The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you’re hungry again.
– George Miller
We’re in the back seat of a white van with tinted windows, surrounded by people dressed entirely in black. It’s a scene from a Tarantino film. Maybe we’re part of a posse of thieves, on our way to steal some basil plants.
Not quite. We’ve been invited to Sunday lunch in Nicolosi, the highest village on the southern slopes of Mount Etna. It’s where I stopped for beer and wild-mushroom pizza on the way up to watch the lava flow back in November. The invitation is from Giulia, one of Gill’s adult students. She’s twenty-seven and, like so many Sicilians in their twenties, still lives at home.
Nicolosi is an hour from Catania and we don’t have a car. Hence the van. The black-clad occupants of the vehicle are Giulia, her cousin Paolo, and Paolo’s wife, Francesca. Giulia’s single concession to colour is a tan cardigan pulled over a black blouse.
The family is observing a period of mourning. Four weeks ago, Paolo’s father (Giulia’s uncle) passed away. Giulia’s own father died two years earlier. As we crawl out of the city and along the scraggly, semi-urban streets of Etna’s lower reaches, Gill and I hear about another uncle in the family who has Alzheimer’s. Doctors have given him two years to live. He’s fifty-eight. Struggling to comprehend all of this tragedy, I silently vow not to whinge the next time one of Erminia’s dogs takes a shit on our doormat.
The custom of wearing black for a period of mourning might be on the wane in the northern half of Italy, but it survives in Sicily. Some women dress in black for the rest of their lives after their husbands pass away. In the Sicilian interior, in particular, Gill and I have watched countless stooped widows pegging entire wardrobes of black to their clotheslines: pants, blouses, cardigans, coats, stockings, scarves and slips. I understand that dressing in black is a mark of respect and commitment, but it must get mighty hot in the middle of summer. A tip for women in rural Sicily: avoid letting hubby die in July.
Thankfully, Nicolosi is high enough up Mount Etna’s slopes to escape the savage heat that afflicts Catania for a third of every year. We feel the drop in temperature as soon as we open the van door.
Giulia lives with her mum on the bottom floor of a three-storey apricot-coloured apartment building. To the side of the building is a small square of unkempt grass and an olive tree. Giulia tells us that several of the apartments on the second and third floors are leased by American soldiers and their families who work at Sigonella.
Sigonella, eh? I’d almost forgotten about the enormous US naval airbase located just twenty kilometres from Catania. It keeps a low profile. Occasionally Gill and I see groups of shaven-headed Americans on R&R in the city. They tend to favour the city’s Irish pub, Waxy O’Connor’s. One day at Waxy’s, I share a beer with some friendly recruits from Mississippi, eager to teach me their recipes for alligator-tail stew. Another time, on a bus to Taormina, Gill and I overhear some less savoury Sigonella recruits chatting. A debate breaks out among them: which soldier in the barracks smells the worst? Votes pour in for someone named Saunders.
‘Yeah,’ nods a nuggetty little fellow with Dolph Lundgren hair. ‘Saunders smells worse than a bagful of dried assholes.’ Private Lundgren nurses a warm can of Miller Lite, clearly at pains to ensure the label is facing outwards so people can admire him for drinking so early in the morning.
From further conversation – consisting mostly of variations on the word ‘motherfucker’ – we glean that they’re travelling to Taormina to let off some steam. Poor Taormina.
As many as four thousand troops are stationed at ‘Sig’ at any one time. Sicily is considered a vital strategic hub for military activity in the Mediterranean. People have thought as much since the Phoenicians in the eleventh century BC. Sigonella’s fifteen minutes of fame came in October 1985, when a plane arrived carrying a group of escaping Palestinians who, three days earlier, had hijacked an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. Both the Italian and US authorities were eager to claim jurisdiction and make an arrest (among other things, an American citizen had been murdered on board). Tensions flared and Sigonella-based US Navy SEALs were warned that they’d be shot if they attempted to board the plane and arrest the hijackers. After a tense night, President Ronald Reagan gave the order for his troops to stand down.
On a more trivial note, Sigonella is said to have the worst driving record of any military installation in Europe. This is presumably an attempt by American troops to conform to the standards set by the maniacs in Catania.
With her decent English-language skills, Giulia has taken on the role of landlord for the Americans in the upstairs apartments.
‘They mustn’t be very easy tenants,’ I say, remembering recent news stories in Australia of military initiations involving vacuum cleaners and testicles.
‘Actually,’ she insists, ‘they’re fine.’ (In fact, more than fine. Months down the track when we’ve left Sicily, we learn that Giulia has fallen in love with one of the soldiers and followed him back to the States to live. We pray for her sake that it’s not Saunders.)
Jumping out of the van, Gill and I and our three black-clad companions file across the car park, greet the family dog (also black, with a permanently guilty expression on his labby face) and step into the modest apartment. There’s a living/dining room at the front. A couple of bedrooms are out the back somewhere, and there’s a well-used kitchen to the side. Glorious aromas emanate from the latter.
The main room is a snapshot of 1970s chic: a gold-framed painting on the wall; a couch of mottled orange and green; a vase of peacock feathers in one corner; and a trophy cabinet of various underwhelming school achievements, mostly football-related (Giulia has three brothers). The television is tuned to one of Italy’s interminable weekend variety shows.
Giulia’s mother emerges from the kitchen. She’s not in black but in a lavender knit top and grey skirt. Her hair is the same honey-orange colour as that of Angela, our neighbour in Catania; this seems to be the dye du jour for middle-aged Sicilian women. A white apron studded with pictures of strawberries stretches around her matronly girth.
We take our place at a long wooden table, where lunch is served almost immediately. It’s preposterously generous. There’s not just a primo and secondo, but a terzo, quarto, quinto and sesto, too.
First comes a hearty bowl of pasta that would on most tables around the world suffice as a complete meal. (For Sicilians, though, pasta is an amuse-bouche.) Giulia’s mamma’s version is a simple variation on a classic sauce: tomatoes, garlic, wine, fresh basil, perhaps some dissolved anchovies, and a tiny lip-buzz of chilli. I forget to ask the actual name. I think it’s spaghetti alla carrettiera (‘carter’s spaghetti’), a Catanese dish favoured by the drivers of Sicily’s famous hand-painted donkey-drawn carts. Regardless, it’s awesome. Francesca clearly agrees. As women go, she’s Rubenesque – or Botticellian, to give it an Italian context. I watch as she twists a fork in her pasta and lifts it to her mouth. Seconds later, the whole thing is gone, inhaled like a dose from an asthma puffer.
The pasta plates are cleared away and three new dishes appear: torta di spinaci, a quiche made of eggs, ricotta, mozzarella and spinach; cotolette alla Milanese, tender veal cutlets, dusted in flour and breadcrumbs and pan-fried; and polipetti in tegame, baby calamari sautéed in olive oil, garlic and a splash of white wine, tossed through with fresh parsley and Trapani sea salt, and served in a little metal pan.
Giulia and her cousins are fundamentalist Christians. For this reason, they’re teetotallers. (Because, hey, it’s not like Christ ever had a drink.) Mamma, on the other hand, looks like she’s been waiting a long, long time for someone like me to walk through the door. At first she’s sheepish, emerging from a hiding spot in the pantry with a single tall bottle of Birra Moretti. She tucks it behind the sparkling mineral water and the two-litre Coca-Cola on the table. ‘Just in case anyone wants some,’ she mumbles.
I want some. So, when the others begin pouring their white plastic cups of Coke, the old girl and I share the bottle of beer. Gill nudges her own cup in our direction as well.
The plates are cleared away again to make room for more food. I’ve already eaten pasta, two veal cutlets, two slices of quiche, a plate of seafood and half a basket of crusty bread. Next to arrive in the fleshy outstretched arms of Giulia’s mum is a tray of veal rolls, or falsomagri – another local favourite. The name may relate to our words ‘false’ and ‘meagre’: the point being that a meagre piece of expensive meat (in this case, paper-thin veal) is deceptively turned into a feast thanks to a stuffing of much cheaper ingredients – boiled eggs, sausage mince, artichokes, cheese, whatever.
The bulging falsomagri have been trussed up with string, sautéed in olive oil, and gently braised in wine and tomatoes. They look like hand grenades because of their shape and the crisscross of string lines. Fittingly, I feel like I’m about to explode.
By now, Giulia’s mother has quietly brought a bottle of red wine to the table. I watch her as she makes a discreet attempt at removing the cork from the stopper in silence. No luck: the top comes off with a loud pop! The other family members exchange nervous glances. Mamma pours me a glass, full to the brim. (Sicilians don’t care too much for letting wine breathe.) It’s a chewy red from local vineyards. The bottle itself is clear glass with no label. We sip with gusto.
Somehow, only an insalata mista remains on the table. Italian salads are interesting. ‘Simple’ doesn’t do them justice: in Sicily, they border on ascetic. One time, our neighbour Carmelo knocked on our door in Catania and handed over a plate of sliced fennel. ‘Salad,’ he said. Similarly, the salad at Giulia’s mamma’s house is just a bowl of green leaves. But at least it’s served with a jar of homemade Roma-style mayonnaise – oil, garlic, anchovies – which we spoon on top of the leaves like mustard.
Epitomising the simplicity of Italian cooking for me was a dish I once saw in a trattoria in Venice. The back-alley restaurant happened to be the place where the city’s ferry drivers all met after work. I watched transfixed as six of them tackled enormous bowls of spaghetti al burro – not ‘donkey’ but ‘butter’. The dish was a steaming pyramid of completely plain spaghetti with nothing but a fifty-gram cube of melting butter on top.
Back to the food at hand: what would a Sicilian lunch be without dolci, something sweet? Two enormous cakes are hauled out for our eating pleasure. They come courtesy of Francesca. One is torta di mandorla (almond cake), the other, torta ai frutti di bosco (wild berry cake). They’re both divine in a heavy, crumbly way.
The feast ends with coffee. The cups are four decades old – a wedding present for Giulia’s mother: cherry-red espresso-sized cups with dragon motifs and gold rims.
‘Cinese,’ says the mamma, aware that Gill and I lived in China for a year.
Then she does something which isn’t very Chinese at all. She adds one heaped teaspoon of sugar to the two centimetres of espresso in each cup, before pointing to where the sugar jar is on the table in case we need more.
Back in Catania, inspired by the flawless lunch at Nicolosi, I resolve to add more Sicilian dishes to my kitchen repertoire.
Step one is to buy more olive oil. There’s no such thing as too much olive oil in a Sicilian kitchen: Giulia’s mum used the word ‘olio’ more than any other when she was giving me cooking tips. One day at a seaside village north of Catania, Gill and I stop to watch a primly dressed couple eating a restaurant lunch accompanied by little glasses of olive oil – as a drink.
Italians, along with Greeks and other intensive users of olive oil, tend to have lower rates of heart disease than other societies. (Cold comfort for poor Giulia and her mourning family, I guess.) The fat in olive oil is much healthier than that of other oils, plus it has high levels of antioxidants. Studies suggest that the risk of heart disease can be reduced by consuming a certain volume of extra-virgin olive oil every day.
Despite this, I seem cursed by olive oil in Sicily. One day as I’m unpacking a shopping bag in our kitchen, I drop an unopened one-and-a-half-litre bottle of olive oil onto the tiled floor. From two metres. The impact shatters the glass and flings viscous oil onto the cupboards, fridge, sink and stove, and all over my legs. Every crevice in the kitchen goes gooey. It’s a half-day clean-up job.
Unfathomably, one week later, I do exactly the same thing. How many people in the world have smashed a full bottle of olive oil at some point in their lives? Not many, surely. How many have done it twice in seven days?
‘You’re worse than my dad,’ says Gill, and that’s saying something. Tony, my father-in-law, is banned from unloading the dishwasher in the family home in Brisbane because of his inability to handle a piece of expensive bone china without accidentally dashing it to smithereens on a hard floor. It’s as if the two of us have defective opposable thumbs.
As I’m bent over the tiles mopping up fruity oil for the second time in a week, I feel an ache at the top of my left arm. I pause for a moment. The ache persists. In fact, it’s not just the left arm but stretches across into my chest and, well, the vicinity of my heart. Wouldn’t that be devilishly ironic? To die of a heart attack while up to my elbows in a substance heralded for its role in reducing heart attacks. I can just imagine Saint Peter saying on my arrival at the Pearly Gates, ‘I think the idea was to digest it, not scrub floors with it.’
Obviously this is a concern. The pain goes in a few minutes, but it’s back again the next day. And the next. The truth is that for several weeks now I’ve also been having some palpitations. The latter I attributed to drinking a handful of strong coffees a day, but now I begin to fear there’s a connection. Then, just to top things off, while I’m involved in all of this self-analysis I discover a grape-sized lump in the fleshy tissue of my left breast – again, right near my heart.
Fear scrambles my mind. The equation is simple: I’ve developed some kind of tumour which has spread (metastasised, even) to my heart, leaving me with months – maybe mere days – before a massive heart attack takes my life. None of which makes any medical sense at all, I’m sure.
What now? Maybe I should write a ‘bucket list’ of things to do before I die:
1. Find the piddling little duck in a puddle who stole our basil plant and put his goddamned eye out.
2. Remind Gill and family I love them.
3. Bungy.
I tell Gill my predicament. She’s shocked. With pits in our stomachs we come up with a course of action. Being young, poor and stupid, we’re entirely uninsured. So I can’t just march into a local hospital and demand treatment. Instead we resolve to approach Gill’s boss Palmina and ask if I can meet with her husband Salvo after work one day. Salvo is one of Catania’s leading plastic surgeons, so I figure he’ll know a thing or two about general health issues. If not, he can at least give me advice on my sticky-outy ears: is it worth getting them pinned?
When we meet, Salvo puts me at ease about the lump. One careful prod and he waves it aside as a small bulge of fatty tissue called a lipoma. Charming. It’s something to monitor, but of no immediate concern. The pains and palpitations, though, are a different issue.
‘Probably best to get that checked out,’ he says, and his tone of voice implies ‘soon’. It’s Friday. Salvo says he can book me in for an appointment with someone at his hospital on Monday.
The weekend is horrid. Gill and I have a trip to Cefalù planned with Natasha and her sister, visiting from London. We decide not to cancel. I try to be good company for everyone, but I can’t help the occasional feelings of dread. They come and go in silly surges, playing havoc with my train of thought: Isn’t it nice to be out of Catania for the weekend; this is fun, the sun is shining, the birds are – OH MY GOD, ON MONDAY I DIE.
Still, I’m at least reminded that Cefalù is one of Sicily’s best towns. I love its cluster of medieval buildings facing the sea, and the formidable crag, La Rocca, that rises behind them. A bracing bodysurf on the main beach lifts my spirits, too.
It’s a brief respite. Soon we’re back in Catania, and D-Day dawns. Our trip to the doctor is preceded by a visit to Signor Pull-the-Rent-in, to whom we owe a heinous chunk of rent as well as payment of an unexpectedly large electricity bill (Gill’s hairdryer, I’ll warrant a guess). It leaves us completely broke. If heart surgery is required, I may have to do it myself using a can opener and a spool of thread.
Gill has taken the day off from work to hold my hand – I’m not the most stout-hearted of patients. It requires two bus trips and almost ninety minutes for us to get to Ospedale Cannizzaro. The hospital is up near Aci Castello in Catania’s north. The grounds are immense, so we also have to wait for a shuttle bus to drive us to the main building.
Patrolling the hospital grounds are a roving crew of vigilantes – I don’t know what else to call them. They wear knee-high black leather boots, cool shades, peaked caps and gloves. They seem to act as security guards and administrative personnel at the same time.
‘Can I help you?’ asks one in broken English when the shuttle bus drops us off.
‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘I’m here to see Dottore Paccione.’
‘Ah, Dottore Paccione. He is a very well doctor.’
‘I’m glad he’s well,’ I almost say, ‘but what about me?’
Soon I’m led to a shabby waiting room. The reception counter is manned by another vigilante, a gnome-like fellow with a nicotine-stained beard. In his hand is a piece of paper torn from an exercise book, with a list of the day’s patients written in biro. From time to time he calls a name. Occasionally someone gets up and limps through a door into the doctors’ rooms beyond; more often than not, nobody answers, and the dumpy guy from the Hell’s Angels shrugs his shoulders and scribbles a line through the name. It’s not particularly reassuring.
I pass the time by examining a list of the resident doctors at the hospital and trying to guess their speciality based only on their names. Here’s what I come up with:
• Dr Gullota – Ear, Nose and Throat
• Dr Illuminato – Radiologist
• Dr La Spina – Chiropractor
• Dr Siringo – Anaesthesiologist
• Dr Zito – Dermatologist
• Dr Achille – Podiatrist
• Dr Sorbelli, Dr Tumminelli – Gastroenterologists
• Dr Fallico, Dr Fontana, Dr Pennisi – Urologists
There are others, too. Dr Trifiletta clearly specialises in treating hypochondria. Dr Buongiorno? Probably a psychologist. But something tells me that Dr Lo Gatto – ‘The Cat’ – is in the wrong place.
Glancing at the long list of doctors, I decide that I don’t particularly care which one of them looks after me, so long as it isn’t Dr Accurso.
Eventually I’m called. On hearing my non-Italian name, everyone turns to stare. I can tell they’re all playing ‘guess the ailment’. I walk up a hallway and into another waiting area. Actually, it’s just the dimly lit corridor outside the doctor’s office. Four people are standing in a queue. Why send us here? Why not leave us in the proper waiting room until the doctor’s actually ready? There are no chairs in the corridor, there’s nothing to read, no plants, no water dispensers, and nothing on the walls, aside from grime. There’s a used swab on the floor with a shoe’s treadmarks on it. From behind a door, I hear a woman yelling in pain – just presented with her bill, perhaps.
Finally it’s my turn. Dr Paccione is in his mid-fifties, entirely charming, though with a bedside manner that could best be described as lackadaisical. Salvo is here, too, having come along to lend some support and provide the doctor with a few details of my problem. It’s a nice touch.
Various tests are administered, culminating in an EMG: the doctor puts electrodes on different parts of my body, then pokes and prods my skin with something that looks like an acupuncture needle. A printer chugs away, preparing one of those earthquake-style graphs.
After an hour of tests, I’m given a diagnosis as good as it gets for someone who’s been contemplating life with coronary disease. My heart’s fine. Instead, I have an issue with a muscle or nerve in my left or right arm, and/or neck and shoulder. (The doctor is a little vague on the details.)
‘You say you’re a writer,’ he notes, attempting an analysis of the results.
‘Sort of,’ I reply.
‘And you spend all day hunched over a laptop?’
‘Perhaps not all day,’ I say, glancing briefly at Gill.
‘Hmm,’ he ponders. ‘It might be your posture. And a bad chair.’
As for the palpitations, he says they’re probably caffeine-related. I’ll need to take it easy on the macchiatos.
‘Anything else I can do?’ asks Dr Paccione.
How are you with defective opposable thumbs?
By way of treatment, I’m given a neck brace big enough for a heavyweight boxer, a sling for my arm, an anti-inflammatory gel, and a prescription for a series of injections, the purpose of which I never discover. The first of the injections is to be administered immediately. A young nurse leads me down another grubby corridor and shoves me onto a bed, face down. She yanks at my pants and applies some rubbing alcohol.
‘You’d better watch this,’ I hear her say to Gill.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re going to be doing the next five of these at home.’
I almost spin around on the bed. It’s a good thing I don’t – the needle might snap or, worse yet, insert itself somewhere far more painful than a fleshy buttock. Instead, I let out a feeble cry with my mouth buried in a pillow: ‘Harmph! ’
It’s the cry of a man whose wife has just been given carte blanche to stab him with sharp objects every day for a week.
We return home via a farmacia to get the prescription filled. I’m sure I detect a glint in the chemist’s eye as she looks at me in my neck brace and hands the needles to Gill.
The next morning, Gill opens the box of medicine on our small table. Out tumbles a hodgepodge of sealed brown pots half-filled with freeze-dried powder, a bunch of glass vials and a set of hypodermic syringes in various segments. Already on the table are swabs of different sizes, a bottle of sterilising alcohol, some surgical tape and a pair of scissors.
‘What am I supposed to do with all of this?’ Gill asks.
‘I thought the nurse explained everything?’
Gill gives me a cautionary look. ‘The nurse showed me how to give you an injection. She didn’t show me how to assemble a hypodermic needle or prepare medicine from powder.’
Stuck to the cardboard inside the box, we find a folded set of instructions. They’re in Italian only. They’re also complicated: ‘Nicetile 500mg/4ml. L-acetilcarnitina. 5 flaconcini di liofilizzato + 5 fiale solvente per uso i.m. ed e.v.; Polvere e solvente per soluzione iniettabile IM EV, 5 flaconcini + 5 fiale solvente 4 ml.’
My pulse quickens. Needles freak me out, so I don’t want this done incorrectly. When I was twelve, a doctor took some blood from my arm. He asked if I wanted to lie down, but I said I’d be fine. As the point went in and the first curl of red filled the dropper, I blacked out almost immediately, slid off the bed where I was sitting, cracked my head on a chair on the way to the floor, and bit through my tongue when my jaw hit the marble tiles. My paranoia has some justification.
‘I’ll ring Palmina and see if Salvo is there,’ says Gill. She opens the doors to the courtyard to get a weak bar of reception then punches the number into the mobile phone.
Salvo’s not home, but Palmina offers to help instead. Gill explains the problem with the needle kit and the Italian instructions. A conversation unfolds between the two of them, though of course I can only hear Gill’s responses.
Gill: ‘We’ve got instructions but can’t understand them.’
Pause.
Gill: ‘Yes, I suppose I can just guess.’
Pause.
Gill: ‘So, I actually snap the glass piece off the top?’
Pause.
Gill: ‘And how do I mix it?’
Pause. I watch as she shakes one of the pots of medicine and plays around with a syringe.
Gill: ‘Okay, I’ve pushed the needle through the rubber shield.’
Pause.
Gill: ‘Air bubbles? Yes, a few.’
Very long pause.
Gill: ‘Okay. Well, we definitely don’t want that to happen.’
Pause.
Gill: ‘But how will I know the right spot?’
Pause.
Gill: ‘His bottom.’
Pause.
Gill, laughing: ‘No, no, his bottom.’
More pausing, more laughing.
Gill: ‘Okay. Thanks, Palmina, I’ll do my best. Ciao.’
Happier now, my wife turns to face me, holding the needle with the sharp end pointing straight up, spurting medicinal liquid into the air in an almost celebratory fashion. ‘Let’s do this, shall we?’
I unbuckle my trousers and pull them down to my knees. Now I know how Singaporean wrongdoers feel as they line up to be caned.
‘On the bed,’ says Gill. I lie face down. ‘Okay, here goes.’
I squeeze my eyes and clench my teeth. I continue doing so. Thirty seconds pass. I open my eyes again. Turning my head to look at Gill, I say, ‘What’s going on?’
Suddenly she’s looking less enthusiastic. ‘I’m still not sure about this. What if I can’t pierce your flesh?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What if I can’t push it hard enough to break the skin?’
By now I just want the ordeal over. ‘As I said, can’t you just follow the instructions of that sexy little nurse at the hospital?’
The needle goes in quickly and easily. And, I’ll add, rather deeply.
Any discomfort and embarrassment caused by Gill’s administration of a week’s worth of hypodermic needles is nothing compared to the euphoria I feel at being cleared of serious illness. I can also take solace from the fact that plenty of people in the country are going through the same thing as me, at the same time. You see, Italians are crazy about needles. Injections are apparently prescribed for almost every ailment under the sun. We hear this from various sources, including one of Gill’s colleagues at Giga, an Irishman named Patrick. Patrick is married to a Catanese and he’s scared to let out even the tiniest sneeze at home, lest the family shuffle him off to a doctor for a series of pricks.
The other medical obsession in Italy is the suppository. Why put a pill in your mouth, argue the Italians, when you can insert it into your anal passage? There’s even a very bad joke related to the practice.
Q: What does ‘innuendo’ mean?
A: It’s Italian for ‘suppository’.
Gill should be thankful that I wasn’t prescribed a five-pack of suppositories. Having said that, something tells me she wouldn’t have stuck around to lend a helping hand (or finger). We’re still on our extended honeymoon, after all. Some things are just a little too warts-and-all for newlyweds.
For the record, the injections do absolutely nothing. Not a thing. I feel no change whatsoever in my arm or chest. The pains continue to come and go until months later when they finally ebb away, never – touch wood – to resurface.
In any case, the neck brace is a bigger burden than the needles. Together with the sling for my arm, I’m supposed to wear it all day for a couple of weeks. But I think the hospital has given me the wrong size. It’s huge and uncomfortable. My empathy for the coil-wearing women of Burma grows immeasurably.
As I’m in the internet café doing a few Google searches one day, typing in things like ‘is it okay not to wear neck brace?’ and ‘neck brace alternatives’, I discover that one of the terms for an orthopaedic neck support is a Minerva brace. It suddenly seems apt that this burden has been prescribed to me, an erstwhile Roman historian. Minerva, you see, was also the name of a figure from ancient Roman mythology. Among other things, she was the goddess of poetry.
In the spirit of the goddess, then, I have come up with a little poem of my own:
Italian doctors’ remedies are best described as sparse,
All they do is ask your wife to jab you in the arse.