Bella Friuli

I must have mentioned it before, but after a visit to the country of my ancestors, Bella Italia, I feel somewhat lost in the Netherlands. The reason for this is a short but serious mismatch between my temperament – freshly re-inflated after a weeks stay with my explosive father and his brother – and that of my dear but docile Dutch colleagues.

Being an Italian from the Friuli region makes one stick out in this country. We tend to be expressive on a level that outclasses the Dutch by a couple of magnitudes. “Why is this?” I asked a local family member, living under the smoke of ancient Aquileia. “What makes these Friulians so special, and heeded, even amongst Italians?”

First another anecdote: a few years ago, I passed an Italian restaurant in my residency Delft, while the owner, a Sardinian called S., was having a glass of wine outside on the terrace with one of his Cheese Head acquaintances. He asked me where my father was, because it was near his birthday. I told him that the old man was in Italy and not to be expected home any time soon, upon which S. rushed inside and returned with a bottle of Ferrari Champagne. (Well, the Italian Bubbly called Spumante of course, not the vastly overrated dishwater they make in the salt infested hills of Champagne, France.)

“Give this to your father for his birthday and drink one on me” he said and he sat down again. At this point, Mister Cheese Head starts eyeing me, turns to his friend S., and back to me, as he jokes: “Yeah, he’s going to drink that himself before his father sets foot in this country again…” And at that moment, S. colours slightly pale, turns to his Cheese Head friend and very adamantly warns him, while cowering half under the table, to “never say such things to Carlo again, because he is FROM FRIULI….”

So what does it mean, to come from Friuli? I have noticed the volatility that my kin can display under normal circumstances, and the utter explosive power that comes out under pressure. I can assure you, you do NOT want to put pressure on any of my family members. If you value your life, that is. So, curious as I was about this feature, I asked one of them, the youngest son of my aunt B. and uncle F., called N. (kid brother of F., by the way) while we were looking over the country side from the top of his hill, building site for his new house. “Look around you” he said, ” to the south, there is Aquileia, our harbour, and to the north and east you see the fertile fields that feed us. In the past 2000 years, we were conquered and occupied by the Venetians, the Hungarians, the Romans, the Austrians and those bloody Germans with their Mussolini friends*. They came here to use our port, steal our food, fuck our women and pillage our villages. We had to deal with so much violence in our history, that we have become as hard as the granite we live on.”

And indeed they did. Granite Heads, is the nickname of these unyielding people who could not compromise to save their life. And they go about it in a very loud and noisy way. Every now and again, I have the – sometimes questionable and always taxing – honour to live amongst them and to submerge myself in this high-strung temperament, only to have the same obduracy rubbing off on me.

And then, of course, I take it back home to the Netherlands, where I have to simmer down for a few days before I can go back to work. If I didn’t take that precaution, I’d scare my workmates shitless. You see, they think I am hefty and high-voltage, but in fact I am a very flexible, diplomatic and almost meek… Friulian. Which of course makes me a Dutchman of 6,2 on the Richter scale, a feature my cousin F. underlines for me when I share with him my opinions on the Italians: “Ma Carlo, tu SEI Italiano…!”

I fear for my Dutch friends. To think that my wife wants to make the trips to Italy into a regular thing.