Rings and other things
Back and forth on the Substack experiment
Saluti a tutti - I am back. I keep starting and not finishing posts. I want them to be good, but they seem half-cooked, left-field, oddball, cross-current. They languish in draft. They go nowhere.
I read the other pieces on Substack. I think I follow too many people. There are some people around here who seem insanely successful. I do not feel insanely successful. But in general the Substack tone feels shrill to me. Did my algorithm at some point skew shrill? I don’t know. I don’t want to either listen to shrill or be shrill.
I heard a flip coinage recently regarding social media and the “industrial outrage complex” and this seems on point. How much advertising will our outrage sell? A cottage industry has grown up around people who are nonstop stateside news watchers. This cottage industry positions itself to help people who watch too much news. The antidote for watching too much news, you might think, is to watch less news. But no. The antidote, in this case, is to pay a subscription to learn more about the news you are watching. I feel crazy even typing and reading this.
We’ve been away for a long time. Just two full years in the US out of the last almost fifteen years. We didn’t leave for political reasons, but people often ask us if we did. Or they don’t even ask, they assume. How to explain to new acquaintances a lifetime of language and travel and cultural deep cover?
The radio signals are intermittent in some ways. In other ways I do feel sufficiently informed. I unsubscribed to most of my paid news outlets late last year. I need to subscribe to local news. I am very lazy about reading Italian news. I get a lot of Italian news via Instagram. The mayor of Florence is a woman who has a very good social media team. I recognized her in town yesterday after seeing her every day on Instagram. I wanted to shout Ciao, sindaca but suddenly felt shy. She wasn’t even with an entourage or anything. It was just her and an aide talking to some business owners on Via dei Brunelleschi. After I passed her very fast on my bike, I wished I’d stopped and asked her why I can’t get a ZTL that allows me to keep my car in Firenze centro, but then I was glad I didn’t because all people do in this town is complain to the mayor and others. The amount of complaining is shocking.
My priest and I discuss the amount of complaining in town at the same time as we complain about different things. We take it lightly and laugh it off. My priest is a broadminded, kindhearted person, and I am grateful for that. We talk about the news in the US and the radio signals and what it feels like to live in Tuscany while watching things from afar. I feel well informed. I no longer need to read the news app on my phone for four hours a day to feel informed. I read various Substacks, and The New Yorker, and the BBC. I read all the major Italian headlines until the paywall stops me: Corriere della Sera, La Nazione, La Repubblica.
Jason keeps a subscription to La Repubblica but I don’t. What a sham to read La Repubblica when my Italian struggles to break the glass ceiling from B2 to C1. I suppose if I read La Repubblica every day as much as I read Substacks, and The New Yorker, and the BBC, I would smash through the glass ceiling and be skating all over C1 Italian language proficiency in no time. I sometimes fear that La Repubblica does not want to sell a subscription to an American reader with subpar Italian, that I am an embarrassment, but then I realize that’s crazy talk because La Repubblica would be very happy to sell any subscription to anyone. The father of one of Eleanor’s best and oldest school friends is a senior news reporter for La Repubblica. I feel like I am letting down senior news reporters and everyone else by not subscribing to La Repubblica. I try to not tell him that my Italian is not good enough to fully understand the articles. But my spoken Italian is so abysmal he suspects as much anyway. When I scan the free headlines, there is too much news about San Remo. I understand most of the words but have little context for what they’re talking about.
I just learned that the famous San Remo cuoroncini are, in fact, heart emojis, or throwaway hearts, or, as Eleanor told me this morning making a very unchildish and repetitive air-thrusting motion in the kitchen, these. Mommy, she said, certain cuoroncini can lead to new babies. Aren’t all babies new? I stupidly asked. She considered this a moment and said, but some babies are really new. I suppose that a really, really new baby is the sort of baby who was made when the unsuspecting future parents were listing to San Remo 2025 and understanding all the gossip about the contestants. San Remo makes me think of The Talented Mr. Ripley when Dickie takes Tom to San Remo and it is all jazz. Now that is a San Remo I could get into.
Q: Is there a version of Italy without Italian bureaucrazy? A: Not if you stay longer than a month and the tourist sheen wears off you and you’re no longer simply being squeezed to extrude money into the economy. I need to pay the Agenzia dell’Entrate four euros for the electronic invoices I issued in Q4 of 2024. I am supposed to do this on my Italian banking app on my phone, or on the bank’s website. But when I go to the form on the app, the software won’t let me proceed because there is no provincia listed for my country of birth, Barbados. The field is required, but is locked, so I cannot edit it, and what do they care about the provinces of Barbados, anyway? Now I will have to pay my commercialista and his staff a fine sum to submit the four euro payment for me. This happens every time I have to make a payment to the Agenzia dell’Entrate.
In a similar way, my optometrist’s software never realizes that I am not a tourist and rejects my codice fiscale even though I have had it for years now. Now I feel like I, too, need to get on Instagram and complaint to the mayor of Florence in the comments section about each of these relative inconveniences. I will make sure to tag the mayor and address her in the familiar tu form (te in Florence, and I will be sure to complain about that too because it is counterintutive as hell for someone who has taken years and years of Spanish, French, and Latin, where the te form stays firmly in the correct category for its syntactic part of speech). While I am busy commenting on my minor struggles, I will take time to mock all her other solutions for the many problems besetting this blessed little city.
The mother of one of Victor’s classmates is a British woman who works on the Ponte Vecchio. I see her from time to time for coffee. She has two new kittens who look like hovering grey rainclouds with matching yellow suns for eyes. Two clouds four suns. Salon full of her art. Somehow we started talking last coffee about my old engagement ring and the diamond that popped out of it, lost forever, replaced by a sapphire, which popped out later. The estate Liberty ring we purchased to replace the engagement ring, but it was loose and I was terrified of losing it in Florence. I could just imagine it rolling between the flagstones and down a sewer drain. Maybe I would complain to the mayor of Florence about that too. Maybe I would just hear its faintest metallic ting and panic, not seeing a flash anywhere. I had another ring also too large to wear, but charming enough with its sparkling color. This is the life of a woman with a size 5 ring finger, practically child-sized. I am sure Margaret of Beaufort wore a ring as tiny when she was wed at 11 to the mother of Henry VII. Listen, the friend said, stopping me. Stop by my shop. I will help you get these all sorted. Really? I said. Maybe I would comment on the mayor’s Instagram account with this information to let her know that generous people do in fact exist.
So over the course of a couple of weeks I gathered my too-large and broken rings, throwing in the bent claddagh band for good measure. In the meantime, Jason either misplaced or lost his wedding band. Great, I thought, I now have a reason to go and buy something new too so her shop doesn’t get annoyed thinking I am coming in getting service for cheap without becoming a customer. Che brutta figura! She works in a dazzling shop, one of twelve owned by the same person. I did some quick math on their daily receipts. Shops are doing well. I tipped my bags of broken and too-big rings onto the baize board where we picked through them like two blonde magpies. Gazzaladre! I also selected a new wedding band for Jason in white gold, remembering his size (7) because it’s the same as my middle finger. Before he lost his bands I would sometimes wear them for fun, or out of spite, because I felt frustrated that he wore his ring inconsistently. I spied a shiny little bracelet for Eleanor and threw that in the sale too.
The friend said, we’re going to the workshop, and led me across the wet stones of the bridge (raining for days here). We slipped into a minute passage to the left of the bust of Cellini, up a narrow stone staircase and into a workshop aerie where two tidy men worked in leather aprons. It was quiet and very warm in the workshop. I had arrived at the sanctum sanctorum of the molten tourist core of Firenze. The jewelers greeted us warmly, looking up from their loupes. The friend quickly took them through each ring. I looked around at the view, the instruments, the massive heart-shaped gem that the bigger, quieter man was fitting into a setting. It looked like something JLo would wear. The friend said that I was her cousin. I felt awkward about this. But otherwise, she said, they would not do it, and they are magicians. They rattled off some very affordable numbers for the work at hand and said for us to come back in an hour. I popped out to the shops to purchase chocolate and Valentines for Jason and the kids.
I returned to the shop and they had sized both rings, and straightened and cleaned the claddagh ring. Nice champagne diamond you got there, they nodded. And what I called “the blue ring”? Apparently the topaz needed to be rotated. I didn’t even know it was real. White gold, they said, with diamonds, and three nice topazzi there. The quiet jeweler looked up. I’m working an aquamarine right now, he said, nimble with his pliers, and that is a topazzo. Quiet Jeweler said that resetting the sapphire would take time. I said that was fine. I said the sapphire was my birthstone and the topaz was my husband’s birth stone. I put on all the rings (safest place for them, the friend said). They complimented my Italian and said I spoke more Italian than they had expected. I might have blushed but it was very warm up there. I thanked them profusely. The magicians seemed grateful for the visit. The crowds of tourists and pickpockets spilled across the bridge in both directions. The friend took me back to the shop to complete the purchases for Jason and Eleanor. I winked at Cellini.A shopkeeper leaning out of her storefront quickly looked at my sparkling fingers. For a moment I felt like a proper matron, and not a late bloomer with broken rings.
Jason and Eleanor and Victor in the end loved their fine jewelry and cards and scads of Lindt chocolate. I’m pleased Jason now has a wedding ring, an anello di fidei, from the Porta Rossa. Gianni Schacchi, here we come. The rain seems to be letting up. No one is sick. We go to Torino tomorrow for a family excursion. I’ll make sure to let the mayor know that I have no further complaints for the moment.
Thanks for the little trip into your world!