Read Online Only in Naples by Katherine Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

or are you Republican and in favor of impeachment? I would answer as best I could that although the president had humiliated himself and his country, I felt that impeachment was too extreme a measure….But no, they would interrupt, we meant are you for Monica or for Bill?
    Wait a second. Him against her? That made no sense to me. Monica was not the protagonist but a supporting character. At the center was the president of the United States, who had abused his power and humiliated…
    “Yes,” Italians agreed. “Humiliation. He really could have chosen someone who was more beautiful.”
    The scandal here was not what he had done, but the fact that he had done it with someone whom they considered overweight and unattractive. So the one who got the respect was Monica. If she, without good looks, could seduce the president of the United States, it was she who deserved to be the star of the lurid
sceneggiata,
or show. The president of the world’s superpower, with only one chick, and not even a pretty one at that? That girl must have something. If she were in Italy, they probably would have elected her president.
    I know that a big concern of the Italian government at the moment is the continuing brain drain, or
fuga dei cervelli,
of intellectuals from Italy to northern Europe and the United States, particularly in the sciences. Parliament is working on grants and other incentives to keep young, talented researchers from leaving the country. I can’t help but think, however, of what would happen if there were a
fuga dei culetti,
or a tits-and-ass drain, in which
veline
found work elsewhere and left the peninsula. Now,
that
would be a national crisis.
    Given the context, I think the
belle presenze
on sports programs are one of the least offensive things on Italian TV. For one thing, there’s no camera positioned
under
the lady’s skirt. But, more important, the
veline
who appear on the soccer programs are, perhaps without even realizing it, so honest and transparent. Roberta is objectified and degraded, yes. But there is something very human underneath: an Italian woman, like so many others, who is just plain bored by men talking about soccer.

I was asked to leave the Denza to find alternative housing in the middle of October. The boarding boys had arrived, and apparently I was a menace. I had unknowingly broken all sorts of rules of the Catholic institution (bidets had nothing to do with it, but I can’t help but wonder
if they had known…
). I had been seen walking with a student there, a young man
.
On another occasion I had been seen walking with a different young man. I had not always been wearing a jacket and scarf when I walked with these members of the opposite sex. I tried to explain to the priest who served as the dean of students that I had to walk across the campus to get from my room to the dining hall, and it was eighty degrees! Most of the students were men, how could I help it if we walked side by side for a few meters?
    “Da noi non si fa così”
was his reply. That’s not the way we do things here.
    I started looking for a room to rent close by. Since this “experience abroad” was footed by my parents’ dollars (and in 1997, dollars went far—thousands of lire far), I had no trouble finding a nice room in an apartment in Posillipo. I saw a big fluorescent yellow AFFITTASI STANZA (room for rent) sign on a building near the Calabrese girls’ flat when I visited them for coffee one day. It was perfect—I would be near them and the Avallones.
    “Will you have to cook for yourself?” Maria Rosa asked, concerned, when I said I was leaving the Denza. She and her sisters knew that things could get messy for me when it came to eating. “I’ll be fine,” I told them.
    Salva and his parents worried too. My new flatmates were two girls from Puglia who went home for weeks at a time and kept to themselves when they were in the apartment. No more dinner tray at the Denza, with its