Food Shopping in Rome
August 23, 2024 at 02:39AMDuring a stay in Italy, Judith Sanders learns how to shop for groceries in Rome, savoring the sights, sounds, and customs and learning how to make purchases by listening to Italian shoppers. In this essay, she reflects on the deeply satisfying meals she was able to prepare, made with simple and delicious ingredients bought locally.
Like the chicken butcher, I trusted gestures more than slippery syllables.
In addition to grammar and vocabulary, fluency required mastering the ancillary languages of gestures, colloquialisms, regionalisms, and, apparently, curses. Still, I enjoyed picking out chopsticks on this Steinway grand, even while fearing that with every mangled word I was committing a sacrilege. Eventually I could compose a sentence: If I concentrated, I could get all those slippery words lined up, the articles, nouns, prepositions, and adjectives agreeing in gender and number, the verbs in correct form.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/22/food-shopping-in-rome/
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