Traveling Home

Two weeks in Italy have come and gone and I am back sleeping aboard GANNET2 and glad to be home in

my van with my wife and dog enjoying the cooling coastal breezes of the central California coast. 

Layne was pleased to see me no doubt but Rusty hasn’t let me out of his sight. He didn’t mope while I was gone but he pushed his face into mine when I got into the back seat at the airport and let me know he had waited patiently but was glad I was back. And just like that Italy was in the rear view mirror. 

Something changed this visit and I found some inner equilibrium missing on past journeys to the place where I grew up. Previously I had landed among my family as a man on a mission wondering where my retirement might lead but this time my visit to the beauties of central Italy was an interruption in my fully formed retirement life. 

Seven days of Covid isolation confirmed in my head my desire to get back to where I wanted to be. The Immigration officer smiled at San Francisco airport when I said I’d been in Italy two weeks. “Was it enough?” “You don’t know my family” I replied as I swept up my US passport. “More than enough.” 

I very brilliantly gave my 75 year old sister (the one on the left in the 55 year old picture below with her twin and our mother) my dose of Covid and in the land of free health care they kept her isolated in the hospital simply as a precaution. Ironically she went home none the worse for wear the day I flew back to California. 

I have no family photo of this trip, everyone was living their routines and my presence, now that my sister was in the hospital was incidental to those lives lived farming and running a hotel and being busy. I had a rental car and the will to use it. 

It was all strangely liberating.  I did my rounds checking out the castle I grew up in, still austere, still there filled with memories of  gothic loneliness, my mother dead, my sisters busy as always, inherited their own preferred homes on different hills among our hundreds of acres, my father indifferent in London and fifty rooms all to myself. I caused scandal not wanting to live out my inheritance, the last male in the family rejecting the anointed role. 

Nowadays no one cares, my escaping to America an object of curiosity and envy even and I finally understood that. My self conscious return to my roots has been a matter of supreme indifference to those around me. My scandalous behavior has been superseded by so much more interesting gossip in the intervening forty one years. 

These spaces I remember from my  childhood are populated by the ghosts of my memory and the people I met on the ground were almost all visitors, a few people spending summer vacations back where their family roots are in these villages, but others were purely tourists walking the woodland trails suddenly made popular by savvy marketing. I saw lots of over heated exhausted “trekkers” in the hundred degree heat: 

I met people from my youth, people who knew not what to say as I appeared as if by magic from a distant past. I smiled and asked how they were doing and we talked about the passing of time and how young I look and is America nice and we avoided the details of my youthful despair and sudden departure. 

I met Carletto at the village store, an 80 year old man in sound health but the strapping tractor driver of my youth was still visible inside the cheerful (despite the photographic appearance) pensioner today. Below with his father decades ago: 

I live in a van.  I drive around. Not words you expect to hear in a place rooted in tradition and learned, expected behaviors but even my brother in law nodded his head wisely at my retirement lifestyle. Smart, he said, you avoid paying the government property taxes. Then we moved on to the much more important subject of how migrants and refugees are ruining Italy. I didn’t even think of disagreeing or having a contrary opinion, I just breathed a sigh of relief and let the rants flow over me. 

You’d think I’d have figured out my insignificance years ago, but for far too long I’ve carried that burden of having let my family down.  In my defense as might seem obvious, I’ve never really had proper training in the social niceties, so it takes me more time and self torture to figure out what is obvious to my neighbors. You don’t care and I don’t matter. I live out of sight and out of mind and it’s time I understood that. 

In the spirit of the new me I spent time at the hospital with my sister, the one who always asks me to visit and I established a cheerful friendship with her eldest son, the happiest most fulfilled member of the family. Everyone else got a wave in passing and my best wishes for happiness and fulfillment. 

I’ve got some driving to do.

The past is another country: they do things differently there. 

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.