Cringe Abbondanza

How should a grown man dress on vacation?

More specifically, how should an American man dress for a vacation in Italy?

My summer wardrobe was pretty busted, and I’d heard that those who don’t come correct in the piazzas are garroted with their own cargo shorts, so I did some shopping before our trip.

Online retailers recommend something called a resort shirt: a short-sleeved, mid-century number with an aggressive neck-line and a wide, spikey collar. The idea is that you’re starring in The Talented Mister Ripley, but your personal bearing will place you somewhere along the Euclidian distance from Dicky Greenleaf to Seinfeld’s Kramer, or all the way to the wacky bowling shirt of your least favorite pot-bellied rock ‘n’ roll uncle:

Meanwhile, both Maya and Blackbird Spyplane have patiently explained to me that there has been a disturbance along the Great Faultline of Pants: a mysterious and violent pendulum swing against the trim styles of recent decades, back toward our voluminous past. Once again, we must all strap on the harem pants of Limp Bizkit’s DJ Lethal, if not MC Hammer himself.

None of that, of course, is any of my business, and I’m not sure how I ended up subscribed to Blackbird Spyplane in the first place. But I’m ready for this trend. I’ve been pushing on the pajama pants in public envelope for awhile now, and if that’s suddenly socially acceptable, all the better.

Deep down in my soul: my ideal look in a warm climate is that of a consulting Egyptologist taking a few hours away from the dig site to sample the local cacio e pepe. A spotless white cotton button-down, khaki pants in canvas or linen, soft leather shoes, tortoiseshell sunglasses. I would add a pith helmet if I could get away with it.

It’s Indiana Jones, Lawrence of Arabia, Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient, and a soupçon of the Professor from Gilligan’s Island.

Over a few months, with that image in my head and with Maya’s careful supervision, I assembled a collection of reasonably tasteful vacation-wear.

But then the airline lost our luggage, so we went to a Roman H&M and bought some cheap fast-fashion bullshit to wear for the first several days of the trip. There’s a lesson there somewhere, I suppose.

Meanwhile, every other vacationing male was doing the same thing I was once my bag showed up: suitcase-creased linen pants, resort shirts with tags still attached. Central casting tourist goofballs, all of us.

Anyway… Italy

I took to Rome right away, even jet-lagged and missing my toothbrush. We had been in town for about half a Negroni before I said semi-seriously that we should try to live there for awhile.

We had been apprehensive about visiting Europe in July, tourism being the global frenzy that it currently is (in Barcelona the locals were pelting tourists with insults and squirt guns) and my lousy personality being what it always is. I’m not proud to admit that I can be a misanthrope on a bad day, and I’m not going to enjoy anything if I’m among a zillion other slack-jawed rubes.

The Sistine Chapel was sardine-packed, and the blocks between the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain were just a god-damned mess.

But Rome is vast and varied, and there is some amazing thing in every direction that you look. If you don’t obsess over taking the same photo of the same artifact or vista that everyone else is also posing in front of, you can have a lovely time.

The best money we spent was on a genius tour guide named Paolo, who led us across town from the Pantheon to the Colosseum. Afterward, if we could have afforded it, we would have hired him to lead us around for the rest of the trip, and then follow us home and explain Brooklyn to us as well. Context is so key for enjoyment on this sort of trip.

We saw the tomb of the namesake of the Margherita pizza. We ducked into a French church to admire Caravaggios. We saw the spot where Julius Caesar got what was coming to him, and which is now home to a colony of feral cats. At one point I pointed at a church and casually asked “hey what’s that,” and Paolo told us that it happened to be the setting for Act I of Tosca, and then led us inside for an extemporaneous tour.

When we walked by the Fontana delle Tartarughe, Paolo told us about some knucklehead chiseling off the turtles and fencing them in an antiques store a few blocks away. Now the real turtles are in a museum somewhere; the ones seen above are copies.

We climbed up Michelangelo’s steps to the top of the Piazza del Campidoglio for our first view of The Forum, and I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I’m pretty sure I gasped aloud when I saw this:

It’s good for the soul to be impressed, even better amazed. I guess that’s why we travel: it’s hard to get that kind of buzz at home.

After Rome we rented a car and drove to the central state of Umbria, which looks like this:

Olive groves, sunflower fields, ancient walled towns on the mountaintops. We stayed with some of our favorite relatives in Todi, which looks like this:

We went to Florence for a day, where we gawked at the Duomo, and the Ponte Vecchio, and the Uffizi Gallery.

We went to Orvieto, where we saw the Metal-est Chapel in All of Christendom:

We rounded out the trip in the Marche region, on the Adriatic coast, eating fried anchovies and reading Mary Beard on the beach.

In closing, Italy is a land of contrasts. You should go! Let me know if you do and I’ll send you Paolo’s contact info.