Getting Local

What a film that’s set in Scotland has in common with Italy

This stretch of Scottish coastline was one film location for Local Hero. Image from the UK Beach Guide.

Cari amici,

Nope, it’s not Wednesday, but here I am again, eager to tell you about the mental through-line I’ve made between the 1983 film Local Hero, which I re-watched recently (being in the mood to drool over Scotland’s scenic coastline), and life here in Italy.

Before I do that, I’d like to thank those of you who have pledged to support Italicus if paid subscriptions become an option. (Substack sneaked that one in; I didn’t know pledging was a thing until the first one came in! I’d thank you individually, but that doesn’t seem to be an option.) Anyway, each one of you subscribers means more to me than you probably know, and I’m happy and grateful that so many of you like what I’m writing.

Now, on to Local Hero. I remembered it only vaguely and I was curious to see what, exactly, I’d forgotten. Pretty much everything, as it turned out, except the basic premise—a rapacious oil company’s greed and environmental blindness lead to an attempt to destroy a good chunk of Scotland’s ecosystem, with zero regard for the place and its people. Along with having my memory cells awakened, I extracted something from the film that I can say with certainty I wouldn’t have seen before—before I moved to Italy, before I got to a certain point of awareness about life here, about the people I’m distilled from. It has to do with preconceptions and expectations and ignorance.

What follows next qualifies as a spoiler, so heads-up if you haven’t seen Local Hero. But you’ve probably heard enough about the film to know that things don’t go exactly as planned for Knox Oil.

As happens in all good stories, the plot twists arise as a result of changes in the key characters (in this case, Mac and his boss Happer). They discover that their perceptions of this swath of Scottish coastline and the people who inhabit it were off base, that they had made assumptions that were far from the truth. (In a clever and pointed counterpoint, the realistic people, the ones who see things as they are and act accordingly, are the supposedly ignorant, unsophisticated locals.)

Mac is an up-and-coming oil exec in Houston who’s sent to the fishing village of Ferness to buy out the residents. He has no interest in the place or the people, no qualms about destroying a coastline to deliver oil to clamoring countries and money into his company’s pockets (and his own). Naturally, since he’s the protagonist, the story hinges around his change of heart, his questioning of his assumptions, expectations, and morals. Actually, though, everyone in Mac’s oil-fueled circle changes. Seeing the skies transformed by the northern lights, accepting the possibility of mer-women, realizing that a beach has value that can’t be measured, the characters come to understand the value of nature itself. They change in ways they could never have expected.

What’s that got to do with Italy? For those of us who moved here, there’s a clear parallel—we don’t really know what we’re getting into until we’ve been here for a while. We don’t understand the full value of the experience because it’s found in things we didn’t know existed and experiences that can take years to discover.

Often, what we think we know about a place comes from the internet and its glossy, superficial “articles” on life in Italy, so shallow they might as well be Facebook posts—what to expect, where to go, don’t-miss sights. “Articles” that omit any discussion of the rules of travel or immigration, fail to mention that la dolce vita is largely an advertising trope. And it’s easy to latch onto those positives, because we want them to be true. We seek out the posts and videos that say what we want to hear. It’s understandable; we’re all guilty of confirmation bias in one way or another.

I see plenty of this in expat groups—people announce that they’re moving to Italy (“in two weeks! I can’t wait!”) and ask what they need to know, apparently unaware that living legally in Italy requires either citizenship or a visa. (And these days, a few months of study of beginner-level Italian doesn’t usually qualify.) It’s clear from what these folks are saying that they have neither citizenship nor a visa, but they’ve seen movies that gloss over such details, leading gullible people to think they can come to Italy as a tourist and just stay, like Frances did in Under the Tuscan Sun. “I can’t go back,” she said, and promptly bought a diamond-in-the-rough house and became instant besties with the locals. It’s called poetic license—I mean, the movie would stall and die if Frances had to go home because she couldn’t get a work visa (yes, you need one even if you’re self-employed), or if her neighbors wanted nothing to do with this straniera (foreigner), or if her contractors fleeced her or took years to renovate her house.

I’m thinking about all this because I’m recently back from a few days’ visit with friends, an American and her Italian partner, who live in Bracciano, a small town north of Rome. As my American friend and I talked about our lives here in Italy, I realized how little either of us understood, as newbie immigrants, what we were getting into. That isn’t a bad thing if you’re eager to adapt and learn—and if you’re willing to accept that Italy’s imperfections are different from America’s. Fortunately, my friend and I were eager and willing. (I, at least, had made some pretty stupid pre-move assumptions.) We have very different immigration stories, but what we have in common is an understanding that we would have to shed some of our American-ness, redefine our expectations of life as immigrants.

What’s bad is when people don’t do any homework at all and come here thinking Italy is eternally warm and sunny, everyone sits around drinking coffee and wine and spritzes, and no one works hard or has to argue with utility companies or the grumpy clerk at the post office. Or they’ve done their homework but—despite all the advice they’ve gotten and the cold hard facts about life here that are staring them in the face—they still expect to find America. And when they don’t find it, they blame Italy for their unhappiness. They decide they don’t like Italy after all.

And that’s also not a bad thing—if those people go back home, that is, because honestly they’ll be much happier coming here as tourists. But if they stay and never let go of their unrealistic expectations, they will never experience the real Italy. They won’t do what Mac did when he went to Scotland and found his perspective changed. Sure, it took a while for Scotland to win him over, but in the end it did. He opened his eyes, began to long for things he didn’t know he wanted: a slower life, one less focused on the incessant need to make a buck, on the status symbol of overwork. A life in which he could stand by the sea and stare at the sky.

People come to Italy for lots of reasons, though the climate, food, art, and pace of living tend to top the list. I’m not one to say that immigrants or travelers who want to find the “real” Italy should focus on small towns and avoid the capitals of over-tourism—Roma, Firenze, and Venezia, with all their riches, are worth every minute you can spare for them. No matter where you are in Italy, from cosmopolitan cities like Torino and Milano to the most remote mountain villages, you can find the real Italy if you look hard enough.

Because the real Italy is personal, quotidian, often discovered by chance. You can plan a visit to a monument or an art gallery and enjoy what you went there to see, but along the way, or maybe even while you’re there, you can find bits and pieces of Italy that make it yours. Things like the Fontana dei Libri (Fountain of the Books) in Rome, tucked away off Corso del Rinascimento and invisible to the hordes beelining to the Pantheon or Piazza Navona. Or little delights like the cat sculpture perched high on a cornice overlooking Via della Gatta, also in Rome.

Things like asking a shopkeeper in Perugia about blueberry tea and ending up talking about a Michelin-star restaurant in the tiny Tuscan town of Monticchiello. (Ristorante Daria, if you’re interested.) Things like the divine lemon marmalata at La Morella, a fraschetta in Bracciano, served with a selection of cheeses and not offered for sale in any obvious way—but ask for it and you’ll get a prettily packaged jar with a handwritten label, plus the name of the local woman who makes it. Like the conversations you have with restaurant owners, taxi drivers, locals waiting for the bus, or those bored-looking security people sitting in museums who come alive, in full tour-guide mode, when you ask them questions about the art or history of the places they’re guarding.

Fontana dei Libri and Via della Gatta, Roma. Photos © Cheryl A. Ossola

You have to seek, look, observe, but most of all refuse to take Italy at face value. Please, go see that famous art, those mind-boggling cathedrals, those famous staircases and fountains. Drink that cappuccino, eat gelato twice a day, overindulge in local cheeses and wines, pizza and pasta. It’s all good. Be a stupefied tourist, even if you live here.

But while you’re doing all that, slow down. Let Italy seep under your skin. Let this country—delightful, warm in spirit, rich in beauty and history, maddening, exasperating, unpredictable—change who you are, how you see the world. Then you won’t be like those wannabe expats or grumpy tourists who look for their home country wherever they go. Then you won’t be like Mac, newly arrived in Scotland and blind to the country and its people. Instead you’ll be like Mac after he’s seen the northern lights—forever changed and dreaming, back in Houston, of that isolated beach in Scotland, of who he might become.

Alla prossima,

Cheryl

© 2023 Cheryl A. Ossola

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Book of the week:

• Fleeting Rome: In Search of la Dolce Vita by Carlo Levi

Poem of the week:

• “Luing” by Don Paterson