Think Italy? Think food. It’s as simple as word association for most of us. But in Parma, home of crumbly cheese and cured meat, when you hit the ground it’s the people who demand primary attention.
At midnight on a weeknight, the cobbled backstreets of Parma
centro take on an unreal quality. Often eerily quiet and impressionistically lit, the narrow
Vias and
Borgos fill with a thick mist that floats above the stones, a result of cold fronts that regularly swoop down from the Apennine mountains. Because of its position in the Po valley, Parma is a wet city in winter. It’s the sort of wet which lingers, drizzling, not quite British in persistence, but subtle and steady. Ditches and irregularities become fast hazards for those unaccustomed to walking historical Italian streets. But the Parmigiani themselves are oblivious.
No matter what the weather, by day the streets team with sartorial Italians effortlessly skipping puddles, wielding umbrellas and casting off
ciao’s and
salve’s to shopkeepers loitering in doorways. Pairs of bambini forge ahead in strollers wheel to wheel, designer booties first, while their mothers teeter along in stilettos, heel to heel, fur coats too dashing to be faux, chattering in tones that sound angry and sexy all at once. These are the beehived women – not all, but most – with hair-do’s stylised into vortices, each one a conical improvement on the next. These are the women who leave shoe-sized crop circles in the snow stamped with Loubouton (no mystery there), and whose primary occupation is to window-shop, occasionally leaning over the pram lid to adjust a pink or blue
cappello and breathe warm air onto purple little faces. Make no mistake: there is real money in Parma.
Wandering down unassuming stradas peppered with shops bearing
frutta e
verdura offers up innumerable film noir experiences. Here you find distinguished gentlemen in neat chequered caps and beautiful woollen coats and brown walking shoes, taking their daily
passeggiata – a walk that is neither about exercise nor going somewhere but about
being seen – and sucking on serious looking cigars. With the cigar, the barrel is positioned square and straight, none of this Jimmy Dean hangin’ from the side of the mouth couldn’t-care-if-this-kills-me aloof kind of smoking, but with a touch of the consigliore about it, not mean but stiff, poking out of the mouth as if to say ‘Yeah, I’m smoking a cigar at midday in the street, what’s it to ya?’ and they don’t even remove it to puff, not two fingers not a hand nothing, they just sorta open their mouths in a halo-shape, teeth still clenched around the wad, and excrete smoke in a circular waft that looks exactly what I imagine ‘Fuck you’ to look like if it was communicated in smoke. Crossing the road at these times affords both safety and a better vantage point. And as they disappear around corners which look remarkably like all the other corners in Parma centrale – old, stoney, historical - there is no geriatric dilapidation in their gate but a message which lingers like the night mists long after they’ve gone: Papa’s got a freehold on cool.
‘Youth is wasted on the young’ said George Bernard Shaw, and nowhere is it more acutely true than for Parma’s teens. Today, they smoke publicly and obviously at every opportunity, as if smoking had been a prenatal pastime, but with none of the dignity of their grandparents. Waiting for a bus to Colorno (25 minutes out of town) is a gang of teens with shoulder bags and puffer jackets, mostly in black, occasional rat’s tails and diamond studs for boys, glittery hightops and eye-liner for girls. They light up in huddles and blow bravado into each other’s faces creating a bubble of aspiring maturity. But their avuncular smiles and childish flirtations give them away and the veil is pierced long before their giggles and slang have moved onto the bus. On Wednesdays, school’s out at 1:30pm, so the mamas and the papas are joined by students that move only in groups; typically, it’s the phalanx, 2 wide, 3 long - an obstreperous unit that leaves a trail of panino wrappers and mobile R'n'B in its wake, a kind of postmodern excrement in a free range pen.
And come Friday or Saturday night, Via Farini is a circus of youth, though this time it’s uni students who do the gathering, always outside the bars, talking to each other, to their mobiles, to both, smoking with only slightly more maturity than their younger brothers and sisters, and sizing each other up in Parma’s third most popular meat market after
culatello and
prosciutto. But who can tell the vendors from the emptors?
Across a strictly demarcated region inside Emilia Romagna, olfactorily gifted quality controllers from the
Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma test and authenticate all 10 million legs of ham by inserting a thin horse bone into the fat of each and sniffing it like some
suino speed ball for a microbial hint of being substandard (an efficient method since horse bone relinquishes smells quickly). But come Saturday night in the meat market of the streets, women are the only quality controllers, and given how inept Italian men can be at the preternatural subtleties of dating, it should come as no surprise that they rarely, if ever, get to put the bone in the ham. A little gauche, maybe, but the parallels and intersections between eating and mating are simply too delicious to ignore.
It’s common linguistic knowledge that 70% of human communication is non-verbal, but if Italians had their way it would be 110%. Even ordering a meal requires hand gestures so elaborate they’re virtually pornographic. It’s fitting since in no other country is eating so sexually charged. Parma’s vivacious inhabitants have been meeting in the same spot on Via Cavour for years to link arms with friends and prepare for the night’s courting activities. The gastronomic chemistry of the occasion lends a sparkle to the air. Round the corner on Farini, mere eye contact is tantamount to an invitation to explore mutual compatibility. But match-ups end as furiously as they begin, with both parties scurrying back to their respective gender dug-outs to debrief a half-moon of coaches and spit putdowns like tobacco juice. Luckily there are plenty of other distractions if things don’t work out, including the tantalising smells of
torta fritta – warm fried bread sometimes filled with ham - which waft down the open mall, weaving their way through the heated outposts of wine bar after wine bar from a small but steaming deli-style outdoor stall. To compete, the bars fill entire tables with gratuitous delectables for drink-buying customers - an equally enticing proposition if you love an aperitivo. Or twelve. These spreads are simply decadent, each one an ever-replenishing artisanal smorgasbord presenting cured meats of all declensions:
culatello,
spalla,
cotto,
speck,
crudo,
bresaola – the list goes on. The bar staff are obliging when it comes to complimentary eats and drinks, and a pleasure to watch as they spin platters with the dexterity of cocktail artists. Even in conservative little Parma, the battle of the sexes is palpable come midnight, when at least one of two hungers has already been sated.
Nationwide, it only became a crime to pinch a woman’s bottom four years ago. And in Parma, there are plenty worth pinching on both sides, what with all the cycling that goes on. Historical Parma is a whirring mass of bottoms so peachy they make Mars and Venus drop arms and strum the lute over bottles of
proseco. Even your average Nonna has buttocks so superbly toned from pedalling that papas be dipping their umbrellas to hide their
salutes, the mink of their racoon headgear flattened in the breeze and their musty perfumes all but dispersed into aromatic madeleines. Sprightly does them no justice, these grand m*
thers zinging around on classic little
bicis like bipedal pacemakers.
Aside from the physical benefits, cycling also presents new avenues for the twin Italian philosophies of Style and Beauty. When they’re not being upstaged by their grandmothers, the young men of Parma cycle care-freely, handlebars unattended, hands hanging loosely by their sides, dismounting outside cafés with all the poise and alacrity of gymnasts. Women with botoxed lips and metallic aviators perform similar feats, adding to the discipline a basket full of shopping bags (Gucci not Grocery), all of which are magically extrapolated before full-length leather boots even touch the ground. The puddles barely ripple with the landing.
And where are all these navigationally frugal commuters going? As the Duomo bells toll to signal 7pm each day, the only clockwork strictly followed in all of Italy – that of mamas calling their sons – can be observed simultaneously across town. At this moment, the bikes stand still. In a local trattoria north on Via Trento, two men in suits sit opposite each other talking on their blackberries issuing
Ciao Mama's in unison. Piatti primi is enjoyed in between the day’s perfunctory report card: a crumbly bread always with three lumps,
Certo mama, non parlerei oggi perché…, a plate of tortellini or penne,
no Mama tutto e posto o-kay, and a carafe of vino rosso di tavola,
Mama sto cenando…, before a secondi which could be anything from osso buco with the marrow still seeping from the bone or cotoletta so mouth-wateringly good you
would call your mother every day if it meant you could eat it at the same time.
If the years of bar-hopping and icy bartering have paid dividends, the misty hours of the morning will find you in the driver’s seat adjacent your bello or bella. Here the mist is of a different kind, condensing inside the two-doored tryst where lovers steal moments of steamy privacy. To spy a silhouette on the lap of a man, his head tipped back in adrenalin-filled lust, is not unusual but
is unjust given the low ceilings of your average Fiat. Two pairs of darting eyes signal the perpetual adolescence of the moment: by 2am they can see Mama peaking through the curtains wondering how, in Gèsu’s sacred name, it could take so damn long to go for a gelato. But it’s a double-bind, because although grown Italian men and women deserve more than furtive teenage bliss and parental scrutiny, the adrenalin fuels the addiction, and even in bliss they know that the food at home is simply too good, the Catholic imperatives too lofty, the bachelorhood too bottom-pinchingly liberating and so the romantic status quo remains until matrimony. Here lies the familial design of our two Parmigiani passengers: they pay symbolic deference with headlights that always shine, in ever-vigilant readiness to move, a light for the chastity of each.
