Today is the eve of the vaunted “Super Bowl.” Perhaps you are from a foreign country and are unfamiliar with it. I shall try to explain.
The “Super Bowl” is what Americans call it when two teams that have risen to the top of the heap in the American “football” world bang into each other for ten second stretches between long and often idiotic commercials, usually for beer that is more tasteless than even the commercials.
Between halves of this contest, there is a “spectacular.” On one occasion, a star hired for the “half time show” had faded enough from the public’s emotional bosom to need help from a bit of costume falling off of a jewel-bedecked breast to generate enough interest to propel said star into, well, obscurity as it turns out.
In any case, when this “costume malfunction” happened, hundreds of thousands of people spread their ire through all means possible, many through telephone conversations with the poor telephone operators the network hires to take care of these kinds of things so the people responsible don’t have to. Many callers claimed to have been harmed from seeing the breasts, or asserted that their children had been poisoned by seeing such a display, and so they are deserving of money or other compensation.
Perhaps you don’t know this, but breasts are just about the most poisonous thing in America—or at least that’s what you’d think if you had to live through this kind of nonsense.
But let’s say that instead of watching the “Super Bowl” on your widescreen, you head off to the Gulf of Poets in Italy. You decide to take the ferry into the delightful town of Tellaro. You are met by:
Yes, that’s right. Women with breasts exposed (not to us, of course, but still). Oh my! In public yet!
The thing is, you don’t see Italian women on the ferry throwing their offspring overboard, thinking that their little ones have been poisoned for life and are therefore beyond redemption. People in Italy just take breasts in stride. Well, they don’t take them, that would be wrong, but you know what I mean.
The women in the picture are frolicking on the dock where the ferry lets you off in Tellaro. The man on the right is waiting for the ferry. He’s probably having a lot better time than most people waiting for public transportation. I imagine the minutes fly by, considering.
So you walk into town, intent on seeing the sights:
Ok, that’s enough. Suffice it to say that it’s nice to spend time in a country where the majority of people don’t think a single, arbitrary piece of anatomy in God’s creation is so nasty it needs to be covered up. How did we get this way anyway?
You should go. There are nice, old things there too. Like the Villa Quintilli on the Appian Way in Rome.
More Articles on Liguria
The Monumental Cemetery of Sanremo
Sciacchetrail | Running the Cinque Terre
Sarzana: Flowers and Historic Cars
Lavagna: Eating the Fieschi's Cake