A CLOSE encounter at a street corner brings home to me how much our lives have changed. Armed with the obligatory certificate supporting my right to be out and about, I am walking to a medical appointment when I nearly collide with a woman wearing a mask. We both leap backwards as if stung, and then we edge round each other in a weird tarantella.
On the walk home I meet only one other pedestrian, a young woman who presses herself up against the wall and lifts her scarf to cover her nose and mouth as I pass. She makes no effort to hide the gesture. But then I know she does it to reassure me as much as for her own safety.
How can this have happened? How have Italians, those touchy-feely people who hug and kiss and invade each other’s space, become so wary and fearful? How can this naturally convivial nation have become so cowed so quickly? How is it that they recoil from each other in the street and flinch if you lean in too close? Never has the phrase “avoid like the plague” seemed so relevant or so ominous.
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Florence, my beloved adopted home, has changed beyond recognition. At a time when the city would normally be gearing up for Easter Week and the first onslaught of tourists, the streets and squares are preternaturally quiet. All restaurants and bars and most shops have been boarded up for three weeks now. It seems like months.
Though almost certain to escalate, infection and death rates are much lower here than in the north. But the effects of the catastrophe are laid bare in the streets. To see Florence now, stunningly beautiful but stripped of life, is nothing less than shocking.
Every year Florence’s resident population of just under 400,000 is swollen by more than 10 million tourists. Sometimes it all gets too much. In hot summer months the city can seem like a cauldron of seething bodies. A walk or bike ride through the city centre becomes a slalom between swarms of visitors and demands infinite reserves of patience. But Florence is reliant on tourists and their absence now is disconcerting.
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When the order came for all restaurants and bars to close their doors, the hope was that the lockdown might last only a week or two. The summer season, we told ourselves, would soon be in full swing and we could put this strange hiatus behind us and forget about it. That hope is now fading.
“There’s nothing we can do,” says a friend who runs a guesthouse offering painting and creative writing courses. “My heart plunges every time the computer pings because I know it’s another cancellation. But we’ll just have to wait it out.” The lockdown has already been extended to 15 April and no one knows if it will be prolonged further. Yet the date keeps the frailest of hopes alive that the end is in sight. The prospect of a long, barren summer is just too terrifying to contemplate.
In what seems like the cruellest twist of fate, our lockdown has coincided with an explosion of spring weather. Normally the streets would be throbbing with life. Florentines would be spilling on to the streets and the first visitors, gelatos in hand, would be jostling on the bridges to take selfies. The aperitivo crowd would be nursing spritzes at outdoor tables and the air would be buzzing with a dozen different languages. Now there is none of that. This evening I have a date for online cocktails with friends. On one level the idea depresses me. But if I want to see friends rather than just hear their voices on the phone there is no other way.
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I am beyond grateful for our handkerchief of a garden. In the warm weather, my husband, son and I can lunch outside. We hear others along the street doing the same. We exchange gossip with neighbours at their upstairs windows. It gives us the feeling that all is as it should be and helps us forget that beyond the front door lurks something we cannot comprehend.
Not everyone is so lucky. Great swathes of the population are cooped up in apartments without so much as a balcony. Many have small children. School-agers have online lessons to keep them busy. But the days are long and home can seem like a prison when outside the sun shining.
Games have to be invented and spent-up energy safely released. Rarely has the quality that Italians are most proud of – the art of arrangiarsi, of making do and adapting to circumstances – been so sorely put to the test.
At such times a trip to the supermarket, one of the few outings permitted, can be a liberation. True, there’s the queue stretching along the street and around the corner. But there is some life, and some heart-lifting signs of solidarity and hope. Notices pinned to doors offering help to senior citizens living alone, posters of rainbows painted by children and hung from windows with the words andrà tutto bene, all will be well.
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In my own working-class neighbourhood, one of the oldest in Florence, there’s a good chance I’ll see someone I know, even if conversation is restricted by masks and distance. And then, somewhere along the line, there may be an eruption of Florentine humour, caustic and deadpan, so similar to that in parts of my native Scotland. I listen to the banter, smile into my mask, and come home nourished.
NOT all the changes have been negative. Our son, who still lives at home but whom we would see only fleetingly before all this began, now chooses to hang out with us. We share exercise apps. We all talk more and have settled into a quieter, slower, rhythm. Chores left undone for too long are getting attention. My own work as a teacher at a university in another city is now done online which saves me three hours of commuting time.
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Italians will often wish each other “forza e coraggio”, strength and courage, to deal with government officials and all the minor and major upsets of daily life.
Such qualities sustained the Florentine population in November of 1966 when the River Arno burst its banks and flooded the city, destroying homes and offices, to say nothing of precious art and manuscripts. Now we all need these qualities again as we struggle to keep fear and despair at bay and to adapt to a strange new world in which the pleasures we took for granted are severely restricted. But we will get through this. Forza e coraggio. All will be well.
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