Even as COVID-19 ravages my own country, for some reason I find myself very focused on the news coming out of Italy. Perhaps this is because it is just so hard for any American to believe that something this bad can happen in the U. S., or maybe it’s just my habit in times of trouble to turn my focus outward as a relief from my own anxiety. With every new article, I hope for a turn to the positive, at least a leveling off of “the curve” of new cases, and when the good news doesn’t come, my heart breaks for you, Italy.
I see the death toll climb all over the world, 335 in the UK, more than doubling in one day to reach 2,182 in Spain; numbers dwarfed by the death toll in beautiful Italy: over 6,000 in a matter of weeks. I know you are ahead of us on the curve so your number may only be a foreshadowing of the death toll around the world as this horrible plague ravages us.
I wonder if you have suffered so much loss, not just because your timeline started before ours, but, in some huge irony because of your incredible warmth and affection as a people. When I think of Italy, I always think of the people I met there and how you were so kind, even as I made social faux pas and mutilated your language even as I had to learn not to burst into a shop like a spoiled toddler announcing what I wanted, but rather dancing around the point of my visit, first saying hello, remarking on the beautiful day, asking about the health and mood of the store clerk or owner, and waiting for my cue, a breezy, “Allora….” Letting me know they were ready to get down to business. And that was just how the most formal exchanges went. If I was invited to dinner, I could count on many embraces and cheek kisses, not to mention some close talking and sharing of food. The dinners would go on for hours, starting and ending with wine and espresso, and warmth, so much warmth, among people who really appreciate the beauty of humanity.
I think of how frightened you must have been by the spectre of death to give up the thing for which you are best known, all that closeness, love personified, all those large gatherings with family and friends to separate for weeks on end and live alone while loved ones suffer and die so close by. How ironic in a place where no one is permitted to feel lonely that so many of those kind, generous people are dying alone. Even as a foreigner, I was taken into that warm embrace. I went through an ugly divorce while I lived there, and while I have experienced that feeling that often comes with being divorced, that somehow my married friends felt they could catch it and so some of them distanced themselves, I found just the opposite while I was in Italy. I was taken into a warm embrace of generosity and kindness. One friend called in a favor with a landlord and enabled me to move into an apartment on the town square that I could never have afforded. Later, I moved into a house that needed electricity hooked up and so another friend had my lights connected under her name (due to some complication about my not having the proper paperwork at the time, and therefore probably illegal) I often travelled to see the sights on my own in those days and remember waiters being horrified that I was dining alone, taking time to chat while they worked, in one case just giving me his personal umbrella because it was drizzling, after I turned down the offer for an escort to safely walk the streets at night in Florence. I believe I saw genuine worry on that stranger’s face when I left that night.
I feel a lot of things about this pandemic, but the thing that consistently brings me to tears is the rising toll in beautiful Italy with your beautiful people so full of love for others that even outsiders are not treated as such. Personal circumstances recently caused me to cancel a trip I had planned to visit northern Italy and now I wonder how changed I will find you when I do go back, and I will go back. It’s one of the things I daydream about while I spend my days in isolation here in my own country. In the meantime, I send my love and prayers to you, Italy. You are not alone.