Italian Snacks

Italian snacks are simply better, in part because they’re — well, simple. Example: on the return flight from Milano, via Alitalia, we get taralli. This is an old Pugliese concoction, amounting to breadsticks tied in a knot. There’s not much to them other than flour, oil, salt, and — secret weapon — rosemary. They’re maybe the best snack I’ve ever had on a plane. More substantial than potato chips. More crunchy than peanuts. A tiny bag goes a long way toward stanching the hunger we’ve amassed while delayed on the runway. Why can’t we get these on American flights? For that matter, why can’t we get these in American bars, or at baseball games?

Another example: the aperitivo. Things can get complicated here, but let’s start with the fundamentals. Every day at approximately 6:30 or 7:00 — the pre-dinner hour — Italians converge on local restaurants, balconies, or merely kitchen tables to down a glass of wine or a beer. If you’re at home, you break out a snack — a bowl of taralli, say. But if you’re out, the snack comes to you. In its default form it’ll be potato chips, plus maybe a bowl of olives. From there things can get more involved: small cubes of focaccia, or frittata, or slender pizza wedges. You might get some fette of salami or prosciutto. You don’t have to ask for these things; they’re included with your drink. Better still, you don’t have to pay for them. I have no idea how Italian restaurateurs, from the smallet to the grandest, make this work economically — especially given that drink prices tend to be lower than in the US. But make it work they do. The practice is universal. In Italy, apparently, drinking is truly inseparable from eating, even if part of what’s consumed are the operator’s margins.

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On a not-so-related note: Once upon a time, those of us accustomed to the alacrity of the US business approach to customer service had a choice in Italy: wallow in frustration, or write it off as quaint and old world, which is to say dying. A decade or so later, maybe the teacher could stand to learn something from the former student.

Because one of the great turnarounds in recent memory seems to have taken place, in an industry — and a country — known less for turnaround than for flameout. Alitalia, the public-private, semi-nationalized airline of Italy, has had more lives than European cats, most of them courtesy of the Italian taxpayer. It’s been bailed out no fewer than three times in my own memory, which reaches back only to when I started paying attention (and flying it) thirteen years ago when I met my wife. Nothing seemed to help. Those of us who flew wondered at only one thing, which was why anybody bothered.

The catalog of laments was thick. Inept service, when one got service at all. Long lines, manned by personnel who seemed uninformed and unconcerned. Air stewards and stewardesses who dressed and carried themelves as if they’d just come — unsuccessfully — from a season of The Universe’s Next Most Luscious and Sexy, and were blaming passengers for their early exit. Flubbed orders; lost baggage; misdirected seating. I’ve seen drinks tossed from one aisle to a customer two aisles over, just to save a trip. Flying Alitalia was like being imprisoned — only for 8 to 12 hours, but still — in a nightmare compendium of every gruesome customer service philosophy that ever plagued the state of Italy herself — a state that, for decades, it’s worth remembering, blended a socialist vision of commercial effort with an absolute sense of its own unerring judgment on dress, food, and social graces. Work was something other airlines did — those less attractive, less tastefully heedless of profits.

Today, that had all changed. From the instant of checkin, through boarding, seating, drink service, lunch service, snacking and general inflight comportment, Alitalia was — to us, today at least — unfailingly professional, organized, prompt, courteous, knowledgable, even kind. It was among the better flying experiences I’ve had. In fact I scarcely noticed I was having an experience at all, except when I needed to.

United-Continental, don’t look now: those footsteps you hear might be coming from fine Tuscan leather.