What’s Italy without traffic?

Last night, on my way home from a quick family vacation in Sabaudia, I stopped in the office in L’Aquila to catch up on a bit of work. Silvia and the girls also stayed in town, so we ended up leaving together for home.

One of the many negative consequences of the earthquake is the traffic. We used to complain if a few of the main streets slowed to a standstill at rush hour, but at most they slowed us down by 15 minutes a trip. People in Rome or Milan (or Chicago, for that matter) would probably have called it light traffic.

Now, with two of the major routs across town off limits (one passes through the Red Zone, the other has a bridge out), traffic is everywhere. The road system in town, like most cities with thriving downtowns, was organized in a wheel and spoke system. Most of the traffic flow went to and from the center - in the space of 30 seconds that all changed, there is no center and will not be for years. Offices, both public and private, are scattered in neighborhoods and outlying hamlets many of us had never been to. Add in a boom of heavy vehicles for the reconstructions and you have a permanent log jam.

Until after six in the evening, when people start to leave. Tens of thousands of us now live in outlying villages just in or out of the "crater" and in cities and towns up to 100 kilometers away, sometimes more. Many take the bus, of course, but it is striking to drive out after work. Last night at eight I started driving home. I have my secret back roads in town that are mostly deserted at the time, but it was from the roundabout at the cemetery all the way to Navelli that brought back memories of driving with the cars full on the evening of April 6th, I was part of long trail of cars driving orderly out of the city towards Pescara and Sulmona. Very few cars were going the other way, unlike April 6th when cars and buses left, heavy vehicles from the fire brigades and civil defense services in the other.

This happens every night. Logjams in the morning as people try to make it in before work starts, a slower more orderly trail home at night.

By the way, the months living in a family-run hotel in Montesilvano on the coast was not a vacation as some try to pass off. My clear complexion below the neckline is testifies on my behalf. While we were sheltered and fed and away from the aftershocks, like tens of thousands of aquilani, we lost hours of our lives commuting and creating an ever larger carbon footprint.

It's the little things

(This was published elsewhere, but I feel it's should be here too, as a record. it was from a month and a half after the earthquake) 

It’s in the little things – that I begin to touch what happened. Over a month has passed since we had to leave our homes at three-thirty in the morning, grabbing what we could as we rushed over the stucco flakes and other debris out of our house into the dark morning to find the hotel in front of us already down, folded like a layer cake of cement and steel.

I have been so busy getting on with life – finding a place to stay besides our car farther and farther from home, going back for essentials – and the cat – with the firemen, getting on with work in Rome, and just getting on with life with the girls here in Montesilvano.

It’s the little things. Last night we were driving to Navelli, the family house there is in much better shape than our house in L’Aquila but the aftershocks continue and most people still sleep in tents at night. The girls missed their friends there and we needed to get some fresh clothes. A song by Irene Grandi came on the Radio and we all started singing to it like in some cheesy movie and I started to cry – silently because I didn’t want them to miss a word.

The experts say that during earthquakes the best thing to do is duck under something that can protect you and wait it out. Which is impossible if you are a parent. As the floor rocked and everything shook and rattled and roared for almost half a minute, Silvia and I ran to the girl’s bedroom to get help them climb down from their beds. There’s really no room for thinking about what’s going on, being a father or a mother guides you.

A woman I saw on TV through the window of our cousin’s house (no one wanted to be inside so we watched TV from the garden), filmed in front of the pile of stones that was her house said something so simple yet full of truth.

“These are only stones, only bricks. I can put one on top of the other again. But my family and friends are the real bricks, and they are still here, and that’s what matters.”