Culture - What is it?

I have returned from my whirlwind two week trip of Europe!

Cities visited: Barcelona, Milan, Catania, Rome, Venice

I've talked about my time in Barcelona a little bit, but to summarize – I loved the casual atmosphere, the wonderful weather and location, and can't wait to go back again.

I went to Milan for a day and a half, and even that felt a little too long. The main tourist area was the Duomo, which I covered in a few hours. However, I did befriend a local restaurant, and we talked about where I was from (Washington DC, since it's the most recognizable thing from Maryland) in stilted Italian and English. Milan had a strong tourist presence, so people were quite open in trying to speak English with me. However, this changed as I moved to my next location.

I took a 20 hour train ride from Milan to Catania, effectively covering the entire length of Italy. I was in a car with an Italian couple, and neither of us were able to converse. All communication resulted in charades. They seemed quite friendly. In the morning, the train was put on a ferry and we arrived in Messina just after the sun rose. The train wound its way down the Sicilian coastline, passing lemon groves and beaches. It was beautiful. By that point, I was alone in the car, so for the last few hours of my travel, I had my head practically out the window. I caught up with my friends in Catania, and began the second half of my spring break. For the first week, I scraped by with rudimentary Spanish and Italian, and having little plans. I would wake up, point at the map and decide to go wherever my finger landed. The second week, we all had to be a little more accommodating to fit everyones' plans.

Catania was not a big tourist area, so we had to rely on our Italian much more. As the week went by, I definitely picked up some phrases (“Scusi, Grazie, Tutto, Si” etc.). The main struggle for me was to not speak in Spanish, as they are so similar, that I can't separate them in my head. Oh well.

There are a lot of things I could talk about what I did over the week, but one of the most poignant things that will stick with me was when we went to Taormina for a day. You had to take a cable car from the bus station to the beach, and on our return trip up the hill, we were in the car with an Italian family. We were talking amongst ourselves, and the father turns to us and says (paraphrased roughly) “Americans? No culture. You only have McDonalds, Burger King and Coca Cola.”

To be honest, we were so in shock (and his accent took a second to understand) we didn't know what to say. But it really put a sour note on the rest of our stay in Sicily, and little bit of Rome. As rudeness goes, that's possibly one of the most insulting things I've heard. He effectively said “everything you do, have done, or ever will do is stupid and had no value.” On the bus ride home, and whenever we had some down time, my mind would always come back to what he had said.

At first, I felt shaken because when I thought about it, I couldn't figure out if he was right. I mean, he was factually correct, we do have McDonalds, Burger King and Coca Cola. But what was “American” culture? It's such a notoriously diverse country that you can't generalize our culture. I couldn't ascribe what my beliefs and traditions were to a larger scale, so maybe we really don't have an sort of identity that all Americans can agree with. (Man, if only this had happened earlier, I would have had so much to say during that online discussion on culture). As I became more distanced from the conversation, I realized that Italy has adopted quite a lot of American culture. There is a great irony for an Italian to mock the lack of culture in America while wearing a Nike tracksuit. But I still felt that was a petty victory for me, so I continued to reflect deeper. (I'm not getting into the pedantic fact that Americans have “no culture”. By definition, everyone who has grown up in any society has culture at some level). Looking around at the people walking by while we sat in cafes, I noticed that everyone was very similar. The hairstyles, clothes and other obvious external features were uniform. People go to cafes for hours to talk with the locals. With these basic observations, I can almost agree with his poorly-formed thesis. Italy, in contrast to the US, has a very well defined culture. Their traditions are much more prevalent and strongly followed, and therefore by his definition “Italy has culture.”

The diversity of America, and the difficulty in defining American culture is a component of the culture itself! Just amongst my friends I was traveling last week, we all had different tastes in clothes, hair, music, books, religion – pretty much anything that could be put as a subset of culture. Just because the culture is more amorphous or liberally-spread, it doesn't mean that doesn't exist.

To culminate my reassurance that I had some sort of culture (whatever that word means, anyway), I went to meet my friends' uncle in Rome. He lived in Rome for the year studying at the American Academy in Rome. (If you don't know what that is, look it up, read about it, and be amazed).

To be honest, it was one of the most eye-opening things I've seen before. It makes me want to take back all of the times I had described something as “incredible” “amazing” and other superfluous words, so that I could use them now for greater effect. He is a landscape architecture who is able to brush shoulders with poets, composers, musicologists, classicists and many other renowned people of their field. As we sat at lunch, he would talk about his work and who was sitting nearby. I felt as though this was the equivalent of going back to the 1920's and drinking with Fitzgerald, Hemingway and all of the artists of the time. The Academy is an intellectual haven that I hadn't realized could still exist. So sum up, one of the most famous grounds for cultural and intellectual genius to flourish in Rome, the capital of Italy – is American.