THIS is the time of year when a visit to your local bar usually involves a complicated obstacle course as the familiar and well trodden path from cornetto counter to cappuccino on the bar to table to read the morning papers becomes strewn with alien objects. Brightly coloured boxes of panettone, wrapped in Christmas glitter and tinsel, are the guilty parties.
How, what is panettone, you ask? Panettone I discovered, was something that the newly appointed manager of AC Milan soccer team would not get to eat. I later realised that panettone was Christmas cake, Italian style, and to suggest that a person will not get to eat his panettone" is to suggest that he/she will be fired before Christmas.
Panettone was originally a Milanese cake hence the use of the colourful expression regarding the AC Milan manager's limited job prospects but in modern times it has been adopted nationwide. Usually consumed with a glass of proseeco or vino splimante, it may be the national Christmas cake but it is a long way removed from the dark, fruit laden, alcohol laced, marzipan and sugar iced beastie that the Irish grannie makes.
Once you get to know it, pane one is more than acceptable in its own way but at first gulp, it seems like a rather dull, not so spongy, sponge cake. Anyway, the point about panettone is that it becomes the subject of a massive sales pro-motion every Christmas, a promotion that goes on through all the usual media channels but which also focuses on the nation's bars and cafes.
Boxes of the stuff fill up almost every bar corner in the land, often banked up like bales of straw at the bends on Formula One race tracks, there to tempt the unsuspecting, bleary eyed hack. One step left to avoid the boxes and, oops, there goes your cappuccino as someone bangs into you.
Mind you, down at my local, La Vela, in the village of Trevignano, the problem does not exist, since it is one of a new breed of open plan bars that offer plenty of room for early morning manoeuvre.
There was a time when the village bar was a rather more straightforward affair, where it was taken for granted that the vast majority of the clients would not have time to sit down for their coffee.
Il Tartuffo, known to everyone as Ermete's Bar after its owner, is such a cafe, sited right in the middle of the village looking out at the neatly manicured lawn in front of the Commune or Town Hall.
Ermete's is open and doing business by six o'clock every morning. Clients at that time of day do not usually wish to sit down for a long read of Corriere Della Sera the newspaper kiosk is not open, anyway, even if they did or for intimate conversations on the relative merits of Schopenhauer and Kant.
Just as they do in many city bars, people come and go in a relative hurry, grab a cornetto, gulp down a cappuccino and make a run for it.
In the city, they're heading for the office but here in the village many of Ermete's early morning clientele are headed outdoors to the vineyard, the olive grove the kiwi fields, or the building site, depending on the time of year.
The relative affluence of the last 20 years, however, has changed village bar life. La Vela, built five years ago, is an expression of such socio economic change, of the well being generated by Italy's post war economic miracle. With full length glass panel walls on three sides and looking out across the lake to Bracciano, the underlying logic of its design is that people will want to stop, sit and chat or read, whatever the time of year.
Implicit in such logic is that people have the time and the economic ease to take a longish breakfast or lunch or afternoon drink or whatever. In a village where, until 30 years ago, people lived largely off fishing and small holdings, it was not always so.
On the walls of his older bar, Ermete has photographs of Fascist Youths complete with Black Shirts, pictures from village life in the 1930s. Ermete knew all the kids in the photo, all of them were part of his village peer group. He once told me, and I have never had any reason to doubt it, that, the major attraction of the Fascist movement for most of the kids in the picture was that it represented a chance to get their first pair of shoes.
Ermete himself, however, is far too good a businessman not to adapt to the changing times and his bar this summer extended its front outwards on to the piazza to offer more tables and chairs. Ermete is also too good a businessman to let the panettone season go by unobserved.
His bar, like thousands of others this week, is crammed with boxes of panettone. Far more interesting, however, is his homemade town, a delicious kind of nougat and nut cake that you buy by the large and imposing slice, and which, like panettone, is a definite sign that the Italian Christmas is upon us. Happy Christmas to you.