Aleatory Elements

“You know, back home they would only think of doing that with a power saw”, my friend said as watched two city workers hammer and try to bend a no parking sign on the cobblestone just a few feet from our table at the Caffè della Pace.
“Your right, but this is much more fascinating.”
It was Wednesday morning, and we were sitting at an outside table, two blocks and one turn from Piazza Navona in Rome. Two empty, cappuccino cups were sitting on the table in front of us. Our second that morning.
The workers had finished pounding and one of them got in the small truck they had arrived on earlier. He turned on the engine and drove a wheel over lower part of the pole. The other one picked up the far and of the pole and started pulling in up, trying to break it like it was a giant wire coat hanger
It was almost raining, a light drizzle that felt more like mist. Large canvass umbrellas kept the rain off our hair and the Italian newspapers on the table.
“At home they wouldn’t even start without the right tools, but these guys don’t care, they’re going at it with a hammer and their bare hands”, I said.
When I was still living in Wisconsin, I would daydream of sitting with friends outside an old café, sipping cappuccinos or wine, talking about creative projects or world events. That’s the way things were in the subtitled movies I loved back then. It is still part of life in Italy, but the rush of work and raising families and paying bills means that most coffee breaks here are quick affairs - stolen from the corners of a busy schedule.
It was good to see that those movies, though fiction, were based on an Italy that was still alive. We were americans watching the random show that plays out every morning around the Caffè della Pace, or Bar Pasquino, or the two cafés in Piazza Sant’Eustacchio. The cappuccinos were expensive, but not more than in a take-away cup in a big city Starbucks. But here the ideas were flowing between as the rain picked up. The workers bent the pole using the wait of their truck for leverage until it made a loud snap. I was thankful my friend had called, and I was once again feeling why I loved living in Italy.

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Forca di Penne - Transitions

Italy is a social country, if you are out with friends and let too much time pass by without speaking you risk worrying people that something is wrong. But not everyone has the wiring to withstand the hours of eating, drinking, joking and chatting that a holiday like Ferragosto (August 15th) can bring on.

Ferragosto is a religious holiday, but for most people it means picnicking. And it is taken very, very seriously. More shops and public services are open on Christmas day than on Ferragosto. Being on a picnic on Ferragosto is like turkey dinner with your family on Thanksgiving in the US.
At least on Thanksgiving you can take a mass nap in front of a football game (american rules).
So around five when I wanted to be alone, in this beautiful corner of Italy in the mountains near L’Aquila, I decided to take a quick 15 minute drive to find a nice scenic place to be alone.
Impossible.

Every scenic look out safe enough to park a car was occupied, every trail to the Tirino river or the artificial lake nearby was full. Everywhere I drove there were people.
Then I noticed the road to Pescara over a nearby piece of Gran Sasso. There were no road indications beyond the name of the road. “Forca di Penne”.
Playing on the hunch that if a road is named after a place, sooner or later it will take you there, I turned onto it.

The signs indicated the town of Ofena, home to some of the best red wine in Abruzzo come from this little mountain valley. My favorite “Cerasuolo” pink wines, they are robust enough to go with grilled meats. The road rose twisting back and forth through the Ofena’s narrow streets to the other side - still no road indications for Forca di Penne - so I kept going. After a few miles of driving up through pine trees the road forked. To the left, Castel del Monte, to the right, Pescara. Since the place I was after was a pass to Pescara I took a hunch.
Fifteen minutes later I pulled over. The road was about to level off and I was about to leave the Tirino Valley behind me. The view of Capestrano, and the patchwork of farmland below was breathtaking.

As I got into my car I noticed what looked like a ruined tower a few hours ahead of me. As I drove closer it became clearer - it was the ruins of a castle. Forca di Penne was a key passageway in the Transumanza, the ancient seasonal pastoral migration from central Italy to Foggia in Puglia (Apuglia).

I found a place to park my car and hiked up a steep, freshly harvested hay field to the base of the Castle. The view was spectacular. The slopes of Gran Sasso rolled lushly down to the Pescara valley below. To the right the Appenine’s second-largest mountain - the Maiella, dominated. Behind me was Capestrano, Navelli, L’Aquila and dozens of wonderful places wounded by the earthquake. In front of me was the sea and my soon to be new home.

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.

Torrione

Today I stopped by my mother-in-law’s place to drop off a few things and pick up some olive oil she had in the basement.
The normalcy of that statement comforts me but although life goes on that sentence is far from normal.
Linda’s building, the one she and her husband built in the fifties with 7 other families and where Silvia was born in their fourth floor apartment, appears from the outside to be in good shape. There are just two nasty cracks on the north wall, and the garden has overgrown. But like much of the Torrione neighborhood, it is still off limits. The uneven quality of the cement in the late fifties means that the stability of the building is compromised. But the garage is still accessible to drop of the girls’ old books and toys and pick up a big bottle of great local olive oil. Two of the five liter bottles survived the quakes but will not make it past our summer salads.
Torrione was one of the first big post-war neighborhoods built after the second world war. Just below the Spanish castle, across from the rugby stadium.
The name “torrione” comes from the rough brick tower at the main intersection just two buildings down from Linda’s building. It wasn’t actually a tower, just the last leg standing from the aqueduct that brought water from Gran Sasso to the nearby Roman city of Amiternum. It withstood 2000 years, it’s half as tall now, surrounded by ancient red bricks.
It was once one of the three gateways to the old city and the only main road that crosses the city still passes through. Many of the shops have reopened, but very few people have come back to live - or park there before going to work downtown (with now downtown, why bother?).
The sensation is a mix of optimism (two bars, two great bread stores, and other activities have reopened. Others have installed kiosks in the neighborhood and moved in. My doctor’s office is in a small building and he’s been back for two months. But virtually no one lives there anymore. It’s as though an ember is still burning under the ashes, but the fire still need fresh wood to burn again. How much fire will there be before winter?

Opening Boxes After the Heartquake

I keep thinking of the song from the opening credits of the series Weeds.

"Little boxes on the hilltop
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hilltop
Little boxes all the Same"

The song refers to the houses of suburban upper middle class America, but in my case they are moving boxes - three different sizes, each taped shut with brown tape - all full of the things we, a half-dozen generous firefighters and a half dozen lazy movers pulled out of our house last week in L'Aquila. After four days of trips either with or without plumbers and electricians the towering maze of boxes and stacked furniture is starting to look like a home again. Every room is still full of boxes, but almost all three couches can now be used as (surprise!) couches and not resting places for lamps sand other fragile possessions.
Today as I pulled out plates and glasses from the boxes the firemen wrapped them in I was happy to find that most of the our white, basic Richard Ginori tableware set was still intact, just dusty, as were our better (but stemless) glasses. The wineglasses were nowhere to be found, probably mixed in with one of the piles of debris we left behind in the center of the rooms in Via Giovanni XXIII. .
Everything has to be dusted, scrubbed or washed. White plaster shavings and cement dust are in everything, pieces or our previous life to be washed or scrubbed away or shaken out. One of the smaller oriental rugs is resting on top of a stack of boxes in the living room. It looks faded, as if the colors have been washed away by the sun. It's just the dust of one big earthquake – the “heartquake” as it was re-baptized by many Italians living throughout the English speaking world and hundreds of smaller ones that followed.
The new house is in Pescara, Abruzzo's biggest city and industrial center on the Adriatic coast. We are hoping to stay our stay will be short, even though the idea of having to soon go through the purgatory of moving house does thrill any of us.
As I rest from my boxes someone is practicing a flute nearby. Tonight we drive back to Navelli where Sofia and Emily are waiting out the move up in the mountains. The annual chick pea and saffron feast will be held in ten days and despite the earthquake's damage to the town families have returned as have their summer friends.

Joshua
(also read me at carbonara.wordpress.com)

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.”

Flying in.

Driving to L’Aquila this morning gave me hope. But then it always does, even before. From the hill town of Navelli where we spend much of the summer, past the devastated but once enchanting and hidden Castelnuovo di San Pio. The morning light tinging a slight burnt orange the slopes of Gran Sasso to my right somehow magnify the feeling that it’s more than just the infancy of another day. The road construction and heavy vehicles slowing me down seem just incidental as I move towards where I used to live. 

Hope.