Why Texas Looks Like Italy

My brain did some interesting gymnastics when I climbed Mt. Bonnel–aided, I think, by the fact that I’d been listening to an NPR story about Southern Italy before I arrived there. The thought that kept crossing my mind as I climbed up through brush was, ‘The West really does look like Italy.’

Edit: It was pointed out to me, that what I really meant here, is that West Texas looks like Italy. I should’ve remembered the lesson I learned from Bernie: that Texas is really five states. (Even though the narrator of that particular clip grants Austin a separate status from West Texas.)

I’ve never been to Italy, but, to me, the landscape I was climbing through felt like it belonged there more than it belonged in Texas. I think Spaghetti Westerns are to blame.

I’ve seen my fair share of Spaghetti Westerns, and I’m always very aware that they were shot in Italy when I’m watching them. So much so that I start to think of them as being set there, rather than in the West. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a perfect example. I’ve been told so many times that it was shot in Italy that I think of it as an Italian movie. The action doesn’t really take place in the West. Rather it occurs in a slightly fantastical realm. That’s the only place a character could get away with being called, the Man with No Name. And since this fantastical realm is created by an Italian, in Italy, it feels more of Italy than of the American West.

So, wandering through the landscape that movie, and other Spaghetti Westerns, try to imitate, all I could think was how much it looked like Italy, even if I knew that was a sort of backwards way to think about. The line between what was imitating what was and what just was didn’t seem to be there.

And if you’ve stuck around through this rambling I’ll also point out that Arthur Dent has trouble with that line as well.

The more he backed away, the more scared he became. After a while, he realized that the reason for this was that in all the films he had seen in which the hero backs farther and farther from some imagined terror in front of him, he then manages to bump into it coming up from behind.