during a hot summer night in August, the eternal-summer month. Start with Cristina Quesada, who has the most gentle voice and end with Valerie Dore, who takes you back to the 80’s – what a good decade to live in. Then change to Latleta, and sing a bit with him in Italian. When you close your eyes, you might almost forget you’re dancing pale and disillusioned in your stay-home leggings between closet and bed. 

Guardare attraverso le finestre

The Instagram account @Italysegreta usually works as an Italia guide with recommendations for each region and provides you with really beautiful Italian landscapes and pasta plates. Now, as the country cant be visited, you can visit the channel for aesthetically pleasing Italian news in their stories, where they share the isolation handling of the people, singing on their balconies (it’s absolutely not pathetic but heartwarming, as it’s Italians), dancing together alone, projecting old Italian movies on each others walls. As well as the outcome of their hashtag-calls #italyfromawindow, with the best views through Italian windows at the moment and #italykeepscooking, with the quarantine dishes the Italians are creating at home and eating on their sunshine-sprinkled terraces with a glass of red wine for lunch. Almost, as if you were there with them. Want Burrata now!

Sei una artista

The Instagram account @milanoartguide usually provides its followers with exhibition information and announcements about vernissages and finissages around to Milan. Now that the Italian capital is standing still, not just museums, all public life has been closed, the Italians stay at home (#iostoacasa). The art guide doesn’t leave it’s audience alone in the Corona-indebted shutdown, but helps to bridge the time in isolation and boredom – with the project “The Coloring Book”. The digital coloring book, curated by Rossella Farinotti, art critic and curator and Gianmaria Biancori, contains black and white drawings by Italian artists, for downloading, printing and coloring. Starting with Maurizio Catellan and his L.O.V.E stature, ending with the artist Luca Trevisan, 42 artists are represented in The Coloring Book with one artwork each. “The artists, whose usual generosity is reinforced by the current situation, provide us with their creativity and give us an intelligent way to spend a few happy hours,” says the website. And a little bit of Italian art for home is sure to be good for everyone: children who stayed at home, isolated grandparents or if the Corona live blog was updated too often – because coloring in is soothing, immensely.

Can you draw feet like Botticelli?

Preparazione per l’estate

Now that you realize how much you miss the country of lemon trees and fior di latte, it’s not a bad idea to practice your Italian, so that you are fully prepared when you go back for Italian estate. Tandem partners might be hard to find at the moment and who does really think the Duolingo-sentences are useful? (lo squalo e nel acqua is not enough). Instead read Italian fashion magazines online and gratis – Vogue Italia and Vanity Fair will be available the next three months, in the Vogue archivio. Like this you can improve your fashion vocabulary, which is always important, and at the same time pretend to already be an Italian person who casually reads some news in the morning sun (balcony) or in bed  (you don’t have a balcony).

Aperitivo a casa 

Aperitivo is the best possible meal-invention and stands for the Italian lifestyle quite precisely. It starts whenever you want, but maybe around 6PM, and ends either never, or when you want to go to dinner or you just leave to a bar right afterwards. You will sit outside, in the best case in the evening sun on a piazzetta with interesting to watch people passing by and a small dog sitting under your chair, have a Campari Spritz and get something small to eat with it –  varies from buffet with pasta and vegetables to small bowls with olives and chips. Worst case it’s only a few cheap chips, but still a good worst case. For the at home version get Spritz-ingredients – white wine or Prosecco, sparkling water and a liquor of your choice – prepare some well arranged snacks of which green olives should be a part of. Serve in the sun, listen to Pino D’Angio, have another drink, enjoy actively!

Granita al limone can be consumed at any time of day and night as well

Mangia!

It could be the time to learn how to cook Italian food which is not Barilla pasta with Barilla pesto. Maybe, but not for me. I’d rather eat it cooked by someone else, so I need to wait a while now and keep myself busy with finding good burrata outside of Italy. You on the other hand can cook soon like an Italian chef, as ‘La Scuola de La Cucina Italiana’ offers free online courses . Me, on the first hand again, I would like to be able to go to Trattoria dell’Orto and have the Ravioli with Mozzarella. Instead I will read this list of all the kinds of pasta that exist.

A tennis-playing orange

Versace vintage silk shirts, a tennis court, some clementines and roman pillars at the swimming pool – this is how I would describe the aesthetic of the French label Casablanca Paris. It looks like a vibrant, rich Italian summer – as multicolored silk shirts, patterned denims and retro print t-shirts. Casablanca describes itself as made to wear between the end of the work day and before going into the night – the golden hour, which, as they say, can be the most decadent time of the day. When you go through the online shop, you will feel like watching Palermo getting ready for la serata or sitting at the beach in Monopoli, biting into a slice of watermelon, I swear.

Sali e Tabacchi

If you want to buy cigarettes in Italy, you need to head to the next Sali e Tabacchi, short, Tabacchi. If in need, you will find there as well lighters, stamps, postcards, maybe chewing gum, maybe a pen, a ticket for the bus. In Florence there’s even one with a small bar inside, for the caffè to your cigarette. Sali e Tabacchi are a typical and only Italian thing, subtle and indispensable. When you enter your Tabacchi  and greet the owner, who knows you as well as you know him, you will have a feeling of being fully arrived. That said, the magazine “Sali e Tabacchi Journal”, provides an unfiltered Italian flair in small details, beach moods and original shots from your favorite country. “Italy behind closed doors” the Instagram account describes itself, you could also say behind the obvious pizza slice in Positano.

Adore adore everywhere

Small habits and details can change your being to an almost Italian lifestyle, so try also these short tips, if you want –

Arrange some fresh lemons at every random place in the house

Hang your bedsheets out the window for drying in the summer heat (lol)

Eat slices of oranges and pretend you just took them out of a Negroni you had at your favorite Aperitivo place

Built a little altar somewhere in you flat. Need: plastic flowers, plastic vases, picture of Santa Maria

Have an Espresso, standing at your kitchen counter and pretend it’s an Italian bar, leave one euro before you get going to the living room

While home officing, listen to Napoli Segreta, and still hate work, but feel a bit better about it 

Greet you flatmates with a some Italian gestures and a confident Buon Giorno!

Buy pistacchio icecream no matter the weather

A presto!