Now where were we?

When Danny and I left Italy in January 2020 we already had tickets to return in April. Of course that didn't happen. We settled into lockdown in California, anxiously reading reports about the devastating effects of COVID-19 on Italy's north, including our little corner of it. People kept asking me what was happening in Fidenza so I began blogging about what I was hearing from my Italian friends, ignoring my rule that "Quanto? Tanto!" is something I do only when I'm in Italy. 

But once it became clear that this was neither a short-term crisis nor one confined to Italy and other non-U.S. places, I abandoned my effort to chronicle Fidenza's pandemic woes from afar. I could offer neither first-hand observations nor any kind of expertise, and trying to fit dribs and drabs of information into some kind of narrative began to seem both pointless and deceptive. Or maybe I was just depressed, like everyone else.

Actually we've had a pretty good pandemic compared to most. We never got sick, we didn't have too much trouble getting vaccinated, and being retired empty-nesters we didn't have to worry about losing our jobs or homeschooling children. We'd even stocked up on toilet paper right before the lockdown commenced. And there are few better places to be under house arrest than the San Francisco Bay Area, with its excellent wifi, fabulous food, and vast network of beautiful parks.

We missed our Italian life, though, and the way being locked down seemed to accelerate the aging process had us wondering if we'd even be physically capable of  making the trip whenever the pandemic ended...if indeed it ever did.

So early this summer, when the surge of vaccinations in both California and Italy provoked a rush of giddy optimism in some of us, Danny and I bought round-trip tickets to Italy for early September. Surely by then life on both continents would be pretty much back to normal.

Alas, the Delta variant and its anti-mask, anti-vaxx, anti-"medical establishment" enablers have squelched that hope. But once we had our tickets in hand--and very  attractively priced business-class tickets, at that--giving up on returning to Fidenza seemed impossible. Our friends in Italy feared that the millions of Italians disporting themselves in vacation spots during August, plus the reopening of schools in September, would guarantee a surge in COVID cases and thence more lockdowns--lockdowns far more stringent than what we experienced in California. But we saw how well Italy's vaccination drive was going and how the number of cases in Fidenza had fallen to almost nothing, and we looked at the reassuring stats about breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated, and we decided to go ahead. 

And so we are back in Italy, and thus far the risk seems well worth it. I'll let you know if that changes.

The view from our little balcony. I'm so happy to be here after almost 20 months away.