Yesterday, I powered through a day of meetings and writing, mostly with coffee and nicotine meds. Around 930, I met S, after her acting class, at a nearly empty Eataly. And we drank wine and ate pasta and spent too much money on cheese to take home. And I also bought Italian shaving cream, which made me feel comically excited about shaving today—as if I would emerge from the bathroom with a cultivated European sheen, like I would emerge from the bathroom as Marcello Mastroianni.
Places like Eataly—High Modern Monoliths—represent an intersection of estrangement and familiarity. You have this giant, cavernous, flat iron space—on one hand, very American. It's pumped full of pop and house music. But it's also full of imported foods from Italy, of course. And the layout and decor from the right angle make you feel like you're in an Italian market. At least make you feel like you're a tourist in an Italian market—not real Euro, of course. Eataly does replicate the feeling of being a tourist: it's tourism brought to your home. That's the appeal: your white-collar millennial professional gets to relive their study abroad experience, a little bit. But at the same time, you can't help but feel estranged from your own feelings of familiarity. You know, underneath your shopping or dining experience, that all of this is about money, about market share: a business opportunity has been located in you and people like you.
So also there's this intimacy, this intersection between intimacy and impersonality. And you’re laughing, having a nice night. The wine is good. The pasta is good. No one else is really there. It's 10 at night. They're starting to close. You’re in this cavernous place. It's not a restaurant that will stay open a little bit longer. It's not a little family Italian restaurant with an unmarked door in a medieval section of Siena. No—it's a giant food house full of tired workers, some of them migrants, who want to go home.
So there’s, also, in this highly modernist experience of being in Italy, that’s definitely not Italy, an intersection between expertise and reappropriation.