La Bella Figura: A Good Way to Die Laughing
I’m in the middle of reading Beppe Severgnini’s new “La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind,” and can’t stop laughing. If you’re interested even slightly in Italian logic, you’ve got to pick this up. A sample: “Yet Italy is far from hellish. It’s got too much style. Neither is it heaven, of course, because it’s too unruly. Let’s just say that Italy is an offbeat purgatory, full of proud, tormented souls each of whom is convinced he or she has a hotline to the boss. Italy is the only workshop in the world that can turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis.” I was chuckling before I’d even made it through the Table of Contents: “The Highway, or the Psychopathology of the Stoplight,” “The Hotel, Where Singular People are not Content with a Double Room,” “The Store, the Field of Lost Battles,” and “The Eat-in Kitchen, the Nerve Center of Domestic Counterespionage.” Flashback! I’ll be back when I stop giggling. And to answer your question, yes, of course we want to go back. Duh.
Our buddy from Italy, Steven Chiodini, wrote to share this 1991 “gem” from the Wall Street Journal with us. (Thanks, Steven. Maybe.) “The Cantonese people of south China are legendary for eating anything that moves — and some things that are still moving,” according to the feature, which went on to profile kitchen utensil salesman and restaurateur Zhang Guoxun, who opened what was believed at the time to be “China’s first restaurant dedicated to serving rat.” The feature easily offers our Quote of the Month: “‘I was always eating out, but I got bored with the animals that restaurants offered,’ Mr. Zhang says during an interview over a plate of Black Bean Rat. ‘I wanted to open a restaurant with an affordable exotic animal. Then I was walking home one night and a rat ran across in front of me and gave me this idea.’”
