GRIM RESOLVE IN ITALY
A tour operator in a COVID-19 hotspot
Today is Day 19 of my wife’s and my quarantine in our tourist villa in a small Italian town. Life has changed dramatically. Everything is on hold.
If these were normal times, the villa, which is the hub of our tour company, would be buzzing with warmth and laughter as we and our staff, who double as family, got things ready for our upcoming season.
Our first guests were to arrive this week, but as I sit in our dining room writing this, the place is quiet, and it feels cold. The espresso machine sits idle. The drinks fridge is empty. Chairs are stacked in a corner. New, unpacked wine glasses sit in boxes on the floor.
On March 10, the Italian government announced a complete, national quarantine of indeterminate length to stop the spread of COVID-19. Since then, 60 million Italians have been helplessly watching the spiralling numbers of infected and dying people.
Our town, Torre de’Passeri, is in the region of Abruzzo, about 160 kilometres east of Rome. We are about 400 km south of the closest hot zone in Northern Italy and 600 km from the contagion epicentre in Bergamo, close to Milan.
That may sound far away, but nowhere and nobody in this country is untouched. As of Thursday, there were 946 cases in our regional population of 1.3 million, which has the same population as Ottawa-Gatineau. Sixty-three people were dead. The intensive care units were full.
There were cases in towns and villages all around us, but there were no cases in Torre de’Passeri, population 3,000. We took the warnings seriously here, well before the lockdown. In postings on our town Facebook group, people say they are proud of this. Nobody here complains about the restrictions on almost all movement. In fact, we see them as protecting us from an outside killer.
As per the quarantine law, everything is shut down except essential services. One person at a time is allowed out of each house for necessities. As my wife, Lisa Grassi-Blais, has slight asthma, that one person, in our case, is me.
The changes are dramatic. Our normally bustling town is empty, desolate, robbed of life. No old men on the benches arguing politics or soccer. No teenagers sitting on the steps of the school yelling and horsing around. No young men on scooters screaming up and down the main street trying to impress the young ladies outside the pastry shop. The two cafés I usually stop at on the way to and from the grocery store are shuttered. No blue-collar workers having a beer on the café tables. The bakery building doesn’t smell of bread. The prepared food shop, which is always hot and humid from cooking, looks cold.
It’s a ghost town.
At the grocery store, you take a number outside, then stand with the rest of the dozen or so people scattered around the parking lot until your number is called. Nobody talks because we worry this aids viral transmission. It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to say. You just wait.
When I enter the store, a woman in a hazmat suit from the public health department orders me to wash my already rubber-gloved hands with sanitizer. She tells me not to pick up anything I won’t buy, stay at least two metres from other people, pay with plastic if possible, be quick, and not chat with others.
At the checkout, I simply look at the cashiers I would normally exchange pleasantries with. With my eyes, I try to tell them how worried I am for them because, after hospital staff, grocery store cashiers are now the most vulnerable people in Italy.
When I walk home, I sometimes see police officers enforcing the quarantine. They stop people to check whether they have legitimate reasons for being out. I’m fine with this. I know this virus is a mass killer, and I also know that strict quarantines are the only thing proven to slow the spread.
Back home, Lisa and I try to keep busy doing yard work and small projects around our villa. We watch Netflix and read a lot. We are trying new recipes. Technology has been a godsend, as we communicate with our families, friends, staff and clients constantly.
After reading about overflowing crematoriums in Bergamo and seeing images of military trucks transporting corpses to other cities to be burned, I only check the news once in the morning and once at night now. It’s depressing and the situation weighs on Lisa. She’s spending too much time in bed on the internet getting updates on the situation. I try to comfort her, but it’s heavy here. You can almost feel it pressing down on your chest, making it hard to breathe.
As of midweek, the national numbers for new infections had declined for three days straight. Maybe a ray of hope, but it’s hard to see a bright side when more than 700 people a day are dying.
But there is also grim determination here. Italians, especially the Abruzzese, as the folks in our region are called, are good at tough times. They’ve survived wars, poverty, depressions, a Fascist government that hated their independence, big and destructive earthquakes, and isolation. They know that if we work together, we can limit the carnage of any threat, this one included. There is no panic buying here. No hoarding. The national motto has become “Tutto andrà bene,” or “Everything will be OK.”
When? Nobody knows.
So, in the meantime, the young people in our town deliver groceries and medicines to the older people who are most vulnerable to the virus. People post inspirational and funny things on our town Facebook site. They sing to each other from balconies. We do what we can to help everybody keep their spirits up.
We respect the quarantine because we know it’s literally a matter of life and death.
And, like the wine glasses in our dining room, we wait.
Jake Rupert lived in Ottawa for most of his life and is a former Citizen reporter. He and his wife now live in Abruzzo, Italy where they operate a tour company.
Italians ... are good at tough times. ... They know that if we work together, we can limit the carnage of any threat.