il dolce far niente...

Imagine you took a town the size of Princeton. Then cut it in eighths. And then again.
Now you have an idea of how big Scilla is.
It's the train station, a "main street", which is endearingly laughable, and the place I'm in, the old fishing village called Chianalea. As someone who did spend a good amount of their life considering art as a career choice (like political science, bartending and food studies were wiser. Discuss "laughable" amongst yourselves), I can't help but fall in love with it here. It seems every door was painted knowing it would peel just so, every window would fall open at that perfect angle. I saw five old men with shock white hair sit in a freshly painted blue rowboat for 6 hours today and just talk, contentedly watching their grandchildren fool around with a soccerball.
A word every ten minutes, gazing at the horizon. Not smiling, not frowning - just sitting, in quiet, looking at the warm reflection of the sun across the aquarium blue water in their large rowboat that smelled intoxicatingly like the fresh coat of bright orange paint that had been applied.
The boat was sitting on land.
They sat, lifelong friends in a boat going nowhere, perfectly content to do just that all day.
Ahh, the sweetness of doing nothing.
I laughed, as I did when the menu at dinner tonight promised, in the english translation "fresh calamarians". I'm sure my mother recognizes this incredibly nerdy Star Wars joke, but that is really what it said.
The restaurant tonight, down the one bumpy, shadowy lane from the Grotte, was amazing. Built over the water, like everything else in this town, I discovered the joy of swordfish carpaccio, and the sadness that "OFF" bug repellent is, in fact, not repellent at all to those crafty Italian mosquitos.
The carpaccio was amazingly fresh, with thin slices of lemons that were bigger then american grapefruit, garnished with generous olive oil, fresh parsley, oregano and pepper, and a beautifully dressed frisee and radicchio salad. Mi secondi was a homemade pasta with a silky tomato and eggplant sauce (how DID they get that texture?) that yet again proved my theory that there are, in fact, opiates in homemade Italian pasta.
No matter how full you are, you eat the whole thing. And consider ordering another.
It's a serious problem.
Before dinner, I went to the "Last Stop Bar", appropriately positioned at the curve in the road before the town turned to the car free zone, and the owner had an insane collection of vintage vinyl Beatles and Janis Joplin on the walls. "Castles in the Air" came on, and he played the whole record.
His wife looked just like Yoko Ono.
I wasn't about to investigate that further.
But it was slow, I was the only customer, and I asked, in bad Italian (which, at this point I am fluent in. Read: not Italian. BAD Italian. Significant difference), if it would pick up - if business would get busier. He grinned at me - ecstatic. "No", he said. "It will stay like this until July".
Talk about a different work ethic. We, as Americans, complain when we have too much to do, and too little. Here is this man, completely content to just sit and smoke cigarettes, look at the sea, and listen to his old records.
Bellisima.