On a recent trip to Italy I experienced all of what you attribute to the US in a way that makes my typical US experience seem full of pointless boundaries and d

On a recent trip to Italy I experienced all of what you attribute to the US in a way that makes my typical US experience seem full of pointless boundaries and distance. The grocery store was a huge social scene that they let me, a foreigner, in on. I was given plenty of unsolicited life advice in train stations. Most of that would be called inappropriate in polite circles in the US. I wondered how much this was that my ancestry is half Italian so I looked the part. My wife seemed in contrast much more likely to be figured as a foreigner and given distance.