Searching for Authenticity In Florence
Travel Blog • Joanna Kakissis • 10.18.07 | 8:51 AM ET
Photo by When the gesticulating Italian selling printed artifacts said “baper” instead of “paper,” Shashi Tharoor couldn’t resist asking the follow-up question: “Where are you from?” “Florence,” the Italian replied defensively. “But before that?” pressed Tharoor. “Jordan,” the salesman replied. “Originally.” Tharoor, an author and former under-secretary general of the United Nations, explored authenticity in the age of globalization in a clever essay in Financial Times. He traveled to the historic Renaissance city—“with its self-conscious air of serving as a citadel of centuries of Italian civilization”—to find a Jordanian man selling traditional Florentine handicraft, a couple of Bangladeshi waiters who spoke Italian with a Sylheti accent, and a Japanese woman who worked at the fabled Farmacia of Santa Maria Novella. “Perhaps our sense of what is and is not authentic needs to change as well in our mixed-up world,” Tharoor writes.
Globalization may have made immigration more widespread but people have long been leaving their homelands to make new lives in foreign lands. Some remain in limbo, in the psychological margins between their two countries. Others—especially the children of immigrants, like me—go native. In Athens, I’ve met young African women who speak beautiful Greek, who have crushes on poncy Greek singers, and who matriculate in Greek universities. Near my house one day, I saw a handsome young Ethiopian man sketching the facade of an Art Deco house and I stopped to talk to him. He asked me where I was from. “The United States,” I said without hesitation. “And you?” In perfect and barely accented Greek, he responded: “I’m from Athens.”