Viva Italia!

I'm going to momentarily interrupt this blog's usual solipsism to give a more objective view of how Italy is dealing with the pandemic. My source is Stethoscope on Rome, a blog by Susan Levenstein, an American medical doctor based in the Eternal City. "Stethoscope..." has been a wonderful source of solid information about the pandemic, not just in Italy but all over, and particularly about COVID treatments and vaccines, good, bad, and worthless. I highly recommend it. 

Not long after we arrived in Fidenza "Stethoscope..." reported at some length on the state of things in Italy. Levenstein began by contrasting a photo of mostly maskless commuters crowding into the Tube in London with one taken in a crowded Italian train, where just about everyone was masked up. "Italy’s vaccination campaign is now neck and neck with the UK, and it’s based overwhelmingly on the highly effective mRNA vaccine," Levenstein wrote. "As you see, they’re good about masks too… and, not surprisingly, they’re having much less of a Delta surge."

With her permission, here's the rest of her Italy report:

Italy is doing a lot better than the US in terms of both vaccination rates and the state of the pandemic. As of September 12^th, 87% of Italians over 60, but only 78% of Americans over 65, were fully vaccinated (note the different denominators). And 81% of Italians over 12 and 74% of the entire population were at least partially vaccinated – compared with 75% and 64% of Americans. 

One way Italy has been encouraging vaccination is by making Green Passes (vaccination or recent COVID-19 or negative swab) obligatory to access everything from restaurants to long-distance trains. Just last night my husband and I had the mild thrill of having our QR codes scanned for the very first time, to see a dance performance. When recent demonstrations against the Green Pass managed to turn out only a few dozen people, hard-core activists decided to go for violence instead of popularity, putting together stashes of knives and brass knuckles for next time around, until the cops broke up the plot.

In October all employees will need Green Passes if they want to work in person. Teachers already have to show theirs at the gate, and vaccine refusers foot the bill for their own triweekly antigen swabs, as well they should. Hopefully vaccination will soon become mandatory for teachers. It already is for health care workers, and since August hardcore novaxers (fewer than 3% of doctors and nurses, but in some regions 10-12% of nonprofessional staff) are starting to be suspended without pay. 

Between high vaccine coverage, the Green Pass, and unwavering adherence to masking and distancing, Italy has kept the pandemic in check even in the era of the hyper-contagious Delta variant. Yes, infections  and deaths have gone up a bit recently: 

But there’s no comparison to the American horror show:

I

In one way, though, Italy is similar to the US: roughly speaking, where vaccination rates are low, case rates are high. If you believe in science, that’s no surprise at all.

Vaccination rates (left), weekly case numbers (right)

Passing

Before we got here we'd read how everyone in Europe who'd been vaccinated was getting a Green Pass, an app on their phone with a QR code that permits entry to concerts, museums, restaurants, and other public places. Eager for American tourists to help boost their economies, the European Union announced that the USA's unimpressive cardboard vaccination cards would also be accepted for entry to the continent's cultural goodies. But friends of friends, Americans in France, reported that their experience was that the U.S. card was regarded as valid proof of vaccination exactly nowhere. And we could find no information about how people who are not in the Italian health system could get in on the Green Pass action.

Then we discovered that California had its own proof-of-vaccination app, complete with QR code, and before we left for Italy we managed to download it onto both of our phones. Surely the two systems, California's and Europe's, would connect with each other.

Looks official, doesn't it?

What a ridiculous delusion. At our beloved local bar we quickly discovered that the Green Pass reader regarded the California QR code as meaningless gobbledygook. Luckily the bar has expanded its outdoor space, where vaccination requirements don't apply, and the weather's been great, so we were able to get cappuccinos and spritzes despite being undocumented. But I worried we'd be reduced to a solid diet of home cooking once the weather turns cold.

Pam took me over to the town tourist office, since surely they'd know how Americans can get in on local eateries and activities. But the woman there had never heard of the American vaccination card and assured us no one accepted it as a Green Pass substitute.

Now here's where the wisdom of settling in Fidenza, where Pam and Romano live, versus any other place in Italy was borne out once again. Pam took me to her local health office and through some kind of Pam magic got an appointment with a doctor who looked at our identity documents and our vax cards and tapped away at his computer for a bit and announced that we were now "a posto." Whether anyone can do this, or only friends of Pam and Romano, I do not know.

In any case, the next day we each received an email from the Ministry of Health announcing that our "green COVID-19 certification" was now available and giving us a special code. Danny printed out the emails (of course) and Pam told us to take them to the pharmacy across the street, because pharmacists seem to be central to the Green Pass system. 

At first the dottoressa behind the counter asked for our Italian health cards and told us that we couldn't get a Green Pass without one, and I feared we'd run into one of those insurmountable blockages that Italian bureaucracy is famous for. But then she studied the email for a minute and said, "Eh, va bene!" and a moment later presented us with paper print-outs of our Green Pass certificates.

We're legal!

We still haven't figured out how to get our Green Passes onto our phones, but the paper version works just fine. We proved it the next evening when we went to Parma to see a production of Rossini's Il Signor Bruschino at the Parma Conservatory, featuring some of Romano's students. The performance was held outdoors, in the Conservatory's large wisteria-draped courtyard, with seats placed far apart and everyone except the singers in masks. But even so, everyone in the audience had to first present their QR code to a gentleman with a Green Card reader, which beeped cheerily and displayed a big green checkmark as each person passed inspection. Our paper QR codes worked just as well as everyone else's digital version. The delightful production of Rossini's one-act confection, with Romano's terrific young singers, was the perfect way to celebrate.

We gave our passes another workout the next day when we went for lunch at one of our favorite local restaurants, a fixed-price lunch place with great atmosphere and solid homestyle food. It's all indoor dining so a Green Pass is required to enter. But no problem for us!

In tribute to Italy's commendably hard line on vaccinations, I ordered pesto di cavallo, that is, horse steak tartar. While American anti-vaxxers are consuming veterinary doses of the anti-worming medicine ivermectin--which they call "horse paste"--in the vain hope that it will protect them from COVID, I was happy to consume a plateful of horse paste, Italian style. It's probably no more effective as a COVID preventive, but without a doubt it's a lot tastier.  

For your own good

As we were getting ready to return to Fidenza, I fretted about the usual things--what to pack, how early we should get to the airport, how many issues of The New Yorker I should bring in my carry-on as emergency reading--and also about the risk of inhaling a Delta viron or two during the course of our journey. What had us waking up in the middle of the night before we finally got on the plane, however, wasn't the threat of  COVID but the ever-shifting list of COVID-related hoops we'd have to jump through before we'd be allowed back into Italy.

Remember when a passport and an airplane ticket were all you needed to board a flight from the U.S. to Europe? No longer. Lured by a low business-class fare, we'd booked tickets on British Air, which meant flying through London. But thanks to Boris Johnson's mishandling of the pandemic (or, some say, European bitterness about Brexit), anyone traveling from the United Kingdom to Italy had to get a negative COVID test result within 48 hours before arriving, a full day less than the 72-hour grace period for people coming direct from the U.S. And this was true even for those who, like us, were only going to be in Heathrow airport for an hour or two. 

Meanwhile the U.K. requires a "passenger locator form," so that if someone on the flight does come down with COVID, all passengers can be tracked down, although exactly for what purpose isn't specified. This is a lengthy form, to be filled out online, wherein you must specify everything from your seat number to any address you're occupying before, during, and after your flight. 

The European Union has its own equally extensive passenger locator form, also online. Both of these forms are supposed to be filled out at the last minute, and if anything changes--a leg of your flight, a seat number--you have to do the whole thing over again. 

Italy also wanted proof of vaccination before you got on a plane heading there. We had the vaccine cards showing that we'd gotten our shots last spring, but I worried that no one would believe these scraps of badly printed cardboard were really official documents. Shortly before we left we discovered that the state of California had quietly introduced an online version of the vax card, complete with a QR code. Figuring that would be useful, we spent considerable time wrestling with the California system and getting these documents onto our phones, since that seems to be the preferred way to prove your vax status among civilized people.

On top of all that, British Air urged us to input all of our information, including our vaccine status, into some third-party app that would theoretically allow us to breeze through check-in by showing that we'd already met all the above requirements. What a lovely idea, right? Even if it meant sharing our personal data with yet another faceless entity. Unfortunately, the app was something of a disaster, and we were frantically trying to get it to work right up until we left for the airport.

A selection of our travel documents, assembled by Danny.

Most stressful of all was getting the COVID tests. A rapid antigen test wouldn't do; a PCR molecular test is required. Our health system provides them for free, but with a two- to three-day wait for results. To make that 48-hour deadline, we had to find someplace that could turn the results around in less than 24 hours. Danny spent days scouring the internet and found several places that were happy to give results in a few hours but charged hundreds of dollars for this usually free test. Eventually he located a reputable outfit that worked out of Oakland Airport, about half an hour from us, and promised low-cost results in six hours. We made an appointment for Saturday afternoon, the day before our Sunday flight.

Unfortunately, their website proved to be chockablock with misinformation. When we arrived for our appointment we discovered that, despite what the website said, this location didn't do the test we needed. However, they were able to send us over to another site a few minutes away to get the tests. More worrying, we learned it might take up to 24 hours to get the results, not the six hours the website had promised. ("We know," the folks at the testing site said. "We keep telling them to fix it.")  With our check-in time less than 24 hours away, we spent the evening anxiously checking our phones, willing the results to appear.

Danny woke me up a little after 3 a.m. The results were in, and we'd tested negative. Now we just had to upload the test report and add that information to our various documents, which we spent a couple of anxious middle-of-the-night hours doing. 

We also tried to check in for our flight. But despite having all our information at the electronic ready, British Air informed us that we would have to go through check-in in person, so that our documentation could be reviewed. Remembering the endless check-in lines we'd waited in during previous trips, we decided to get to the airport even earlier than we'd planned.

Back in the days before there was an internet, Danny's travel preparations always included preparing a folder with all flight information, hotel reservations, and so on in writing. He's maintained that practice even as more and more people, mostly younger, do everything with their phones. And so his carry-on included print-outs of all our flight and seat numbers, taxi confirmation, locator forms, test results, and vaccine cards, and even a copy of our marriage license in case someone challenged the reality of our 50-plus years of respectability. I thought he was being silly, but I wasn't going to sneer at someone else's security blanket when I was lugging several months' worth of New Yorkers. 

When we got to the airport, though, we discovered that flying business class allowed us to prance past Economy's long, glacially slow check-in lines and step right up to one of the counters reserved for the plutocracy. Moreover, the woman checking us in was thrilled that Danny had all our information ready to hand on paper, and so was I when I watched a couple at the next counter trying vainly to locate their documents on a phone that didn't have quite enough signal. 

From there pretty much everything went as smoothly as I could have hoped. With several hours to kill, we strolled off to the mostly empty plutocrats' lounge for a free lunch and some time with the New Yorker food issue. At the gate, we boarded early and settled into our business-class pods with a glass of complimentary champagne. The dinner and, later, breakfast we were served were surprisingly tasty and the service couldn't have been nicer. And the lie-flat seats, though not anywhere near as comfortable as an actual bed, were a huge improvement over spending the night hunched over in Economy.

I should note that we wore N95 masks through all of this, aside from when we were eating and drinking, and that this was exceedingly unpleasant. You can tell those masks are really effective by how hot and uncomfortable they are, and trying to sleep while wearing one was an experience I don't look forward to repeating. But I am no anti-masker, and I was, if not exactly happy to mask up, certainly willing to do my part by wearing one. 

Masked up in Fidenza's central piazza.

When we arrived in Italy, our vaccination and test documents were accepted without problems, our taxi showed up only a few minutes late, and soon we were in Fidenza, sitting in the piazza with Pam and Romano and watching the sun go down as we sipped Negronis and nibbled on pizza. All the hassle seemed worth it. So did flying business class, even if next time we can't get a super-low fare. 

I do wonder, though, about all the data-gathering the pandemic has unleashed. Once the virus is finally defeated, will all these requirements become just a memory? Or will this be like 9/11, where the emergency of the moment morphs into a new normal that we all have no choice but to submit to? 

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.

Opening up

On May 4 my friend Franca wrote me another English essay. This one began, "Today is a great day!" That Monday, with COVID-19 cases and deaths on the decline, Fidenza and broader sections of Italy moved into "Fase 2." The extremely tight restrictions on movement and commerce that had slowed the spread of the virus were at last beginning to be loosened.

Where before people were only allowed out of their homes to get food and medicine, always by themselves, now they could take walks with other members of their own household, jog or do other non-contact sports, and get together with close relatives, as long as social distancing was maintained and masks were worn.

"COVID emergency phase 2. Gatherings no, masks yes." 

In the first days of the lockdown, "incredulity paralyzed us," Franca wrote (more or less--I've made some minor corrections). "We weren't able to believe that Mr. Corona was so close or, rather, already among us. Then we didn't want to accept the idea that our freedom could be limited.

"The next step, the worst, was when fear and worry began to overwhelm us each time we heard an ambulance siren. (There were so, so many in the beginning.) Each time we watched television there were too many dead, even more people in intensive care units, and the numbers rose every day."

As the two-month lockdown wore on, there was resignation and willingness to obey the government's strictures. "We started to appreciate our new life at home, but we were always waiting for freedom."

Now freedom, or at least a bit of freedom, had arrived, but Franca admitted she had "two conflicting feelings: joy in the little light you can see at the end of the tunnel, and the fear that Corona will come back as before." There is a shadow hanging over everyone, she wrote, "a sadness...I am not really able to understand it...it is like a question that arises spontaneously: are we ready to go back to living in the same way as before? Or have we had time to think about what is really important to our life? Doing less shopping, spending more time with relatives and friends instead of with virtual people or things, really thinking about our planet--how can we stay healthy when the Earth is ill?"

She sent along this video, which some Italian wag had labeled "4MAGGIO2020." Now that May 4 had arrived, she wrote, "I hope we will continue to behave well, respecting the rules the government has given us...not like these chickens!"

On his Facebook page Fidenza's mayor, Andrea Massari, urged his fellow citizens to show solidarity and protect each other. He published the photo at the top of this page with the comment, "One rule is so little. Are two too many?"

He also answered citizens' questions about what the new rules meant. Collecting mushrooms: OK, but only in the daytime and only for your own consumption. Team sports: No. Individual training: OK. Going to a second home within Emilia-Romagna: OK. Going to visit your grandchildren in another region: No.

A few days later he announced a major milestone. Fidenza's hospital, which had been converted to an all-COVID facility and had had some 300 cases a few weeks before, discharged its last COVID patient. It's now once again a full-service community hospital, except for the birthing center, which is scheduled to reopen in June. Massari posted a video showing hospital staff, gowned and masked, dancing in celebration and holding up signs saying, "The future depends on you" and "Behave well."

When I spoke with Pam, she told me how lovely it was to again hear people talking on the big pedestrian street outside her place, where before there was only silence broken by the sound of ambulance sirens. "Last night at 8 o'clock there were kids playing with a ball in the Piazza Grande" next door to her. "They were socially distanced and their parents were keeping an eye on things. It was great to hear kids laughing again."

It sounds like most Fidentini were following the rules, but for younger people just escaping from two months at home, the temptation to ignore them ran high. The mayor posted this photo of three young men disregarding the social distancing regulations.

"No, guys, this isn't OK," he wrote. Unless these three fellows all lived in the same household, they weren't respecting social distancing, even though they should know better.

He added that during the first week of Phase 2 he'd received many stories about citizens who were following the rules. But he'd also received stories "about those who aren't taking the emergency seriously or simply don't care. About themselves or about others. Do I have to repeat myself? I will. If we don't all do our part, we'll return to the starting point, and that starting point was brutal: ambulances continually bringing COVID patients to the hospital."

At least in Fidenza, there doesn't seem to be a lot of talk about an individual's "freedom" to infect others. Instead Massari and citizens on his feed talk about the importance of respecting each other, and showing that respect by protecting each other with masks, gloves, and not getting too close.

Franca acknowledged that this last was going to be difficult, especially for the young, including the many twenty-somethings who still live with their parents and have been cut off from their romantic partners throughout the lockdown. "I don't know how boyfriends and girlfriends that don't see each other for months can stay at a distance," she wrote.

So perhaps it's not surprising that when bars and other social gathering places opened up on May 19, things got a little out of hand. More about that in our next episode.

Not all bad

My friend Franca and I have been exchanging little essays--hers in English, mine in Italian--as one way of trying to increase our fluency. I've shared some of her observations about the situation in Fidenza in earlier posts.

Her essay describing how the virus had shut down the town was titled "Corona...I hate you!" Which considering how tough things have been there is pretty much what I'd expect. I think by now we all have experienced a lot of visceral anger at this not-even-quite-living thing that is robbing us of our lives, in tens of thousands of cases quite literally.

So I was surprised when I opened my email one morning and found she'd sent a new piece of writing titled, "Corona I love you." Of course Franca doesn't really love the virus (unlike some U.S. Republicans, who seem positively gleeful that it will clear out the old, the weak, and the non-white). But she has found a few things to be grateful for, which strikes me as very healthy.

With her permission I want to quote some of what she wrote. (I've made a few small grammatical corrections.)

"Yes, this seems to be a silly affirmation, but [this situation] has so many positive sides. I obviously am speaking about life in Emilia-Romagna, the region where I live, but I think that more or less you can extend my outlook to other places in Italy, or in the world.

"First of all, the sky is blue. You may think that it is an obvious thing, but it isn’t. Here we usually always have a gray-blue sky, because of the nearby great highway that connects the North with the South, and the industries, and the thousands of cars that everybody uses in our overpopulated zone.

I think this was more fog than pollution, but the sky was sort of gray-blue.

"Now the sun, the moon and the stars shine like never before!

"You can sniff the air and it smells good; it's like the air in the mountains, scented with flowers and grass. Before we had one flat smell of …...nothing!

"What about the silence? 

"l am a fan of deserts. When will I have another occasion to stay at home and have the same kind of silence? No cars, no planes, no people in the streets, very few trains...there is only the sound of the birds in the trees or in the sky!

"There is no stress. This is like the life of about 40 years ago; you have things to do, but with a relaxed rhythm. We are not in a hurry for anything....

"Before we had no time, no time for anything. Everyone was in a hurry and always more, and more, and more. Our life was full of work, meetings, courses, shopping, false desires and false necessities. Now everything has gotten more simple. More natural. More quiet.

"And if Mr Corona is giving us a suggestion, perhaps it is: 'Take it easy and enjoy this, your one and only life.'"

Now of course neither Franca nor I think that quiet and blue skies make up for the deaths and all the other losses this pandemic has inflicted on Italy and the rest of the world. There is no ignoring the tragedy of it. But I think most of us are finding little things to be grateful for as well in this sudden stoppage of the everyday--things we should appreciate while they last and that perhaps we will miss when the crisis is over and normal life roars back again.

A little more news

Various friends in Fidenza have been checking in to let us know how they are faring. I'm happy to report that everyone in our immediate circle is still in good health, evidence that social distancing is working. And now it sounds like the town's rate of hospital admissions is starting to go down. There as here, you can't help but wonder if locking things down sooner might have saved even more lives.

My friend Franca told me that on Feb. 23, the day the Italian government cordoned off the handful of northern Italian towns that first saw big outbreaks of COVID-19, her family drove over to a seaside town on the Ligurian coast, about two hours from Fidenza, to celebrate her mother's 90th birthday. The streets and restaurants were full of people; the danger all seemed to be many kilometers away.

During the drive home they listened to news on the radio and heard that cases had now shown up in Piacenza and Parma, towns right near Fidenza. But it took two more weeks before everyone was told to go home and stay there. Even then, a lot of Fidentini seemed unable to believe the danger was really that great--the same denial we've since witnessed, and perhaps been guilty of ourselves, in communities all over the world.

By early in March people in Fidenza had been told to stop meeting in groups, stop hugging and kissing each other, and stay at least a meter apart--a big ask in Italy, where hugs and kisses are standard greetings even among people who barely know each other. At that time Pia, our upstairs neighbor in Fidenza, told me that although she was very carefully following the rules, she could see that a lot of other people weren't.

Franca says that although people were told they should wear masks when they go out, most people didn't until more recently. Perhaps that was because masks were very hard to get. Franca bought some on Feb. 23 when she came back from her family's outing and had to pay 5 euros for each mask. By the next day, she says, they were up to 15 euros.

Franca hasn't been outside without a mask since March 8, and like Pam, Romano, and everyone else we know, she rarely goes out at all. She's only allowed out of her home to get food, but since everyone in the household is desperate to escape the house, there's stiff competition for who gets to do the shopping. "So I've only gone out about three times since then," she told me.

A few days ago our friend Debora the banker told me that the COVID19 dead now include many people she knew. "Every day someone rings to tell me that their father, uncle, husband has died," she wrote. Men, she noted, are apparently much more at risk. A co-worker's father died in the hospital in Parma, all alone, because relatives weren't allowed in for fear of infection. The local crematorium was so overcrowded that his remains were sent to Ravenna, more than two hours away, and for the moment at least his ashes have gone missing.

Meanwhile many people--especially those with marginal jobs and those who work in Italy's bustling underground economy--have been living without a paycheck for weeks. "People are beginning to starve," Debora said.

A volunteer delivering food (photo swiped from the mayor's web site)

When I checked the mayor's web site I was glad to see that the town has been taking action. Fidenza has organized volunteers from the Red Cross and other groups to do food shopping for older citizens. It is starting to distribute free surgical masks to its citizens. It was also reportedly one of the first municipalities to put in place procedures for distributing the national government's first wave of food aid.

The aid is in the form of vouchers that can be used to purchase food in local stores. "We did it with clear rules so we don't waste money and get it to those who really need it," the mayor wrote. The first round of vouchers, intended to cover two weeks' worth of groceries, came to about $300 for a family of four and went to over four hundred families.

In addition, Fidenza is collecting money for additional food aid from those able to donate. We're going to kick in a few euros. After all, it's our town, too.

Some news from Fidenza

This blog is normally active only when we're in Italy, which we left early in January. We were planning to fly back on April 7, but now we are socially isolating in California and there's no telling when we'll be able to return to Italy.  Fidenza, our other home, is in Emilia-Romagna, the region next door to Lombardy and thus not far from Italy's original COVID-19 hot spots. As the contagion spread, Fidenza became part of the Northern Italian lockdown, even before all of Italy was sent into isolation, and before California followed suit.

Italian towns, including ours, are flying flags at half mast in honor of the dead.

I've heard from a lot of worried friends and relations wondering where we are and what's happening in Fidenza, so I thought I'd revive the blog rather than write the same individual email over and over again.

We have been in frequent touch with Pam and Romano, the long-time friends who inspired us to choose Fidenza as our Italian base in the first place. Happily they are both all right, as are their families. A few weeks ago their reports of what was going on in town seemed the stuff of science fiction. Now it's becoming a story that doesn't seem quite so strange, since it's becoming our story, too.

Italy was way ahead of the United States in responding to the coronavirus threat, but in retrospect its response rolled out too slowly. The country declared a national emergency on Jan. 31, but small towns in the north that suddenly began seeing outbreaks weren't quarantined until Feb. 23, when carnival and some large sports events were also ordered canceled. Schools were closed on March 4 and the three hard-hit northern regions--Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, and Veneto--were locked down on March 8. The next day the lockdown was extended to the whole country, but restaurants and bars weren't closed until two days later and "non-essential" businesses weren't shuttered until March 22.

The hesitant response and the fact that Italy's population is the oldest in Europe are two reasons COVID-19 has hit the country so hard. As of today, Italy has over 100,000 reported cases and over 11,000 deaths.

Many of our American friends are glad that we're here and not there, given the grim headlines. But I'm not sure we're actually better off. The fact that the United States has responded to the crisis even more slowly, and with vastly less seriousness, indicates that collectively we in the U.S. will face death and destruction on an even vaster scale as the pandemic rolls forward. The U.S. is already up to 144,000 cases as of today, and the death toll just passed 2,500.

The most recent tally from Fidenza is that 19 residents have died, but that number is from four days ago, so by now the death toll is undoubtedly in the 20s at least. The local paper is full of obituaries for prominent citizens--a soccer coach, a geneticist, an electrician, a priest.

Fidenza's hospital had just completed an expansion at the end of last year and had about 200 beds, but two weeks ago over a hundred more were added, including more ICU beds. Then a few days later the town announced that the hospital would now only treat the flood of COVID-19 patients; all others would be redirected to the hospital in Parma, a half-hour away. "It is a huge sacrifice," said Fidenza's mayor, Andrea Massari, "but even more a huge responsibility on which the fates of many families and many people depend."

Restrictions on Americans, even in California, are mild compared to what has been imposed on Italians in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. There any movement out of your town or your home province is prohibited unless required for work or some other urgent reason, and police are stopping people on the road to demand proof that they're not moving around illegally. Fidenza police are strictly enforcing the lockdown in town, where people are allowed to go outside only to buy food or go to the pharmacy.

Pam and Romano live on the same street we do, the main drag, a wide pedestrian-only thoroughfare lined with stores, bars, and markets. Usually it's full of the noise that Italians make when they're together, lots of loud talking and loud laughter and excited greetings. Now, Pam says, the street is empty and the only sound is ambulance sirens rushing people to the local hospital.

That struck me as horrifying. But today people in New York City are saying the same thing.

The penalties for violating Fidenza's lockdown rules are stiff. Pam has a certificate allowing her to go for a walk every day, for health reasons, but she can't go more than 100 meters from home, which means her only choice is to circle her block six times to get her steps in. People who are caught going out without authorization or meeting others can be fined 400 to 3,000 euros (about $440 to $3,000), more if the violation involves using a car, and doubled for a second offense.

Those who've tested positive but leave home despite being quarantined face up to five years in prison (although that would seem to pose its own public-health dangers). So far 45 people have been charged with violating the lockdown rules, according to the local paper, which didn't specify which violations and what penalties. Meanwhile businesses that are caught opening illegally will be forced to remain closed for between 5 and 30 days after the lockdown is over. In other words, they will have to remain closed while everyone else opens up again.

The town website announced that tomorrow Mayor Massari will be in the main piazza, presumably alone, at noon, with the flag at half mast, as part of a national moment of silence in memory of those killed by COVID-19, in sympathy with their families, and in honor of the nurses, doctors, and other health-care workers fighting the virus. A moment of silence seems very poignant in the midst of the greater silence of a town, and a country, that has had to be shut down so completely.

What's God's pronoun?

I'm a long-time member of a Twelve-Step group. I'm going to adhere to that world's traditions and not say which one, but the Steps are no secret, and it's well known that they include a lot of talk about a Higher Power, about "God as we understood Him," about "humbly ask[ing] Him to remove our shortcomings" and "praying...for knowledge of His will for us."

Lots of people have had problems with this aspect of the Twelve Steps, including atheists like me, but what I want to discuss here is an issue that has come up in many of the meetings I attend in California, particularly among some of the more earnestly feminist women in the fellowship. They don't object to God being in the steps, but they do bridle at all those Hims. Many insist on revising the steps when they read them aloud to say, for instance, "God as we understood God" and "God's [rather than His] will for us," so that the deity's gender remains unspecified. There has even been talk about trying to get the worldwide fellowship to officially change the Twelve Steps in order to eliminate all gender-specific pronouns.

The same fellowship exists in Italy, too, and there's a weekly meeting in Fidenza that I attend. It's all in Italian, of course, and one of the things that struck me right away is how impossible the gender-neutrality project would be in a country where every noun is either male or female.

Take the Serenity Prayer, which in English starts out, "God, grant me the serenity..." In Italian it's "Signore, dammi la serenita'..." because signore literally means "lord," which is conventionally how God is addressed. Nowadays signore is also the polite form of address for men and not just deities. So every week when we recite the prayer I inwardly chuckle at how indignant my California friends would be at addressing God as "Mister."

When I searched my photos for "god," this old photo of my dad came up. Patriarchy!

It isn't only God who's gender-specific. The prayer goes on to ask for the serenity to accept things I can't change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. In Italian each of these things is assigned a gender identity: serenita' and sagezza are feminine, coraggio is masculine.

So is every other noun in the language, and the logic of which word is assigned which gender is unclear. Milk (latte) is masculine and so are breasts (seni), although udders (mammelle) are feminine. Meat (carne) is feminine and so are machines (macchine). This is one of those things that you learn by memorizing, not by ratiocination.

Moreover, a woman can't be a scrittore, a writer. She's a scrittrice, a writer-ess. She's not a dottore, but a dottoressa. The de-gendering of words such as "actor" or "waiter" that's happened in English would be hard for Italian speakers to wrap their minds around.

I've read that countries with gendered languages adhere more closely to traditional stereotypes about men and women, and I can see why. In Italian a noun's gender affects so much in the typical Italian sentence that, for a novice speaker at least, gender has to be kept in mind all the time. Adjectives have to be in gender agreement with nouns, and so do plurals. Children are either female (bambine) or male (bambini), and if I want to say "We went to Parma" it's Siamo andate if it's Pam and me but Siamo andati if I went with Danny.

That's because when boys and girls or men and women are together, it's always the masculine form that predominates. So even though I have two sisters and one brother, my siblings are i miei fratelli (literally "my brothers"). Even though I have a daughter and a son, my children are i miei figli (literally "my sons").

One additional bit of confusion arises when using Italian's formal form of address. When you're speaking to someone older or more important than yourself, or just someone you don't know very well, instead of using "tu" (the informal second-person pronoun) and its associated verb forms you're supposed to use Lei, which also means "she." Maybe this stems from antique forms of address using feminine-gendered nouns of respect, such as Sua signoria, "your lordship," or Sua eccellenza, "your excellency. I've also read that it derives from Spanish court traditions, from the era when Spain ruled large parts of Italy.

Whatever the reason, someone working in a store, for instance, will say Cosa potrei offirLa? or Grazie a Lei! ("What can I offer her?" and "Thanks to her!") to a male customer, just to be polite. The femininity of this form of gentilezza, as well as its purported foreign roots, led Mussolini to ban official use of the formal Lei while he was in power, in favor of the older, supposedly more Italian use of voi, the plural "you," as the courtesy form.

When I told my Italian Twelve-Step pals that some Americans wanted to eliminate the male pronouns in the Steps, they were plainly baffled. Everything in their version of the Steps, everything in their world, is either male or female. It was hard for them to imagine how that could be changed, or why anyone would want to change it.

But perhaps change is on the horizon. There are regional elections coming up in Italy later this month, and the parties of the right and left see this as an important test of strength. Just before we left town I noticed this poster in downtown Fidenza.

I figured this gal for a right-winger just because of her Fox News makeup and bottle-blonde hair, and sure enough, she's a leader of Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the candidate of a coalition of right-wing parties calling themselves Popolo della Famiglia, "People of the Family." And the only political content on the poster is the battle cry No gender nelle scuole, "No gender in the schools."

That slogan notwithstanding, I don't think neofascists in Italy are on the same gender-neutral page as California feminists. I haven't been following Italian politics as closely as I should, but no doubt these rightists are trying to make political hay with the same "bathroom bill" homophobia that their counterparts in the U.S. have been hammering on. In the U.S. these right-wing campaigns have been all about emphasizing so-called biological gender, but in Italy the push is to not talk about gender at all. Here the bright line dividing the world into male and female must seem--to some, at least--omnipresent, eternal, all-inclusive, beyond argument. Not unlike God Itself.

Goats, cabbages, and other wordplay

Although I'm still painfully far from fluent, my Italian is coming along. I'm able to make conversation that's comprehensible, if not entirely grammatical, and I even successfully make jokes now and then.

However, understanding Italians when they speak at their normal clip is still way beyond me. I've realized that I have the same problems understanding Italian that my very hard-of-hearing husband does with English. If there's background noise, or the person is facing away from me, or if a regional accent is involved, I'm lost. I don't know the language well enough to fill in the blanks, the way I can in English. I need every bit of information I can get to even halfway understand what an Italian speaker is saying.

Eavesdropping is one of my favorite activities, and Italy should be paradise for eavesdropping, since Italians talk everywhere, all the time. Unfortunately, I can get only a random word now and then, never the gist of what other people are talking about.

I am, however, starting to learn the kinds of idioms that make a new language so much fun. Herewith a few of them:

Tocca ferro! "Touch iron," a phrase similar to our "Knock wood," except Italians seem to use it to ward off something bad rather than encourage something good. Like us, they will say it and tap their own head.

In bocca al lupo! A dialect phrase that means "in the wolf's mouth" is the way you wish someone good luck. A cruder version is In culo alla balena!--"in the whale's ass."

Lei ha fetta di salame sugli occhi. "She has slices of salame on her eyes," meaning that she is refusing to see something obvious. Prosciutto sometimes fills in for the salame.

La goccia che ha fatto traboccare il vaso. The Italian version of "the straw that broke the camel's back" literally means "the drop that made the vase overflow."

Terza giovanezza. "Third youth" is a polite euphemism for old age, similar to our "golden years." Although it sounds amusingly similar, it does not mean the same thing as "second childhood."

A cavallo by the sea.

A cavallo del secolo. "Astride the century," the Italian way of saying "at the turn of the century."

La verita' nuda e cruda. "The truth, naked and raw," or as we would say, "The whole truth and nothing but."

Avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca. The Italian version of "having your cake and eating it, too" is "having a full barrel and a drunk wife."

Salvare capra e cavoli. There doesn't seem to be an exact English equivalent for this one. "To save the goat and the cabbages" means to achieve two seemingly incompatible goals and derives from an ancient riddle about a farmer who has to ferry a wolf, a goat, and a crate of cabbage across a river. He can only take himself and one other item in the boat at a time and he can't leave the goat with the cabbage unattended, nor the wolf with the goat. Danny solved this instantly; I had to look up the answer online.

Mi formicola il piede. "My foot tingles, my foot fell asleep." This tickles me, so to speak, because the verb for "tingling" comes from formica, ant, and evokes little critters crawling around under your skin.

Mamma mia! I am delighted to report that Italians really do say this, all the time. It's adorable.

Architecture of death

Ever since I was a child, death and its trappings have fascinated me, perhaps because death was--is--so huge and so terrifying and yet so rarely talked about with any candor. Graveyards I found particularly intriguing, since they were not only full of dead people but also crammed with stories that were compelling yet incomplete. How did that long-ago mother feel about burying three young children, and how did they die? What happened to the man who passed away at the age of only 23? What led a family to erect a granite monument to their father but leave him all alone when their own time came?

I therefore would have been fascinated by the cemetery in Fidenza even if it had been just another graveyard. But it is also weirdly, wonderfully different from the American graveyards I'm used to.

Located just on the other side of the railroad tracks, a few blocks from our place, it is very large and has a variety of resting places. Unlike an American graveyard, Fidenza's isn't all graves but is made up of lots and lots of structures. There's a chapel, but most of the real estate is taken up with open-air breezeway sorts of things.

The majority of cimitero residents are tucked into niches in the walls of these buildings, a practice that echoes Fidentinos' evident fondness for living in apartment buildings rather than single-family houses.

There are miles of these niches, called loculi, and most seem well tended. (Although a few have notices taped to them asking any relatives to please contact the cemetery office immediately. I suspect a bill is overdue.)

When I visited the cimitero on a recent Sunday dozens of people were coming in and out, making visits to deceased relatives. The loculi are engraved with religious emblems, inspirational sayings, photographs, and expressions of love, as well as names and dates. Most are adorned with flowers as well, often artificial but frequently fresh. The cemetery provides ladders, watering cans, and brooms to help people keep their kin tidy.

There's a tiny Jewish section tucked away in the back. I had a hard time finding it again. 

All the spots along the sides are marked with just a number. Whether these are unclaimed plots or anonymous dead I don't know. I'll have to figure out who does.

Although almost all the cimitero's graves are decorated, few are very elaborate. This isn't anything like the famously over-the-top Staglieno cemetery in Genoa (which I am determined to go see in the not too distant future). Most of what's in Fidenza's cemetery is the opposite of spectacular, just sadly everyday expressions of grief and love.

This ode to motherhood caught my eye. "The poetry of life is composed of a single word: Mama."

Fidenza has been around for centuries, but most of the folks in its cemetery departed this mortal coil within the last thirty or so years. My friend Franca explained that Italians have a system for not letting the dead take up too much space.

Forty years after someone is interred, she told me, they open up the loculo and pull out the coffin. If it still feels heavy they put it back and give it some more time. If it's light, they open it up and move the bones--which is all that's left--into a much smaller box that can share another relative's loculo or... Well, Franca wasn't sure what happens if there aren't any relatives left to deal with the bones, but the authorities put them somewhere. Presumably there's a record of where they've been laid to more permanent rest.

I'd assumed this box I glimpsed when I was wandering the grounds one afternoon was empty, but now I wonder if it was someone in the process of relocating.

I have to say that I found Franca's explanation more than a little shocking. But when people have been living in the same place for thousands of years a system like this is probably necessary.

Most likely the 40-and-out rule doesn't apply to those loved ones who are housed in separate mausoleums, of which the Fidenza cemetery has dozens and dozens lining its streets.

The array of architectural styles is amazing. Some mausoleums look like offices, some like spacecraft, some like bank vaults or jewel boxes.

Do people pick the designs out of a catalog or are there architects that specialize in customized tombs? I hope I can find out.

 

Only a very few of them resemble what I would expect a mausoleum to look like.

I was particularly struck by how tall all of them are. A few weeks ago we went house-hunting with an Italian friend and saw a place whose ground floor ceilings were eight feet high, something you see often enough in U.S. apartment buildings. The realtor told our friend that legally the downstairs space could only be used as a garage, because the ceilings were too low for human habitation. Or at least for Italian habitation. Well, apparently even in death Italians can't live without at least 10-foot ceilings.

The cemetery also offers more conventional graves, and there are hundreds of those, too.

The wooden crosses seem to be new arrivals.

The headstones come later. But they're propped up with wooden boards...is that a temporary measure during the rainy season or some kind of budget alternative to the more firmly fixed headstones further back?

I'll end with a picture of a little monument near the front gate. The motto means, "To all the dead." I wish I knew the history of this, too.

There are so many questions about the cimitero that I'm dying, er, very eager to get answers to. Good thing I'll be back in a few months.