Eating Rituals - Turning Tuscan: A Step-by-Step Guide to Going Native - page 59

grande vanilla lattes or venti frappuccinos whenever they damn well please, I was a bit
incredulous. But once we began to pay attention, we did in fact notice that Italians drank
cappuccinos mostly for breakfast and occasionally in the late morning. And no one, abso-
lutely no one, ever drank them after dinner—except for the foreign tourists.
You could challenge the logic behind this rejection of cappuccino after dinner by pointing
to the rich creamy desserts like tiramisu or panna cotta that Italians certainly do eat after
dinner. But that would be to miss the point. The reason no one drinks cappuccino after din-
ner is really because “it's just not done”.
When we compare and contrast the cultures, we realize that, as Americans, we very much
like to make up the rules as we go. We aspire to define our own style and follow our own
inner guidance systems, and we've learned to be generally disdainful of social conformity
in matters large and small.
Many of our images of the human collective, particularly out in the West, have been ap-
propriated from herding and ranching practices. The cowboy and his horse are the solitary
ones who have the intelligence and the upper hand. The sheep and the cattle huddle close
together, look to each other for cues, and wind up in the slaughterhouse. We've learned
which side to identify with in this contest between the individual and the collective. And
since the horse is our ally in this quest, we could never imagine eating horses. Our rituals
support individualism and initiative just as other cultural practices strengthen the sense of
being an integral part of the collective.
Instead of seeing them as sheep or cattle, I prefer to imagine the Tuscans as a flock of birds.
Though they might fly off occasionally on their own, they usually stay close and take com-
fort in one another's presence. They enjoy the feeling of being connected, of facing the
world in a shared stance, of having a safety net of community to catch them should they
fall.
After our seasons in Tuscany, whenever we return to the States, we poignantly feel the rug-
gedness of our individualism. We're on our own in America, for better and for worse, in
ways that are still unknown and unimagined in the villages of Tuscany.
The Equation of a Tree
I came to Italy every fall for 13 years.
I saw the chestnut tree in fall for 13 years. I learned Italian under the tree from Narciso
and Ugo, the bachelor twins—an exchange of words: bread, pane ; cheese, formaggio ; the