Placemats are at the center of Italian eating.  If you are sitting at a table, you have a placemat in front of you.  I suppose it is a nice tradition, keeping things clean and tidy and not ruining one’s kitchen table.  The ironic thing is, however, that that the placemats often become dirty and worn so you are still eating on a suspicious surface.  The most problems infact, usually involve cheese.  Graded cheese, melted cheese, soft and sticky cheese, on the bottom sides of placemats all across Italy after months, even years of meals at the table.  I don’t mean to say that everyone has a house-full of dirty placemats, I admit it is probably just the people I know. 

    I once lived with two of the heaviest chainsmokers I have ever met for about six months.  They were cousins and created an axis of flith and confusion in our house, so strong, I nearly had to escape in the night.  They ashed their cigarette butts on their dinner plates after a meal, but the one time I sat down at the table and placed my dish directly on the wood they screamed in fright.  “Ma, sei pazza?”  I am afraid I was crazy because there was a reenactment of the same scenario only a week later at a friend’s house.  Had I learned nothing?  

      It isn’t that people don’t use placemats elsewhere,  it is just I have never seen any people use them with such urgency.  My grandmother used cloth placemats, which much like her tiled kitchen floor, served as a collection trough for anything fallen from plate or counter.  She did her best to rebel against the stereotype of the sparkling Sicilian kitchen.  The nuns from my Montessori kindergarten also were into placemats, but they made us clean them ourselves, with windex, when we were five. 

       I only think of it now because last week at my friend’s house, where he never is the one who cooks (his girlfriend and her sister do that…), he certainly remembered his placemats.  They were a little worn and had some bits of cheese embedded in them.  Frankly, it felt like home.  For all intensive purposes his kitchen was clean, but there was something antique about it all, some pieces that after decades would never change or vanish.