Ferragosto: closed for holidays, open for a feast with the family
It is a real exodus. They all return: they go to the beach for three or four days, flee to the mountains, to their Tuscan village or to a small Calabrian house. In general, there are already few who resist in Rome during this month, with unbearable heat and sticky humidity, but hardly anyone forgives this date.
Those who stay are only those who have to work, this year they walk with a tight belt or are mired in a more or less bizarre situation not included in any of the previous three. This has always given a lot of play to Italian directors and writers in movies and books (brilliant 'Vacaciones de Ferragosto' ( 'Pranzo di Ferragosto' , 2008) , where four elderly women are left alone in a flat in the Trastevere while their children go on vacation).
From the day before, everything becomes chaos: stations and airports are filled with people who have not booked and want to travel yes or yes, trains suffer delays for reasons "out of their control" and in supermarkets half an hour before from its closing queues are mounted only similar to those of New Year's Eve. And it is that Ferragosto is, above all, a kind of Christmas in a bikini, an excuse to get together as a family at the vacation home and eat like tomorrow will never come : fresh fish, pasta, pizzas and specialties from each of the regions.
Then the youngest organize get-togethers with all their childhood friends, they go to look for themselves with the motorinos and to greet the parents who are almost like their own, and They go partying at the discos at the foot of the sea . The Ferragosto hangover, almost out of obligation, “you have to spend it under l_’ ombrellone_ (the umbrella) ” on the beach. It says so on another sign, that of a hardware store in the San Lorenzo neighborhood. And so it must be. Says one who writes from her tablet, on a beach in Calabria.
An empty Trastevere cafeteria, deserted during Ferragosto... at least with Italians