September 12, 2009, 11:45pm.
I came to Rome to participate in an international conference on violence against women which was an Initiative of the Italian Presidency of the G8. The participants were smart, serious, principled, educated, eloquent, practical, courageous, energetic and beautiful; they wore vibrant colors, stunning jewelry, multi-colored headgear and hijab.
I presented my preliminary findings about honor killings in 28 countries and on five continents. Religious Muslim feminists (modern, professional, accomplished woman, not fundamentalists, not jihadists, some in hijab, some bare headed), confirmed that my work was “true” and “very important” and begged me to explain to them why so many western and academic feminists were so willing to betray women in developing, Muslim countries and Muslim immigrant communities by insisting on multi-cultural “relativism.”
Sweet vindication. (Yes, ‘tis true, three fundamentalists frowned a great deal and one took the mike, as if she were taking an oath, and solemnly declared: “Islam is innocent.”)
I will be writing about the Conference women when I return home. But first, I have to say goodbye to Rome, a city that I have been visiting for 49 years.
I am always sad to leave it but have never considered living here, renting or restoring a house in Tuscany, or learning to cook Italian-style. This does not mean I do not love Rome. I do; who doesn’t? She’s just not in the cards for me this time round.
But here’s one small snapshot of this city of ancient ruins ‘neath a splendid, 21st century sun.
Atop the well-touristed Spanish Steps, sits a small masterpiece. No, it is not a sculpture, a fountain, a painting, or a drawing. It is an exquisite, many-terraced restaurant named Ciampini.
Below, the crowds surge restlessly, ceaselessly, their cameras and children in tow. The restaurant lives at another pace, exists in another time. No one is hurried, and due to the mid-afternoon hour, most diners have already left; only a few linger on.
Ciampini has a garden, an indoor fountain filled with lazy turtles (!) sunning themselves, abundant, consoling greenery, lattice work, proper table linen, old-fashioned gas lights, and extraordinary views: One can see St Peters in the distance. And churches, rooftop gardens, a huge expanse of sky.
This little piece of paradise is blessedly silent. No music, not even classical music. No cellphones, no loud or raucous conversations. The waiters speak softly and are gracious, solicitous.
We choose a table on the highest terrace and discover that there are glass doors which the waiter slides shut “in order to provide the air-conditioning.”
Other than this unexpected and much appreciated accommodation, sitting here is a bit like sitting here fifty or a hundred years ago. Suddenly, we are caressed, enveloped by beauty, timelessness, seduced, won over by both the elements and civilization. We relax. Nature and Art, Roman-style, show us how much one can learn and feel merely by slowing down, sitting still, paying attention, taking it in.
And so, two very “busy” Americans actually have an unhurried meal.
We are the only diners. Three waiters in green jackets serve us as if we are royalty. It is like a dream. Or a movie with Joan Plowright or Maggie Smith that Americans love so much.
Sitting here is a bit like re-living every expatriate’s love affair with nineteenth and early twentieth century Italy. And so I become a character in an Ivory-Merchant film—no, in a novel by Henry James–no, maybe in a novella by Thomas Mann, and I, too, do not see how or why I should ever leave.
Arrivederci, Roma.
Reading your post makes me feel I have to visit Italy again. My Italian has gotten a bit rusty, but I’m sure it will return with a little pratice. This summer I visited the neighborhood near the Italian synagogue in Jerusalem, which looked rather less Italian than I remembered it from four years ago.
Ah, La Dolce Vita! Thank you Phyllis for painting such a most excellent tapestry.
I am happy that you enjoyed your trip to Rome, Italy, not a country particularly friendly to Israel, but certainly less despicable than many others.
I understand why you feel it is important to address the issue of violence towards women, and especially the misogyny which both creates and allows this phenomenon.
However, as a Jew and an Israeli I am not at all happy about the prospect of improving the lot of women in the Arab or Islamic world, and I much prefer that women in these societies remain as backward, discriminated against, subjected to violent death, and locked in their houses as much as is possible.
We have more than enough trouble with the men in these backward and violent cultures, they are badly educated, murderously anti Jewish and anti Israel, primitive, ignorant, and impoverished. These men do one thing well, however, they are spectacularly successful at murdering Jews and inciting the International Community to a visceral loathing of Israel. The few women who are actually in positions of any power among them, like Hannan Ashrawi, are even more venomously anti Semitic and anti Israel than the men, if that is possible.
Frankly, for me, the more Arab or Islamic women killed for honor crimes, or beaten up and crippled by their husbands, or simply locked up in their houses is just fine.
After 30 years of watching just how dysfunctional Israeli Arab, Palestinian Arab, and Islamic societies are first hand, the last thing I ever want to see is the empowerment of their distaff side.
Sorry Phyllis, too many of my friends, a couple of my kids, and even myself have been victims of Arab Islamic terror for me to want to see their women participating even more than they already do!
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That was beautiful, Phyllis. You sound as if you’ve climbed into love so since you’re such a talented artist and your tools are portable, why don’t you rent a place there and go there when you need to have your love charged?
None of this is a shock to me. Twenty years ago, after some women I knew were date raped, I decided to volunteer at a battered women’s shelter in Richmond, where I went to school. As a result of that association, from time to time, people would send me information about terrible things happening to women, either in their community or even internationally.
When word of the Taliban’s abuses came to me, and I passed along the stories, a lot of my friends thought I was naive. “Things like that could not actually be happening in our modern world, could they?” Then came the video. Some brave soul had smuggled video out of the country that showed Taliban thugs beating a woman with wooden clubs in the street. Her crime? All her male relatives were dead from fighting the Soviets, and she had the audacity to *walk with her children to visit a doctor!!* Imagine, walking in public without a male member of her family! Oh the degradation!
And *still* people tell me, even after the Taliban’s attack on schools where children learn to read, still people say it couldn’t have been that bad!
I just can’t understand anyway to get through to them except for possibly for them to be invited by the US Army (they call the invitations “Orders”), as I was, to spend a year there among the people.
I wonder if after that experience they could still ask me that!
Ken Besig,
Hanan Ashrawi is a Christian.
3. Ken Besig:
I can relate to some of what you wrote. Even though I am not Jewish, in the 1990s I lived for a while in Netanya while training in Krav Maga. Master Imi Lichtenfeld (Imi Sde-Or), lived (and died )there. He invented Krav Maga. I even tried to volunteer for the IDF, to no avail as you needed to have at least one Jewish grandparent, and speak some Hebrew. Krav Maga training has been helpful in later travels.
But I witnessed on a couple of occasions this visceral hate (and envy!)the Arab has of anything Israeli, and believe that you have to live there, close to the source, experience it firsthand, to really understand it as you do, for outsiders may take you as an extremist, but some others know better.
Hannan Asrawi is an Arab woman, no less anti Semitic than her Islamic counterparts, and probably more fanatically anti Semitic than Josef Goebbels.
doors rule!!