A little piece of America

On Saturday, N and I decided to do some shopping in Formia, a city in southern Lazio. He was looking for shirts, and I was looking for anything that would fit me. Being a medium-sized American is not easy in a country where the clothing available in plus size (taglie comode) shops begins with the equivalent of an American size 6. I've seen conversions charts that claim that a 42 is an 8, and perhaps it was thirty years ago, but I was wearing 42 (and 44) here in Italy while I still fit into a size 6 back home. Anything larger than that, and you are a bella grossa donna (actual words used to describe me by the workman we hired to plough Campo di Pere.) For anyone wondering, I currently wear a size 8 American.

Aside of the plus-size considerations, which admittedly are not too much of a problem given that it is possible to find larger sizes here, one major difficulty is that most of the clothes available in my size are simply just larger versions of clothes designed for girls who like to show off their thongs in ultra-low rise jeans. Those young ladies must all have very thin legs, because I haven't found many trousers that I can even pull up over my thighs. Trousers that do fit my legs tend to gape at the waist and bunch in the front. My muscular legs also mean that buying boots here is out of the question. Recently, N bought me a pair of rubber boots to wear at Campo di Pere, and they are uncomfortably tight around the calves. Does that mean that even the legs of farmer's wives are stick-thin?

But back to Formia. I must have tried on about a dozen pairs of trousers that day, all of them my size, and all but one of them made for women with a body type completely different from mine. I bought the one pair that fit well, despite its being overpriced (and my not liking it very much.) But I need more than one pair of trousers, and I am running out of places to shop. N has begun to take this problem rather seriously, and he often proposes new places to look for trousers. Yesterday he asked, "Why don't you go to the mercato americano?" The mercato americano is the section of our weekly market where all the stalls sell used and remaindered clothes, allegedly from the United States.

There was some sunshine this morning, so I headed out early in order to get to the mercato americano while the selection would still be good. When I arrived, I found all kinds of clothes dumped in large piles on long tables. Sorting through cheap synthetic blouses and skirts and stacks of jeans, I quickly became aware of two problems with the mercato americano. Very few of the clothes were actually American, and almost all of those that were American were Levi's 501 jeans with a waist measurement of 29 or 30 inches. (Of course, if they had been any larger Americans would have bought them and there wouldn't have been any need to send them to Italy.) I was a bit depressed by these discoveries, but something compelled me to keep looking, and so I did until I saw this:
That's a pair of Tommy Hilfiger jeans that looked like my size. There was no way to know for sure because the size printed on the tag was neither American nor Italian, but I bought them anyway, and rushed home as fast as I could to try them on. My hunch was correct, they are perfect. The rise is just right, the legs are boot cut, and the color is just the way I like it. They were made in Mexico of U.S. grown cotton, and that's American enough for me.