The plague in Italy … and coronavirus

Italy knows a lot about plagues which has taught them to be tough when handling something like the coronavirus. Medieval hill towns were built to keep out soldiers and marauders but the walls also kept sick people inside, or protected healthy people from sick strangers who were barred at the gate. The word quarantine comes from the Italian for forty days, or quaranta giorni, the amount of time that ships were required to be isolated prior to docking in Italian ports from the middle ages on during bouts of the plague. Venice even set aside an island in 1370 and built a hospital/quarantine center for sailors from infected ships to either get better or, uh, not.

A friend of mine from Milan who has decamped to the countryside to escape the current threat in Northern Italy is fittingly rereading Boccaccio’s The Decameron, in which ten people escape Florence during the Black Death to go to the country. During their exile they decide to tell a tale each for ten days to help pass the time. (Boccaccio started The Decameron in 1349 right after the Black Death raged in Florence, killing three-quarters of the city’s population including his father and step-mother.)

Our house, which dates back to medieval times, I’m sure has seen its share of disease, and was used as a hospital for patients during the Spanish Flu of 1918-19.

I think this long history has given the Italians a certain pragmatism about epidemics. We are not anywhere near the “red zone” in the north but the risk is on everyone’s minds. I’ve been fascinated to see how it plays out in day to day life.

The first thing I’ve noticed is a lot less cheek kissing when people greet each other, something impossible to imagine a few weeks ago as it is such a universal and ingrained behavior. Bars and restaurants are as packed as ever, but there’s a slight hush and subtle movement away if anyone coughs or sneezes and people are looking at one another to judge the appropriate response. The grocery stores seem back to normal but a week ago we went to stock up a bit more than usual and the atmosphere was thick with furtive glances into other people’s shopping carts (and we were doing the same). There seemed to be a careful watch for what was excessive purchasing. Many spots in the pasta and flour sections were empty, as well as hand sanitizer.

This pragmatism is also apparent in the mass testing by the Italian health authorities, over 11,000 people so far, which has caught positive cases that have not resulted in an illness but made the overall numbers look far worse than other countries that are not being as proactive. The speed with which lockdowns have been imposed on towns at the center of the outbreak was impressive, with people still unable to leave their community, although movement within the towns has freed up in recent days.

This is taking a significant toll on the economy with 200 million of euros of travel bookings cancelled — and tourism is 13% of Italy’s GDP.

Am I scared? Yes and no. Like people everywhere we’ve been increasing our handwashing, bacterial wipes, practice of not touching faces, etc. but I’m not too stressed about it, taking my cues from the people around me. I think we all realize it is highly likely to spread further in Italy, but that we will get through this together. Italy has seen worse.

Carnevale

One of my favorite moments of the year is when the village comes out to celebrate Carnevale. Here’s 41 seconds from today’s fun.

And one more moment.

Meanwhile at lunch…

I’ve just returned from a week in Paris followed by two in California and while my mind has been occupied by strikes and sales in Paris and traffic and tension in the Bay Area I kept remembering a few tidbits of news I wanted to share with you from the homefront.

Expansion at the farm stand

The farm stand, which serves a 10€ mostly vegetarian worker’s lunch made from their produce, always faces a significant issue when colder weather comes. Their unenclosed front porch, which holds four tables in addition to the two that fit inside, becomes much too cold to use and significantly decreases the number of lunches they can serve. But this year Michele solved it. I arrived one day to find him beaming with a decided spark in his eye putting the finishing touches on the porch enclosure, thanks to wood provided by produce crates, a few sheets of plastic, and a nail gun. This infrastructure, boosted by two pellet heaters, has done the trick and now they can operate at the full number of “tops” year round. I assume that the removal process to return it to an open porch come summer will not be too difficult as the installation took an afternoon.

The pig is no longer with us

Colder weather brings the spezzatura or dismantling of the pig. We were lucky enough to be invited to join a family for their annual event last year which was one of the most fascinating and completely Italian things I’ve done since moving here. The respect, care, and attention given to preparing a year’s worth of meat from an animal everyone knew moved me. A couple of days before I left the farm stand had killed their pig and completed the spezzatura. To celebrate Michele said they were preparing a very special lunch later in the week — freshly-made sausages and chestnut polenta — and asked if we wanted to come. I love the local fresh chestnuts (yes frequently roasted over open fires) but have a hearty suspicion of other chestnut-based delights. For many Tuscans if you combine chestnut flour with water, olive oil, rosemary, and pine nuts and bake the whole mess it is suddenly a revered dessert, castagnaccio. Unfortunately it looks just like a brownie. Do not make this mistake as I have.

Anyway, Michele was especially excited about the chestnut polenta. Silvia, standing behind him, mouthed that she was also going to make “something good”. With great reluctance John and I showed up the day of the feast and bravely opted for one order of the sausage and chestnut polenta. (We also got one order of the “something good” to cover our bases.)

The sausage and pancetta from the pig were delicious, as were the onions. The chestnut polenta was not as bad as expected, much better than the castagnaccio dessert, even though it had a strong resemblance to Play Dough gone wrong. But I did not opt for the sweet version of the chestnut polenta, served with ricotta, for dessert. Instead I ordered the classic ramp up to carnevale and Lent Tuscan dessert, castagnole, which are bits of dough that are fried and around here often stained with runny dark red sugar (Christ’s blood?).

Royal Fascination

John and I happened to be having lunch at another local favorite while the emergency meeting was going on between the Queen, Prince Charles, and Prince William about how they were going to handle Megxit. I didn’t know this because I was following with rapt attention but because the large man with work overalls at the next table was. Propped up amidst his quarter litre of wine and pasta was his phone, loudly streaming the live coverage from the U.K. as the swarm of reporters waited on any news of the outcome of the meeting.

God save the Queen. And lunch.

Happily Ever After

I was very excited to hear the news that Carlo and Armando got married — the first same sex marriage in the 1,000 history of the village. I have been impressed by the support and openness the village has shown the gay couples who have chosen to live here but the majority have been from America or other parts of Europe. Carlo was born and bred here and I wanted to find out how a tiny Tuscan village with a largely older population feels about one of their own taking a less traditional path, so I invited Carlo for a coffee.

When I say born and bred here I am not exaggerating. Carlo actually sleeps in the same bed he was born in, in the same room, in the same house. In his teens and early twenties he dated a girl for about six years but slowly realized that his sexuality was taking him in a different direction. He moved to the US for several years, Rome after that, and also lived in Arezzo, but the whole time life in his village was calling him back. He returned in his 40s to live in the house with his mother and would go out on weekends to clubs that were gay-friendly as far away as Rome or Florence.

One evening eighteen years ago he met Armando and they have been together ever since. He and Armando started spending weekends together as Armando had a cabin the the country and both were living at home at the time. One day Carlo’s mother said “Why are you always packing your bags and going away for the weekend? If you have someone in your life I want to meet her.” Carlo admitted to being deeply in love, but with a man. Without missing a beat his mother said to bring him over for dinner so she could see what kind of a person he was. Carlo still remembers the tension of the evening, but at the end his mother was nearly as in love with Armando as he was.

Armando’s parents both died as all this was going on, and Carlo’s father had died a few years previously, so both decided to move into Carlo’s birth home with his mother. Carlo remembers how close and welcoming his mother was from the start, treating Armando like another son. All of them would even go on vacations together. When she got sick with cancer both of them took care of her during the four-year course of the disease until she passed away.

The official coming out of the couple was equally supported by the village. Carlo said that he never constructed his identity around being gay, but just who he was, loving who he loved. He said that the village treated him the same before and after Armando was on the scene, and Armando was quickly accepted by everyone as being a lovely addition to the community.

Carlo and Armando had talked about getting married for the last few years and finally, rather spur of the moment, decided to do it. (Partially because the political climate here in Italy —as in so many other places — is always on the verge of shifting more extremely to the right and they wanted to take advantage of having this right to marry.) They didn’t send out any formal invitations but there was a notice posted, as for all things official, at the comune, or City Hall. There was a huge outpouring of support and enthusiasm as the word spread and over 100 people came from far and wide to help them celebrate. The outpouring on social media was equally impressive.

After 1,000 years some things were ripe for change. And I can’t imagine a more deserving couple to initiate it.

Halloween in Italy

My Halloween week started with a really disturbing dream involving the reappearance of my Mom who passed away three years ago. I don’t want to go into any details but in my dream she was decidedly, very certainly, unmistakably dead. And I was not pleased to have her visiting me in that state.

I was telling a friend about the dream who it turns out believes that this time of year, exactly around Halloween, is when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest, and that this has been known and celebrated around the world since pagan times. The Celtic Druids marked the midway point between the Fall Equinox and the Winter Solstice with their celebration, Samhain, that is an early forebear of Halloween. It coincided (at that time in history) with the Pleiades star cluster culminating at midnight, which is somehow very relevant. The spirits of the dead were thought to be the most restless and present to the living world on this special night and needed to be shepherded back to the land of rest.

This rumbling in my subconscious caused me to look at Halloween in a different light. I’ve always heard about Day of the Dead celebrations but before moving to Italy had never lived in a culture where this aspect accompanies, and overshadows, Halloween. When we first arrived seven years ago Halloween was barely a blip on the local scene. I was really worried that Sebastian would nix our move as this was the first holiday he’d celebrate in Italy, so his then eight-year old self and I dressed up in some pieced-together costumes, me carrying an arsenal of nerf-guns and armed with a supply of American Halloween candy, and set out in the mist to the deserted square to trick or treat. We were told to stick to the stores. Most shopkeepers were mystified about what we were up to but glad to receive a dolcetto Americano, an exotic treat called a miniature Snickers bar, in a kind of reverse exchange. All good-naturedly contributed something. Our favorite “treat” was a sausage from the butcher. I will never forget Sebastian’s face when the butcher handed it to him over the counter.

Much has changed in seven years. Now you commonly see carved pumpkins, there are a few activities for kids, and there’s a general festive atmosphere in towns and villages. The next major town has a Halloween disco. The grocery store features a small selection of kids’ costumes. But it’s not the big event.

The main focus is November 1st, All Saints Day, and November 2nd, the more inclusive All Souls Day, both of which are full-on holidays with most businesses closed. All the action happens at the cemeteries. Right before the holidays cars are double parked around every local cemetery (even the smallest hamlet has one) so that families can come and decorate the graves with new fake flowers, battery-operated candles, photos, and small ceramic figurines of angels and the like. (Many graves touchingly come in pairs of husbands and wives.) The supermarket display of plastic and fresh flowers dwarfs the section of costumes, and tents selling flowers are set up around the cemeteries. Traffic around our nearby cemetery is routed in a one-way direction to prevent collisions. Inside the walls of the cemetery it is a cheery, convivial scene with crowds of people of all ages talking and laughing and tending the graves. I wrote about the Italian approach to death, cemeteries, and recycling graves in last year’s Itch.

The very spiffy graves after much work by the families.

It’s a revelation for me to see the trivialized American Halloween tradition reunited with its more ancient and profound roots about death and those who have passed beyond our worlds.

It has even started to make me question my plan for eventual cremation and wondering if it wouldn’t be nice to have a little niche, right beside John, with a photo and plastic flowers and perhaps a clay figurine of Lola. That way if I do wander into the butcher, in a less than fleshy form, demanding a sausage on the night of October 31st, I will know my way back home on November 1st.