Italian Country Life Etiquette (1882)

The balls are not select; even the peasants are included; and the price of admission is only one sou. There is every variety of class and costume. Some of the ladies will appear masked; other in what they fondly imagine to be the height of fashion; some in evening and some in morning dress, and some in a happy mixture of both. One will wear a low gown and her best bonnet; another will carry in addition to fan and smelling bottle, her muff. The band plays on a raised scaffolding. — At the Fancy Dress Ball of 1893

Amusements in Italian Country Life

There is always a band, often very good, and there is generally a theatre, where, during the carnival, some sort of dramatic representation takes place, and the theatre serves also for a ballroom; then there are the fairs, which make a rendezvous for all classes, and. at the risk of appearing irreverent, I must include processions among the entertainments. 

Italian amateur actors are infinitely better than English. To simulate emotion, to speak distinctly, to suit the action to the word all this comes naturally to them. A great many are born actors and actresses, and display their talents freely off the stage; for the exhibition of feeling is thought so proper and becoming that they feign it where they have it not. To weep at every parting, even with the most casual acquaintance, is thought a point of etiquette, and the art of pumping up tears at will is one of the first to be acquired. 

Knowing the amount of pain and rehearsing necessary to get up private theatricals in England with any success, I was surprised at the facility with which the dullest and most uneducated Italian would learn and recite his art, and with what grace and what effect each point would be given. He never mumbles, or looks as if he didn t know what to do with his arms and legs, or appear to be wondering why he is making such a ridiculous fool of himself, as is the way of the English amateur. 

The balls are not select; even the peasants are included; and the price of admission is only one sou. There is every variety of class and costume. Some of the ladies will appear masked; other in what they fondly imagine to be the height of fashion; some in evening and some in morning dress, and some in a happy mixture of both. One will wear a low gown and her best bonnet; another will carry in addition to fan and smelling bottle, her muff. The band plays on a raised scaffolding. 

Musicians and dancers cannot agree, “Do you know what it is yon are playing ?” is occasionally shouted from below. “Do you know what it is you are dancing ?” is the tu quoque from above. More lively banter follows, ending perhaps, in a quarrel. The musicians strike work; the dancers reply that does not matter; but it ends in a reconciliation, and all goes on as before. The peasants prefer dancing in the open air. The only dance known to them in these parts is the “salterello.”  The man and woman dance opposite one another, she looking as if she must fall forward, and he backward. Hands are sometime joined; but this is thought bad form by the peasant aristocracy. 

Two or three fiddlers play a monotonous, bagpipe like tune, which is occasionally enlivened by a shout and gust of song. Then an “improvisatore” will be inspired by bis muse, and, like some clergymen who preach extempore, has a difficulty in leaving off. The energy which the peasants display after a hard day's reaping under a burning sun seems amazing, but Italians, though some times averse to work, never tire of their amusements. 

The band plays an important part in all festivities. During a wedding it will play operatic music inside the church; it brings up the rear in all processions; it celebrates the “Befana” (Epiphany) by going about, much as our “waits,” do, from house to house, and, like the “waits,” it is apt to become a nuisance. On occasion such as a birth, or a christening, or an electoral triumph, or the return from a journey, we have suffered much from the midnight serenade of a particularly zealous band belonging to a neighboring village. –The Cornhill Magazine, 1882

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Spaghetti Etiquette

Left– Old Italian artwork in background on a 1992 magazine cover, shows how pasta was once eaten properly — Today, spaghetti-eating etiquette demand forks. Fists full of wet pasta are simply not acceptable on any 'civilized' occasion.

“A North American father, presumably initiating his son, aged 15, into the world of adult business affairs, took him out to what the boy described as 'a big dinner meeting.' When the company was served spaghetti, the boy ate it with his hands. 'I would slurp it up and put it in my mouth,' he admitted. 'My dad took some grief about it.' The October 1985 newspaper article does not describe the response of the rest of the company. The son was sent to a boarding school to learn how to behave. 'When we have spaghetti,' he announced later, 'you roll it up real tightly on your fork and put it in your mouth with the fork.'

What he described, after having learned it, is the dinner-table ritual --as automatic and unquestioned by every participant in it, as impossible to gainsay, as the artificial rules and preferences which every cannibal society has upheld. Practical reasons can be found for it, most of them having to do with neatness, cleanliness, and noiselessness. Because these three general principles are so warmly encouraged in our culture, having been arrived at, as ideals to be striven for, after centuries of struggle and constraint, we simply never doubt that everyone who is right-minded will find a spaghetti eating companion disgusting and impossible to eat with where even one of them is lacking. 

Yet we know from paintings and early photographs of spaghetti eaters in 19th century Naples (where the modern version of spaghetti comes from) that their way of eating pasta was with their hands-- not that the dish was likely to appear at a formal dinner. You had to raise the strings in your right hand, throwback your head, then lower the strings, dexterously with dispatch, and without slurping (there are invariably 'polite' and 'rude' ways of eating), into your open mouth. The spaghetti in the picture does not seem to have sauce on it.

Today, spaghetti-eating manners demand forks, and fist fulls of wet pasta are simply not acceptable on any 'civilized' occasion. The son's ignorance cast a dark reflection upon his father: he had not been doing his duty, had not given his child a proper 'upbringing.' Even if the boy had not seen spaghetti before, he subsequently admitted that what he ought to have done was to look about him, watch how other people were eating this awkward food, and imitate them. In any case, the options were clearer after this demonstration of an ineptitude: either the boy learns his table manners, or he would not be asked to 'a big dinner meeting' again by anyone who had heard of his unfinished education.” Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia