Italian for beginners

“Eeey ragazzo!” Luigi said. Traveling is a funny thing. A whole range of things that you take for granted suddenly assume new and unexpected propensities; like the taste of cold carrot pie in the morning –you can somehow not compare this event in Austria with the exact same pie, with the exact same ingredients in say, Guadalupe. The two things might look the same, and smell the same, and the taste will probably be confusingly similar too, but it is in the mind of the beholder that eventually a higher level of differentiation takes place. According to the positioning of the aforementioned mind in space and time, they become, essentially, two completely different things. I shall not bore my readers here with a numbing exposé on the General Theory of Relativity, but it essentially revolves around Einstein’s famous regret; the Cosmological Constant, that misfit of empiricism that astronomers have recently started rescuing from the dustbin of scientific history. This in turn is to do with the mysteriously pervasive “dark matter” and the even more ridiculously labeled “dark energy”, but as I said, I shall not bore you with such hodgepodge of fancy-sounding mumbo jumbo. It all boils down to this; distances in Italy between A and B are not necessarily traveled fastest by plotting a straight line between them. I was able to discover this whilst hitchhiking along the SS12 from Modena to Bologna yesterday. Enter: Luigi, a retired plumber and native of the village of Crevalcore. “Eeey ragazzo!” he exclaimed, opening one of the suicide doors on his 1960 Fiat 600 Multipla Van. “Che cosa? Ciò non è un ragazzo. Ciò è un coniglio. Ah, mama mia! Fantastico.” Having said this he started driving, never exceeding a self-imposed speed-limit of 45 kilometers per hour. All the while he talked incessantly (to me?). For an inexplicable reason, he then deviated from the autostrada and in stead meandered into the verdant countryside and its winding roads. I must concur though that its ageing vineyards and piled-stone roadside parapets have enchanted me. I’m actually in a vineyard as we speak, close to a place called Crespellano. A timid spring sun points its tenuous rays at me and it feels like the smile of a girl in a pretty dress. It’s not really clear to me as to what exactly I’m doing here. Decreasingly so I might add. “Eeey Coniglio! Un po'più di vino?” says Luigi. “Il mio niece sta venendo e sta andando mostrarvi un buon tempo.” I’ve been saying “yeah, why not. And by the way, the name is ‘Ben’” for the last hour and a half or so and I fear that I might wake up with a headache tomorrow, wondering if Albert Einstein could have been Italian somehow. Oh, and Cassandra? I’m not in Bologna yet.