Tragic Tales of Gelato
Jul. 9th, 2011 08:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa yesterday. You guys, you guys, it's totally pulled itself up by its boostraps and stopped leaning!
(Everyone asks: "You went to the Leaning Tower? Still leaning?" Why no. No, suddenly skyhooks descended and pulled that slovely tower up straight.)
Also I had the world's BEST cookie: two layers of almond shortbread with sweet, tart orange marmalade in the middle, the whole studded with slivered almonds. BEST. COOKIE. EVER!
Also on the food front: I tried to eat a medium-sized gelato last night. The eating part went fine, but it couldn't keep pace with the melting, so my delicious chocolate gelato dribbled all over my hands. I felt like a five-year-old.
However, this was not as horrifying as the time I tried a gelato-waffle sandwich. Hot waffle! Cold gelato! Terrible alchemy! It dripped on my hands, smeared over my wrists, and was making for my elbows when, with a wail of despair, I chucked it into the trash beneath the Palazzo Vecchio.
And finally, as part of my quest to read the classics of the nations that I visit, I'm reading The Adventures of Pinocchio. (I should be reading Dante's Inferno but the number of translations overwhelmed me.) Pinocchio solves most of his problems by crying vigorously at them. Perhaps we are too hard on nineteenth-century heroines; clearly weeping your way to victory was a dual gender activity.
(Everyone asks: "You went to the Leaning Tower? Still leaning?" Why no. No, suddenly skyhooks descended and pulled that slovely tower up straight.)
Also I had the world's BEST cookie: two layers of almond shortbread with sweet, tart orange marmalade in the middle, the whole studded with slivered almonds. BEST. COOKIE. EVER!
Also on the food front: I tried to eat a medium-sized gelato last night. The eating part went fine, but it couldn't keep pace with the melting, so my delicious chocolate gelato dribbled all over my hands. I felt like a five-year-old.
However, this was not as horrifying as the time I tried a gelato-waffle sandwich. Hot waffle! Cold gelato! Terrible alchemy! It dripped on my hands, smeared over my wrists, and was making for my elbows when, with a wail of despair, I chucked it into the trash beneath the Palazzo Vecchio.
And finally, as part of my quest to read the classics of the nations that I visit, I'm reading The Adventures of Pinocchio. (I should be reading Dante's Inferno but the number of translations overwhelmed me.) Pinocchio solves most of his problems by crying vigorously at them. Perhaps we are too hard on nineteenth-century heroines; clearly weeping your way to victory was a dual gender activity.
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no subject
Date: 2011-07-09 08:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-09 11:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-10 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-09 12:54 pm (UTC)The national weeping association should make that its slogan.
I think Victorian grown-ups were just so removed from children (I mean the upper-crusty ones who had nursemaids and tutors and governesses to handle any actual interaction with the fruit of their loins) that they just had this impression that they CRIED all the time and got their clothes DIRTY all the time and were in the WAY... so when they created children characters, that's what they described.
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Date: 2011-07-09 06:04 pm (UTC)The really Victorian obsession (...if something Italian can be said to be Victorian? hmmm) in Pinocchio is all the stuff about obedience: Pinocchio disobeys everyone, learns his lesson, and then disobeys again and suffers more just in case the kiddies haven't got the point yet.
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Date: 2011-07-09 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-09 06:00 pm (UTC)