Finally, after two and a half years of COVID exile, we are back in Umbria.
This is not meant to be a travel blog, or a current affairs blog, but sometimes the present does rather impose itself. I read and write about history partly because I like the sense of perspective one gets from looking at distant events like pestilence and war, but those things have crept rather closer recently.
It is a strange feeling being back. On the one hand, things are familiar – like the Saturday morning porchetta van in the piazza. Yet on the other hand, things are subtly different. Instead of the former devil-take-the-hindmost scrum at the porchetta van, there was the sight of a group of Italians voluntarily forming a queue.
One reads that Italy and the Italians have been changed in other ways by COVID. Government services have supposedly been simplified and made available online. This may be true for the central government, and for regional and local governments in Rome and Milan, but not here in Umbria. Going by the experience of trying to renew my parking permit for the centro storico, the processes are as old-fashioned and unnecessarily complicated as ever.
Old friends no longer greet one with a kiss on both cheeks, this is true, but instead of a distant Anglo-Saxon nod, we get big hugs.
There are sad undertones too. Where are the charming old couple who lived up the street? We haven’t seen them. Did they survive? We note that a familiar shop is closed, and friends tell us that the proprietress committed suicide.
But the sun is shining gloriously down on the Tiber Valley, people are smiling and turning out to community events like the Bersaglieri band concert on Liberation Day, and the swallows have returned, swooping and darting all day as they feed up after the long flight from Africa.
During the long gloomy Melbourne winter lockdowns I produced fewer posts, but longer and somewhat more didactic ones. My plan now is to write more briefly, and more often. I have a project in mind to explore parts of one of the local Roman roads – not the Via Flaminia, but the Via Amerina, which in one of its urban manifestations is the road we take to the supermarket.
It is wonderful to be back.