Appearance matters – postscript!

A small select group of us sat talking Italian the other evening in the Café Rosa Negra on Calle Ecuador here in Vigo.

The owners of this café appear to have had a good idea for boosting their clientele. On several evenings a week they have what I will call tertulias, the old term for groups of people meeting to chat and discuss things cultural, political, topical or just gossipy. Poets and painters and such used to do it but now it’s just us. You pay €4 which includes a drink and makes payment to the Escuela de Idiomas who then pay the native speaker for coordinating the tertulia. Everyone wins: the customers get to practise their foreign language (French, Italian, Portuguese, English, even Esperanto) the native speaker and the Escuela de Idiomas earn some money and the cafe has extra customers.

Anyway, there we were, a small select group talking Italian. The conversation wandered around various topics: football, fashion, visits to Italy, footballers’ wives and girlfriends, hairstyles, weather in Vigo, living in Vigo, football, fashion..... In the middle of this we discovered that our Italian friend considers French and Italian women to be the most elegant of all. English women – well, better not go there – and as for Spanish women, well, many of them overdress to go to the shops. Italian and French women, however, know how to do things properly.

Now, this business of how you dress to go to the shops keeps coming up all over the place. My Italian teacher in Manchester once declared that English women going shopping are a disaster: they go shopping dressed any old how, often with their hair in curlers! Quite true, I’ve seen them. Not that I would go shopping in curlers, but then I don’t use them. Italian women, on the other hand, he insisted, would never even leave the house without being properly dressed up and made up. It’s a matter of pride, rather like my grandmother in the 1950s and 60s who never left the house without putting her hat on!

I wonder what he would make of the British so-called yummy mummies, well-off young women who were criticised some time ago for being too lazy to get dressed properly to drive their children to their expensive schools in their expensive 4x4s. They just threw a tracksuit or in some cases just a dressing gown over their pyjamas. The problems arose if they ran out of petrol on the way back. It’s rather embarrassing to go to the petrol station in your jimjams!

Mind you, here in Vigo you can see something similar but it’s usually the older generation. Just yesterday I saw an old gent in a fine plaid dressing gown walking along the street to put his rubbish in the container. There’s an old dear I’ve seen several times on Travesía de Vigo, doing her recycling in her nice pink bathrobe. And one day I saw a younger woman in one of those we-sell-everything shops at the bottom of a block of flats, the equivalent of the old corner shop on an English housing estate. This lady had clearly just popped down to the shop from the block of flats for some item she had forgotten earlier – flannelette pyjamas, warm dressing gown, slippers. Overdressed for the shops? I wonder!