A scene from Dante’s Inferno by Botticelli<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nItalians seem to gain some sort of pleasure out of these exchanges, but are often \u201cdisappointed\u201d by an American\u2019s reluctance to engage.\u00a0 If you\u2019re staying in Italy for the long run, you need to unlearn this tendency, as it will only lead to endless frustration.\u00a0 You\u2019re in their country, so it\u2019s incumbent upon you to learn their ways. We come from a country where everything<\/i> is possible, so \u201cit\u2019s not possible\u201d sounds like a truly hopeless situation and the perfect moment for a hasty retreat.\u00a0 In Italy, it\u2019s merely the next phrase after, \u201cbuongiorno<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\nThrough the Gates of Hell<\/h2>\n
In this post\u00a0I’ve\u00a0attempted to impart a bit of my hard-earned wisdom to you, my kind readers.\u00a0 And these little pearls are valuable, no doubt.\u00a0 But the best advice that I can give you is precisely this: enter this den of chaos only when absolutely necessary.\u00a0 Remember the words of the great Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, \u201cAbandon all hope, ye who enter here.\u201d\u00a0 Dante placed this warning above the Gates of Hell, but it\u2019s no less fitting at the Italian post office.\u00a0 So buy your stamps at the tobacco shop\u2014and make friends elsewhere, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, \u201cA long history of organized postal systems in Italy began with the cursus publicus of the Romans.\u201d We know from the writings of Procopius that through a series of stations, a relay system was developed that greatly increased the speed of long distance communication in ancient Rome. Each station maintained a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":680,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,6,4],"tags":[380,52,28,15,60,86,14,492],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}