No curry powder in Italy?

I went to the supermarket yesterday to buy ingredients for some good old fashioned home cooking.  My beautiful wife had given me suggestions on the weekend for tasty meals that won't tax my culinary abilities.  One of these recipes is a personal favourite, spicy lentil soup,  hmmm... delicious.   The recipe calls for carrots, onions, red lentils, chicken (or vegetable stock) and a tablespoon of curry powder.  What could be simpler?  The list is short, the challenge, not too great.  And yet, 45 minutes of scouring supermarket shelves led me to the inescapable conclusion that there were no herbs or spices to be found, no curry powder, not even a whiff of a chilli in the fresh food section and do you think I could find chicken or vegetable stock?  No sign of it.  In a supermarket that had 10 aisles, each one 25m in length, I was stymied.

I spied a couple of shop assistants and decided that as a last resort I would do the unmanly act of asking for help.  I retrieved my trusty Lonely Planet Italian phrasebook and found a quiet place between the bottles of Nutella and Cinzano Bianco where I could practice my broken Italian.  My phrasebook has a section called 'self-catering' and I flipped directly to that section and quickly found  'Where do I find the...'  I then looked for the word 'curry' and to my dismay realised that no matter how often I read the words listed between 'B' and 'D', the word curry just wasn't there.  I weighed up the pros and cons of walking up to one of the shop assistants and saying "dove posso trovare il.." and then miming curry powder.  Suddenly, making spicy lentil soup had become more challenging than I had initially thought.  How do you mime curry powder?  I set that thought to one side.  Even if I could pull it off, I would still need to ask for chicken stock.  In my mind's eye I saw an image of myself doing the chicken dance in the aisle and then pointing to a bottle of fruit juice - Chicken juice, would that work?

Life was becoming too complicated.  I went home and bought a pizza.