Like comparing olives to oranges

It is hard to face Los Angeles after three weeks in Italy. Despite famously sharing that Mediterranean climate, the two places are about as aesthetically and culturally removed from each other as they could be while still sharing the Western Hemisphere and a devotion to espresso.

In Italy, the Medicis are positively modern, and it is not unusual to tread upon a road that predates Christianity, to lean against a wall that that has withstood Romans, barbarians and the black plague. “Do you know how much you’d pay back in L.A. for distressing like this?” said my brother, running his hand along a Siennese building. He examined his blackened hand. “Of course, this is actually distressed, and we’re not so interested in that.”

In Italy, the supermarkets close on Sunday, entire towns shut down for siesta, and everyone has a cell phone, a cigarette and a scooter and the graceful ability to utilize them simultaneously. In Italy, everything is lovely, charming, romantic and, to the Angeleno eye at least, miniaturized. In the time it takes you to get from downtown to UCLA in rush hour, you can drive from Rome to Florence, although you will have similar trouble parking.

Even in the big cities, things in Italy are smaller, sleeker -- the cars, the people, the strollers, the cappuccinos, the dollar. The women carry purses large enough for a fistful of Euros, some really dark lipstick and a scarf, and the men carry nothing at all.

In Rome, in Florence, in Siena and the hill towns throughout Tuscany, there are many streets narrow as an oxcart, which is the biggest traffic they had to accommodate when they were designed, and staircases where two cannot walk abreast. Italians go for days, or lifetimes, without getting on the auto- strada. They take the train, they take the bus or they just stay put. There are no SUVs. There are no Wal-Marts.

In fact, the only thing linking Italy to U.S.-driven mondo culture is the tour buses. Outside every centro storico is, inevitably, a parking lot so full of tour buses it looks like the legendary harbor at the top of the world where the whales go to die.

In Italy, there seem to be more tourists than olive trees, more tourists than gelaterias, more tourists than vineyards. Survey the human contents of any campo or plaza and at least 70% of them will no doubt be squinting back down at tour books and maps or nodding into their earpieces while their tour guide explains the importance of the architecture in Japanese or German. Will the actual residents of this city please stand on their heads?

This, more than the sleek little scooters and canonization of the six-week summer holiday, throws life in L.A. into a cultural bas-relief.

Yes, yes, there is tourism in Los Angeles.

People inexplicably come here from other lands to visit Disneyland and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, to photograph the Hollywood sign once they overcome the disappointing news that they cannot touch it.

You see the dark slender herds of Japanese tourists staring at the bust of James Dean at the Griffith Observatory, the German families or French teenagers peering up from under their backpacks, trying to reconcile the Bradbury Building and City Hall with the Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance palaces they have left behind in their own downtowns. And it is absolutely baffling.

“Go back,” one is tempted to say, “there is nothing for you here. Our cathedral is one year old, there are no movie stars in actual Hollywood and you can’t swim in Santa Monica Bay without breaking out in a rash.”

Yes, there is beauty here, much beauty, but it isn’t the tour book kind because it’s still young and alive and often very messy. There are no angels in the architecture, no bell towers to climb, no series of Annunciations to compare. Much of the art and poetry is still in people’s heads, and the landscape changes almost daily.

In Tuscany, on the other hand, even the earth is preserved by the government as the national treasure it is; vineyards and golden fields fly by, the smoky sky broken by cypress trees standing in lines like exclamation points in a Tom Wolfe novel or a castle shining on a hill. Still and silent, these vistas hang against the horizon, wanting only gilt frames.

It is hard not to want to live in a place of such composed beauty, hard not to want to surrender to Venice, to Rome, to find in them all the things that are missing in Los Angeles -- the history, the confident sophistication, the patina of social ways worn smooth and warm with use. Oh, to be so sleek and easy, to never see a Humvee or a valet parking kiosk again.

But the flap of the inevitable tour maps bursts the bright dream. Because after a few days of touring Italy, it is difficult not to think of the entire country as one big museum. Everywhere one looks, the focus is on things unchanging, on what has happened.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, is all about what is happening, what will happen. So it’s a harder place to visit -- no centro storico to speak of, and Frank Lloyd Wright is as ancien as it gets. It’s irritating the way a teenager is irritating -- prickly and unpredictable, vital and vain. But then, that’s why we all live here instead.