I doubt there are too many occasions in life when the smell of cow shit brings a smile to your face. I smiled broadly when I realized I could smell it wafting in from the stable below. Then I smelled the eggs frying in olive oil for my breakfast, and as an experiment I boiled water for tea. It was all there, taste and smell were back. I was going out to dinner in Leonessa.
As soon as I got the negative Covid test the pharmacist said, “You are free to go and be among people,” an Italian’s highest aspiration as being alone is an incomprehensible state of unendurable solitude in these underpopulated hills. “I want an ice cream,” I said firmly. Even if I couldn’t taste it I wanted something cool and creamy, a memory of vanilla to celebrate the disappearance of my Covid. The pharmacist laughed. Fair enough she said as she scooped up my 15 Euros and we were both maskless, the first time in a week I wasn’t unclean.
I walked to the village shop where my Facebook friend Enrica owns her late mother’s institution, the convenience store. Below you her mother Angelina getting water at the public fountain fifty or sixty years ago as everyone had to in those inconvenient days, and she was dressed as I remember her in her black widow’s weeds:
Armed with my chocolate coated vanilla ice cream bar I got into my rented Fiat 500 for the forty five minute drive to the hospital at Terni. That ice cream bar had flavor, and I thought of the comment left on this page which affected me profoundly. Imagine losing your senses of smell and taste forever? Unbearable. I had an inkling mine was coming back as I sat in the car licking the chocolate coating off the vanilla and I was profoundly grateful.
The Italian countryside is littered with fixed speed traps which seem to have multiplied since the last time I was here, orange pillars everywhere. The fines arrive by mail and are not subject to appeal. I don’t drive fast in my old age but the cars beeps at me every time I exceed the speed limit, even by one kilometer per hour, in the vicinity of these damned Autovelox machines. The car sounds like a juvenile’s phone texting beeping at every village.
Giovanni spent forty plus years as a cardiologist at the public Hospital of Santa Maria in Terni (no separation of church and state here). They put up the obligatory banner thanking healthcare workers but Giovanni retired with a profound sense of relief at escaping a politicized and under funded public hospital. Forty years of public service paid back the state for his medical education and assured him a pension plan.
With his instructions I found the infectious disease ward but visiting hours are in the evening only and pretty strict so I left a message for my sister that I had been by and went off to meet Giovanni who had plans to go for a drive. I was ready to do anything other than sit still.
Just like the majority of the United States central Italy is enjoying an appalling heatwave so to escape one hundred degree temperatures we planned to head to the mountains of Terminillo, a ski resort a short drive from the heat sink that is Terni.
Giovanni was rather dismissive of the town of Leonessa saying it voted him. Personally I rather liked it, properly medieval, comfortably flat for strolling with lots of interesting alleys and medieval buildings, many wracked by recent earthquakes which take decades to repair in lackadaisical Italy.
The interior of the church held together by a jigsaw of plumbing bolted together to stop the thing from imploding..so far so good.
Inside one church we came across this rather startling mural painted in 2016 about a massacre that took place in April 1944. Italy was the scene of some ghastly violence in that year as the Germans grew increasingly desperate as they were forced to retreat. My grandfather was imprisoned by the Gestapo for hiding guns (true) but he was saved by the arrival of the British, including my father who ended up marrying his daughter. Wars do terrible and sometimes astonishing things for people.
Twenty four people including a priest were murdered in a public execution to try to persuade the partisans to stop fighting and the whole city watched. Ghastly stuff not easily forgotten, apparently.
More earthquake damage:
More earthquake straps…
“I know this place,” Giovanni said and they squeezed us in for dinner without a reservation. It turns out she was his patient.
I can’t tell if Italians are hypochondriacs of if they are just more ill than they tell us in the US where the “Mediterranean diet” is promoted as heart healthy; but there was a positive parade of people stopping by to say “Hi!” to the doctor. I kept my head down and ate my heart- friendly portions as ordered by my cardiologist.
Giovanni insisted on paying but as he told me later “ I had to give her something…” otherwise as he put it she’d wanted her heart checkups for free!
It was a short walk back to the car but it helped settle dinner…
Whereupon someone else flagged down the intrepid doctor from their car. The weird thing is the town of Leonessa isn’t even in Umbria and is miles off our beaten path in the Lazio region. But not that far from Terni.
Finally we got going for a drive through the cool night air several thousand feet up, me snug in the Audi’s comfortable passenger lounge half listening to Giovanni explain why Italy is such a mess thanks to the communists and immigration and all that stuff.
All I could see was miles of oppressed middle class tax evading Italians enjoying expensive full dinners out in the mountains many of them wild camping in parking lots at the ski resorts closed for the season.
I missed GANNET2…
And so we drove back to Terni and there I took my Fiat 500 back to my farmhouse.
Another day in retirement.
