Il Ventilator

I’ve always been a light sleeper. For years I’ve had to sleep with the ambient noise of a fan when I could. (I keep a small fan in my car for when I’m on the road.) If I don’t have a fan, I have earplugs to help keep the noise out. When I went to Italy several years ago, I stayed in three different hotels that had air conditioning, it was in June, and the fans from the air conditioners worked fine as ambient noise. But one hotel, on the island of Procida, didn’t have air conditioning. When I checked in, I asked the receptionist if they had a fan I could use, but she didn’t speak any English, and I had to go through various linguistic gyrations, followed by a crude drawing of a fan on a bar napkin, to get her to understand what I was trying to ask for, but she didn’t seem to think they had whatever it was I was wanting. But when I returned from my walk around the island that afternoon, she flagged me down as I was going to my room and presented me with a black metal fan from what must have been from the Mussolini days. But it worked fine, and I considered the whole interaction a success in multicultural understanding. And I slept quite well for the three nights I was there.

On our most recent trip to Italy, on our first evening in Amalfi, I asked the manager of the hotel (Lidomare) if they had a fan – I’d learned that the Italian was il ventilator, but I still had to draw a picture on a scrap of paper. He told me – this was not in any coherent conversation but rather a staccato of Italian/English from him and English/Italian from me – that they didn’t have one but there was a heater in the room that they could turn on. I didn’t want a heater (it only was in the 50s overnight) and told him that all was fine. I slept well that night with my earplugs. As we were leaving the next morning, he stopped me to say that he was having the house keeper try to find a fan he thought they might have, but it had been stashed away somewhere where no one could remember. But when we returned that afternoon, there in our room was a floor fan. And it was not from the Mussolini days. In fact, it had not a scratch or speck of dust on it. It had not been stuffed in the back of some closet. I have no doubt that he had had someone go out (or did so himself) and buy a new fan. Not necessarily just for me. Perhaps he had thought, Maybe we should have a fan for such a situation. But this was clearly a brand new fan.

You hear about indifference, if not surliness, between Italians and tourists, particularly American tourists. That’s certainly not been my experience. If it exists, perhaps it’s because of the tourists and not the Italians. My experience has been of cheerful accommodation over and beyond what I might have expected. And I would like to think that part of that is because I don’t present myself as the demanding, entitled American (which I have seen too often), but rather as a pitiful lost soul, stranded on a lonely shore, in need only of il ventilator.