what it means to have less

I have been living in Italy for a while now, and being here here is teaching me something I never would have thought I needed to learn. It is showing me what it means to have less.

This is something I knew before, but it makes it so much more concrete to live in the midst of it. I am seeing, very clearly, how much of the rest of the developed world lives, the good and the bad.

People here live with less. Fewer clothes, smaller apartments, riding bikes, walking, or at least driving small cars. They eat less, drink less, watch less TV, don’t buy all the latest technology as soon as it hits the shelves, and life moves a little slower.
Some things here in Florence are very cheap. Fresh vegetables at the markets are at such low prices you can absentmindedly buy almost anything, including things like berries, which are usually fairly expensive in the US. Chicken is fairly cheap, red meat a bit more, but fish is quite expensive (because it is always so fresh, but we aren’t near a sea, so it is carted in very quickly; less than 24 hours from catch to market).

Many other things are extremely expensive: all types of electronics, dog food and dog medicines, things like notebooks and paper, clothes are exorbitantly expensive, and the list goes on. We have spent a lot of money since our arrival, just buying things that are necessary for us to get settled in.

This was all starting to dismay and confuse me. How could people live when things are so expensive? How do you buy a pair of shoes when they are all at least €100,00, if not more?

But then I read an interview with Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement, at odemagazine.com. Petrini said something that made me see clearly one of the major differences between life here and life in the US. Petrini was asked if he thought maybe his movement was sort of ridiculous because only upper-middle class people to wealthy people could think about living life the way he believes it should be lived: buying quality goods from local businesses, rather than supporting huge corporations selling bland, low quality products. Petrini’s focus is on food, but his views cover every aspect of life.
Petrini’s response was, “It’s not that quality food - organic, made with local ingredients - is too expensive; it’s that the other food is too cheap.”

This statement made me look at things here in a different light. I realized why things here are the way they are here. First off, almost everything you buy comes from somewhere in Italy. It is built here, grown here, or stitched together here. These people cherish quality over the quantity of objects they own. They would rather one bottle of good wine than five bottles of bad wine. They would rather two pairs of nice leather shoes than fifteen pairs from Payless. When it breaks, they repair it.

Not that they don’t have their bargain shops here, and their bargain shoppers. But the mood, on a large scale, is different. I read an article the other day about a fairly large protest that went on somewhere in Italy (Milan, I believe?) to try to get the government to crack down on illegal imports from China. Mostly clothing and food products. Their slogan was “Hands Off Italian Quality”. They don’t want tomatoes from China, they want tomatoes from Italian soil, grown using Italian traditions and following their quality standards. They don’t want leather from China, they want leather from Florence, stitched by an Italian leather shop that cares about the quality if its products. They want leather bags that cost a lot and last 20 years.

Although sometimes I miss H&M’s cheap button down shirts, printing without thinking about the cost of the paper I’m using, or having a car... I’m starting to get used to it. I have always believed that quality is important, and that we should be purchasing locally produced goods, and supporting local businesses. It is eye opening to see what that actually means. It is good, but hard to get used to when I am used to going to K-Mart for a hamper.

But, thank God, there is an IKEA.