Eat, Pray, Love

mind. The Mafia has been the only successful business in Sicily for centuries (running the
business of protecting citizens from itself), and it still keeps its hand down everybody’s pants.
Palermo—a city Goethe once claimed was possessed of an impossible-to-describe
beauty—may now be the only city in Western Europe where you can still find yourself picking
your steps through World War II rubble, just to give a sense of development here. The town
has been systematically uglified beyond description by the hideous and unsafe apartment
blocks the Mafia constructed in the 1980s as money-laundering operations. I asked one Sicili-
an if those buildings were made from cheap concrete and he said, “Oh, no—this is very ex-
pensive concrete. In each batch, there are a few bodies of people who were killed by the
Mafia, and that costs money. But it does make the concrete stronger to be reinforced with all
those bones and teeth.”
In such an environment, is it maybe a little shallow to be thinking only about your next
wonderful meal? Or is it perhaps the best you can do, given the harder realities? Luigi Barzini,
in his 1964 masterwork The Italians (written when he’d finally grown tired of foreigners writing
about Italy and either loving it or hating it too much) tried to set the record straight on his own
culture. He tried to answer the question of why the Italians have produced the greatest artist-
ic, political and scientific minds of the ages, but have still never become a major world power.
Why are they the planet’s masters of verbal diplomacy, but still so inept at home government?
Why are they so individually valiant, yet so collectively unsuccessful as an army? How can
they be such shrewd merchants on the personal level, yet such inefficient capitalists as a na-
tion?
His answers to these questions are more complex than I can fairly encapsulate here, but
have much to do with a sad Italian history of corruption by local leaders and exploitation by
foreign dominators, all of which has generally led Italians to draw the seemingly accurate con-
clusion that nobody and nothing in this world can be trusted. Because the world is so corrup-
ted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experi-
ence with one’s own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in
Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, pres-
idents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains of industry, but will never tol-
erate incompetent “opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors,
cooks, tailors.. .” In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can
be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And
sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.
To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious busi-
ness—not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding
on to the real when everything else is flaking away into... rhetoric and plot. Not too long ago,