Earthquake Country

The mountain range that separates Umbria from the Adriatic Sea is subject to some pretty severe earthquakes which in Italy tend to mean life will not return to normal for decades at best. 

But life goes on and Italians make do in these Instagram countrysides where agriculture continues underneath the new overlay of mass selfie tourism. 

You might be forgiven for thinking this valley is half the size of Italy if you judged by the number of photos taken here, especially in Spring at the height of wildflower season.

They call it the Great Plain and since the Internet opened up the worlds back roads for inspection people flock here and enjoy it. 

You come across a mountain pass around 4,000 feet and there it is, a couple of miles of straight road in the wilderness. Click with the camera and we were gone.  Giovanni my chauffeur is a fast paced tourist where the pleasure is in getting the Audi through the mountain roads. 

The great earthquake of 2016 flattened this area and seven years later they have done almost nothing to build back the public spaces. 

Stores in cabins and homes in containers are the norm here seven years later with piles of rubble and latticeworks of scaffolding to try to hold up the remains of centuries old landmarks. 

But the visitors keep coming. Unlike us many of them stop and take in the scenery. 

No parking on either side of the roadway! And of course perfectly disciplined Italians follow the rules to the letter…

Norcia is famous for its preserved meats and as Umbria is the home of meat eaters that’s saying something. Norcia is where you get wild boar salami and exquisite mozzarella, truffles and so forth, all the symbols of central Italian cuisine at their best. 

You’d think everyone would have hopped to after the earthquake of 2016 but destruction is everywhere in this historic district. 

Abandoned buildings line the highway and weeds are taking over. There is of course rural population flight here like anywhere but the lack of reconstruction is exacerbating it. 

I try to cone up to these parts when I visit Umbria because it’s so different, it’s more Alpine, more stark than most homey low altitude Umbrian hills. 

Highway snow markers, steeply pitched roofs and ski lifts are the norm around here, where it’s high enough you get serious winter weather. 

We zipped into Norcia, the town where Saint Benedict was born in order to admire the history for a moment and more importantly to have a coffee pick-me-up. 

Seeing this long standing destruction and the efforts to keep living a normal life gave me flashbacks to life after severe hurricanes in the Keys. I put my camera away and used my phone to record what I saw as I felt awkward about staring at the misery. 

Mind you six months after Hurricane Irma wrecked the Lower Keys 90% of the damage was repaired. This is seven years of suffering with no end in sight. 

The posters promise a return to the loveliness it used to be, and slowly facades are being supported and the buildings behind are being rebuilt. 

Saint Benedict surveying the slow pace of work: 

A protest poster saying the local government (“conune”) promised the hospital would be rebuilt by 2023 and work hasn’t yet started. 

By the way they have real estate for sale: 

We stopped for the inevitable coffee. Giovanni had business to transact and I sat had watched the world go by while he hunched over his phone. 

The chain smoking cardiologist.  He retired after 40 years working in the hospital which paid back the government for his university medical school but he continues his private practice offering EKGs to Italians who are by nature hypochondriacs. He’s cheap and quick where public care is free but slow to even make an appointment for non urgent care. 

Local government has discovered the value of these speed traps and they are everywhere. My rental car beeped if you were approaching one above the speed limit which innovation surprised me. 

The Valley of the Nets River approaching Terni, Giovanni’s home.  It is a remarkably picturesque area. 

I as a good traveler organizing my laundry for my last day in Italy. It was over 105 degrees in town and how the laundry workers kept going I don’t know. 

Layne sent me a few photos from time to time of Rusty enjoying life without me. 

I sent her food pictures to make her jealous. 

Up next Orvieto underground and then my long awaited flight home. 

Santa Maria Della Consolazione

It’s a well know problem for people who live near famous or desirable tourist attractions: they never visit them.

I used to ride my motorcycle or even drive my car past this distinctive church innumerable times in a week. It’s on the edge of the city of Todi which is the nearest town to my village, a commercial and social hub. From my village 12 miles away  it is a clear landmark on the horizon: 

You come into town and there it is “the Consolazione” an old familiar blob by the side of the street. 

They were closing when I arrived but she squeezed me and my camera in at the last minute. I guess I must have been in there before but honestly I can’t remember so my breath was quite taken away by the beauty inside the church. 

In the old days the church was a bit of a head scratcher as no one knew who was responsible for creating it. I know it’s hard to imagine but the Papal States (which were dissolved only on September 20th 1870) were absolutely littered with these kinds of churches monuments and ruins and the Papal bureaucracy was much less efficient than the secret police. They just lost track of this stuff. 

The authorities used to say the temple was “attributed to” Donato Bramante (1444 - 1514) a wildly successful Papal architect. You may have heard of the cathedral in Rome known as St Peter’s, he was commissioned to design that masterpiece to mark the place where St Peter was martyred. In a list of his buildings you probably won’t find the Consolazione. However nowadays there is the tourist trade to consider so his hand in the design of this church is now definite… in 1508. He was a busy man as St Peter’s was designed in 1503 and Michelangelo started work in 1506. 

Apparently this is a Renaissance church built more as a square with a dime reminiscent of St Peter’s. But what it makes me think is how stuff there is lying around Italy, so much art and history that the origins of a building as particular as this can essentially get lost. 

That and the fact that tourism has arrived in the backwater where I spect my childhood. Not only can you get pizza delivery nowadays…

…but back at home banal public buildings are now labeled as historic sites for the benefit of the passersby walking these villages to discover their heritage. 

I wandered around a bit outside the church at Todi pondering the benefit of the internet which makes what was obscure well known suddenly. 

And had I known all those years ago riding to band practice or coming to market, would this 21st century knowledge have made a difference? I’d like to think I’d have stopped and pondered things more and not taken these beauties for granted. But I was a callow youth and I had no Google! 

Leonessa

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.