Of gnocco fritto and the red flag

"Want to come with us to the festa?" my housemate kindly offers on the morning of the 25th of April. The 25th of April is Liberation Day here - as far as I can tell, it is the day that Italy was liberated from Germany during WWII. This is a very important point here in Emilia, because the tradition of revering the partigiani seems quite strong here.

"Sure, thanks," I say. Why not?

"Apparently that's where all of Reggio goes on the 25th," her boyfriend informs me on the way there.

When we arrive, though, we become aware that it is not really all of Reggio, per se. Rather, it is all of a certain subset of Reggio people. It is not the ones who saunter around in their designer clothes and perfectly straightened hair. It is not the ones who dress their children in Lacoste with Prada sneakers. It is the ones who have Che Guevara tattoos and let their children play soccer in the mud (where they shriek with laughter).

They are selling a sort of Fair Trade coke-like drink that I've never seen before along with the beer and the coffee. They are also selling t-shirts, the slogans on which are complicated enough that I only figure out a few of them before we move on. There is a man with a priest's collar shouting political-sounding things from a stage at the front of the crowd. I don't understand enough of what he says to follow his line of thought, so I let the words float by my head and look around at the people instead.

A man with dreadlocks that reach halfway down his back walks by, balancing three beers between his two hands. A smallish little boy weaves his way between people's legs until his father catches up with him to throw him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and give him a stern lecture about getting lost in the crowd. We walk past people proudly wearing Che Guevara t-shirts and flying the red hammer-and-sickle flag above their heads, and I vaguely wonder how such an open display of very-left-leaning political philosophy would do in the States. I'm not very knowledgeable about the whole politics thing, but I get the feeling that it might not be taken so well. It clearly doesn't mean the same thing here, though, because no one seems perturbed in the least.

It's very sunny out, and we find some space at a picnic table half in the shade. We drink some beer and wonder how long it would actually take to wait in the line for gnocco fritto. Someone is brave and decides to give it a try. He comes back bearing salumi, meat that is grigliata (like little sausages and stuff), and bread. The gnocco was apparently finito. Music is playing now, and we let it wash over us with the sun and the sound of people chatting and laughing and children shoving each other around in the space between some tables that has apparently been converted into a makeshift soccer field. The table next to us strikes up a stirring rendition of a canzone poplare - from what I can gather, this seems to be a type of song that everyone knows the words to but whose origins are kind of unknown. "Boh, non te lo saprei dire," my housemate says when I ask her who it is by. I like it, though... do we have anything similar in America?

Later we go to Parma, which is far more alive than Reggio usually is, and eat some gelato. We enjoy the sheer number of people who are milling around, and the lingering warmth after sunset. There is a big palco for a concert in Piazza Garibaldi. The mayor reminds us all of the solemnity of the day, and introduces an ex-partigiano (or maybe you never really cease being a partigiano), who reminds us not to forget how lucky we are to live in freedom, even though we can't possibly understand what freedom really is because we've never had to do without it. (He has a point, there.) The concert is lovely - listening to music with a lot of people in a piazza in Italy when it's still warm after sundown and there aren't any mosquitoes yet... there's really nothing you could possibly complain about.