COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

Are you there? I’m not. I’m in Italy, which is far away, although cellphones have definitely brought it closer. I’ve been here a while so you’ll have to fill me in when I get back. I assume everything is still standing, everyone is happy, more or less, the 55 is still going nowhere and no decision yet on a new city hall in Newport Beach, which is about where we were when I left.

Things are about the same here as the last time I was in Italy. It is a breathtakingly beautiful nearly impossible relaxing and maddening place, and that’s just the stuff that happens before lunch.

As I told you last week, I’m here with my brother Dom, visiting our relatives, who account for about 8% of the population of Italy.

They love seeing us not just because we’re family, but because we are the only Americans they know.

Thus, we are expected to know, among other things, why Arnold Schwarzenegger drives a Hummer, why George Bush does and says the things he does and says, what some actress from “The O.C.” I’ve never heard of is really like, why we don’t do more about global warming and why do we call it baseball not batball?

And keep in mind, all this depends on my Italian, which is somewhere between the pre-school level and first grade, although first grade is a stretch.

We started out in Milano to see the northern Italy contingent of cousins.

I love Milano, which Americans rarely visit other than on business. It’s a big, bustling, sophisticated city and the center of Italian design, fashion and finance.

Then it was a quick flight to Sicily and the town where our dad was born, a fishing village about 40 kilometers west of Palermo.

If there is water anywhere in this world as blue and green and turquoise as along the Sicilian coast, I haven’t seen it. People from around the world trek to the tiny village where our mom was born to see a lagoon called the Zingaro.

The water is a startling cobalt blue and so impossibly clear that you can easily see the bottom some 80 feet below.

A high point of the trip for me was going to the window about 5:30 one morning and opening the shutters to find the bay crowned with a crescent moon and one, dazzlingly bright star beside it that looked close enough to touch.

Next it was on to Palermo to see another major cousin contingent and take the action that separates the sane from the mad in Italy — renting a car. Driving in Italy falls into two categories: driving on the autostrada — the autobahn Italian style — and driving in the cities, which was the inspiration for Dante’s “Inferno.”

I’ve driven in most of the major Italian cities, but Palermo is in a class by itself. There is nothing even close. Driving in Rome, a mistake that most people swear they will never repeat, is like driving on the Autopia at Disneyland compared to Palermo.

Traffic lights and signs are meaningless, irrelevant, a silly remnant of another time.

Imagine street after street as wide and as busy as Harbor Boulevard or Pacific Coast Highway where the only, and I mean only, way to cross them is to throw your car — or if you’re on foot, yourself — into the flow of traffic, block the first lane, get cursed at and curse back, nose into the next lane, block that one, curse, get cursed at, repeat, until you reach the other side.

But here is the piece de resistance. The scooters, which are everywhere and mostly have two people on them not only do not stop, ever, they never slow down, not ever, and they flit and weave through the crush of cars and people like gnats who just downed a double espresso.

You quickly learn to ignore them because you really need to stay focused on whether the truck bearing down on you is going to stop, which miraculously, it always does. And that more than anything is the core difference between drivers here and us.

They know, for a fact, it will stop. It would never occur to them in a millennium that it won’t, whereas the rest of us are left to flinch, stomp on the brakes and wonder what is to become of us. I did discover an interesting thing though.

I have a respectable selection of curse words in Italian and Sicilian, but I ran out completely by the time we were a half mile into Palermo. I had no choice but to curse in English, which worked even better because people were so stunned to hear it. In fact, one driver gave me an appreciative shrug that seemed to say, “I don’t know what that means but I like it. Could you teach me that?” Italians can fit a lot into a shrug.

Now, it’s on to Taormina, near Mt. Etna and one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. And that is all I have to tell you, almost.

You notice that I mentioned neither the food nor the wine, which are my downfall. On this trip in particular, damage has been done that will take months if not years to repair. Things were going so well until we stopped in a pasticceria — a pastry shop — in my mother’s hometown.

At that point, with just a casual glance at the miniature cannoli, the brioche with the chocolate-mocha gelato and the granita limone, the entire system collapsed, restraint was gone, and order was not restored for nearly an hour. I am so ashamed. Now you know, but we will never speak of this again, not ever. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at ptrb4@aol.com.