Column: A stick shift in Italy
“Speak softly and carry a big stick” may have been Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy, but I know from recent experience, it’s still the practice of Americans in foreign lands.
I speak of the selfie stick, a device that allows you to extend your smartphone into the ideal position to photograph your own sweet self.
In the past, at scenic overlooks, ancient ruins and architecturally significant structures, I found myself several times a day holding someone else’s camera, encouraging them to smile and trying to get the entire family plus the ancient ruin into the picture at the same time. Now no one asks.
The selfie stick has made all that go the way of the buggy whip. In fact the selfie stick could bring back the buggy whip; it’s so versatile, it could be used as one.
I observed this phenomenon during a recent trip to Italy with my husband to celebrate our anniversary. There were no selfie sticks at our wedding, but if there had been, they’d have made excellent chuppah poles to support the ceremonial marriage canopy.
In Florence, I saw selfie sticks extended aloft to assess the waiting line for entry to Brunelleschi’s Dome, deployed to poke through garbage and used as a sort of cattle prod by parents herding their children. I’m told they can be used for something called “up-pantsing” — looking up someone’s trousers, usually without their knowledge. Fortunately, in Italy, I was not wearing pants.
At Rome’s lovely outdoor market Campo di Fiori, bouquets of selfie sticks were offered for sale in buckets next to boxes of porcini mushrooms and slabs of pecorino Romano.
Developed about 10 years ago, the device was originally called a monopod, but in 2014, it became ubiquitous, a global icon of narcissism and touristic cluelessness.
While useful, it is still a stick, and therefore forbidden from places like the Museum of Porcelain in Florence’s Boboli Garden. It is sobering to contemplate what a selfie-gone-wrong could do to a display case of priceless 18th century Doccia ware.
The devices were banned last summer at many European museums and at the Colosseum in Rome, where one American couple took a selfie after carving their initials in the wall of the 2,000-year-old stadium.
In Italy, selfie sticks seemed to be banned from restaurants as well, although every trattoria and osteria we visited was crawling with cell phone-wielding diners immortalizing their mozzarella and anchovies.
The old saw about it being impossible to get a bad meal in Italy held up for us and I have photographic proof.
One memorable meal was very good but very odd. It was a high-concept restaurant called Il Santo Graal (The Holy Grail). The name should have told us that dinner would not be a simple bowl of pasta. The chef had a poetic side. Every dish that came to the table had artistically placed dabs of sauce, and foam with lumps of dark things that tasted sweet, alongside dabs of pastel things that tasted savory.
We enjoyed eating who-knows-what including a dish placed before my spouse that ostensibly contained steak tartare– one of his favorites. The bowl was covered by a thick red membrane that he had to break through to get to the steak. To that end, the waiter handed him an X-Acto knife.
My husband and I are veterans of the bad old days of print publishing — a time when an X-Acto knife was the tool of choice if you were trying to remove a comma from a paragraph of camera-ready copy about to be released to the printer. Think razor blade on the end of a selfie stick. This X-Acto was intended to stand in for a table knife, but I couldn’t help thinking that someone would emerge from the kitchen, slap my husband’s hand and ask what on earth he thought he was doing eating steak tartare with a razor blade. (Of course, I took a picture of it with my phone.)
Back on Shelter Island, I see so many photogenic spots and realize it’s inevitable that the selfie stick will reach our own pebbly shores soon enough. Ferry captains will tell stories of tourists walking backwards off the boat attempting to photograph themselves with the gingerbread cottages of the Heights in the background. Someone will narrowly miss knocking a hole in the portrait of Ezra L’Hommedieu in the parlor at Sylvester Manor.
If this is our fate, why not get out in front of it? Let’s put our heads together and design a Shelter Island selfie stick. It will double as a snapper pole, complete with popper, hooks and Shelter Island logo for $39.99. All proceeds will go to the Town Medical Center, which will surely field an influx of selfie/snapper pole injuries.
