He looked me: “Not one curve. Can you believe it?”

I could — made me think of Highway 101 in California. He couldn’t. Life in Italy is a series of curves to which you adapt. There is zero scope for autopilot.

Adaptation and adjustment are the name of the game. This can be trying. On the other hand you can enjoy lemon zest from your own lemons, perhaps with salmon and those 200 grams of penne.

It was May 1, International Workers’ Day, a holiday. Yet, most people were working, a lot of stores open. I heard the following exchange:

“It’s the workers’ holiday and everyone is working!”

“Yes, I know, but of course they don’t work the rest of the time!”

“That’s true.”

There’s still a continuous banter in the streets of Italy, as when I lived here 30 years ago. Italy has cherry-picked modernity, taking only so much. Something in it has resisted the reduction of human interaction to the transactional minimum. Something in it has resisted the squeezing of the last cent of profit from every exchange. Something in it recognizes the human need for community and what a couple of sentences to a stranger can do. There are still innocent smiles in Italy, something you can only call humility. They don’t teach you that at marketing school. They don’t tell you how monotonous self-promotion can become, how tiresome, and finally inhuman. People return to Italy for its beauty, of course, but also for a refuge from relentlessness. Conversations veer here and there in the elasticity of Italian time, loosened from the constraints of time as a metric of productivity.

At the pharmacy, where it’s better to have a prescription but rules can be bent, I heard this:

“We don’t live in Italy.”

“Better that way!”

“Why?”

“Everything is difficult here.”

It is. Efficiency was not one of the cherry-picked items. Arriving at Milan Linate airport for the first time in decades, I found the same cumbersome buses from aircraft to terminal. The ATM machine was broken, the Information Desk unmanned. Strange, the Milan world’s fair, Expo 2015, has just opened — a time, if any, to spruce things up. The themes of the fair are guaranteeing food security; combating waste (Italy has much to do); improving nutrition (I can’t see that rabbit being beaten); and preserving the environment.