Christmas Musings 2009

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love

It’s snowing. Cute little snowflakes are swirling all around me on an icy terrace in Hampstead as I stand here with a frozen glass of good champagne on this New Year’s Eve in London. This insignificant snowfall has gladdened my heart and made me feel that change and joy really are coming, that Christmas and New Year’s Eve have waved a magic wand over my world, and everything is softer and more beautiful :)

I recently went back to my home town of L’Aquila in the Abruzzo region of Italy, for a Christmas with the few remaining cousins that still have a house to live in or still have work nearby. It was a wonderful time, but it brought on mixed emotions – the sadness of seeing the ruined city, the dread of realisation that mum would not have survived, and the joy of hugging and kissing beloved relatives again...

The Nature of Things

Abruzzo differs from the soft rolling hills and sunburnt hayfields of Tuscany and Umbria. In the Abruzzo, nature is as untamed as tradition is undiluted. Only here do the Apennines assume truly alpine proportions, topped with Gran Sasso at 2914m. It is rugged sheep country rather than farmland, and mostly consists of tall craggy peaks, deep frozen valleys and wild untamed parks where wolves, wild boars and bears still flourish and roam. Rather than having a Renaissance or Baroque imprint, it has been shaped mainly by the harsher Middle Ages. It really is more like an austere “Tibet by the sea” than elegant Italy. And so it is against this craggy template that its people have been shaped – they are a hardy, stoic lot, joyous in celebration and their traditions, but with their feet planted firmly on the ground...

Aftermath

As many of you may know (Easter-Musings), at 3:30am on the morning of April 6, 2009, most of the people of L’Aquila in Italy were asleep in their beds. There were 3 major jolts they said, each one more powerful than the last. For a population somewhat used to earthquakes, the first 2 quakes gave most people enough warning to run from their beds and leave their houses in time to survive the last and most destructive quake. What happened that night gives many of the population of L’Aquila nightmares to this day - most earthquakes happen in one dimension, left to right, or front to back, or even up and down. This last quake was in all three dimensions, a truly horrific nightmare that lasted 30 agonising seconds; the top halves of whole Palazzi lifted and twisted in mid-air, crashing down to crush their bottom halves; scores of trees were uprooted throughout the region; massive holes gaped open between houses, swallowing dozens of cars like toys; and medieval L’Aquila was in some places reduced to piles of dust and rubble just 30cm high.

My large family (48 first cousins, 10 aunts and uncles, and so on.), were amongst the lucky ones, only losing property and furniture - just some of the 29,000 left homeless; just some of the 15,350 moved to 139 hotels on the Adriatic coast, and their homes just some of the 15,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. Many other families were less fortunate. The night ended with 1000 people injured and 308 people tragically dead, many of them children and grandparents. In a country and a culture that venerates its aged and adores its children, L’Aquila still mourns both the loss of its past and its future. The worst hit was the small village of Onna - being closest to the earthquake’s epicentre, every building was completely destroyed and of the 300 people who lived there, a tragic 50 souls from this small community were killed.

Every relative I have spoken to has a story to tell of that Monday morning; when three massive quakes from below heralded three gigantic waves of destruction. The final quake destroyed every one of L’Aquila’s 99 churches (seen as a sign amongst the population), lifted whole palazzos from their foundations, and literally shook medieval buildings to piles of dust. The destruction remains there today, throughout the whole city and all the surrounding towns, a grim testament to the power of an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale - the energy of 50 x Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.

SO it was with some trepidation that I drove into L’Aquila 8 months on, not sure what to expect...

Silent Passage

It is an extraordinarily eerie feeling to walk through a city you love and know intimately, but in utter silence and completely alone. On my first morning I decided on a pre-breakfast walk. From my hotel, I found myself walking in a silent ghost town, every building cracked and leaning, propped up by wire and rope, scaffolding and steel bracing.

I found myself retracing the path of the evening passegiata that my cousins and parents and I would have wandered along in normal times - along the cobbled main artery of the Corso, wandering past smashed shop windows with art-nouveau lettering. Here the shops used to sell beautiful Italian shoes and handbags, elegant clothes, delicious Torrone (chocolate nougat), and confetti (sugar-coated almonds to be showered over Abruzzese brides and grooms). Thankfully there are still no global brands in sight, no chain stores, no cyber-cafes or fast-food joints – and that is a small but significant joy to my saddened heart. I wandered down each of the maze of medieval alleyways leading off from the Corso and again these were silent and broken, the holes in the walls allowing me to peer into the now crumbling palazzos, once boasting intricately carved facades.

The scale of the damage was too great to really take in; every single building and church and paving stone and archway and statue was broken - every single one. And there was no-one else around. I was walking in utter silence for hours, criss-crossing the city. It felt like a disused Hollywood movie set instead of a bustling, busy town that should be full of Christmas shoppers and families. Inevitably I would stumble into a Red Zone and some military policeman or worker with a red hard-hat would come out of the scaffolding to gently shoo me away from the very real danger of collapse.

At the end of my walk I found that I had arrived at my mother’s apartment. It was horribly cracked and ruined on the outside, completely collapsed within. The realisation that my mother would never have made it out alive caused me to hold my breath and I found tears running down my face. A few minutes later I ran into some surviving neighbours and found myself being hugged and kissed and asked all sort of questions about mum. In the face of such staggering destruction, they just wanted to know what mum was up to and when she was going to come and visit.

When I returned to the hotel, I just wanted to cry – it felt like I had been visiting a much-loved aunt in hospital, covered in bandages and bruises after a terrible accident.

But the people of L’Aquila are a hardy lot as I said, and Christmas with them was as loud and joyful and bountiful as ever...

Noisy Celebration

Apart from the religious foundation of Christmas, the other focus of Christmas in Italy is the food. The food of the Abruzzo tends to be hearty mountain fare, rustic with large portions and everything sourced regionally. Over the three days of feasting I was served mountains of rustic antipasti, maltagliati (“badly cut”) pasta with truffle and porcini sauce, beef lasagne, spinach & sheep-ricotta cannelloni, maccheroni alla chitarra (a homemade pasta cut by a guitar-shaped implement), served with a delicious sauce of lamb, pancetta and pecorino cheese. roasted chunks of local lamb, pork and veal, wild boar casserole, melt-in-the-mouth beef, braised in red wine and garnished with truffles, Italy's best lentils, stews of hot peppers and beans, spicy rice dishes, and a risotto made with local saffron. This was all mopped up with the best bread in Italy (I mean it) and washed down with the best red wines east of Rome. Later, with coffee and slices of homemade walnut cakes, chocolate cakes, Nurzia Torrone and endless chunks of Panettone, we had a variety of sweet local liqueurs like Aurum (made from made from rum, bitter orange peel and saffron) or Ratafia (made from wild cherries), to the knockout, dark green liqueur, Centerbe, with its 72 per cent alcoholic content... Burp :)

We ate, we played music, we played cards, discussed politics, played tombola (Italian bingo) and watched the world on television celebrate Christmas. A normal, happy, reflective Christmas with loved ones...

The Beginning
There is no end to this story, it is just the beginning...

Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.

L’Aquila is in transition now, the people passing from survivors to rebuilders, and as always with my stoic town-folk and family, carrying on as normally as possible while this progresses around them. The people of L’Aquila aren’t looking for a hand out, they’re looking for a hand up, they’re looking for help; they just want to go back to their homes. There is a spirit of optimism, defiance and solidarity among the mainly young people here. They have a simple demand: to reconstruct the damaged homes, including those in the centre of the city. They fear that Berlusconi's hollow promise to "build better homes" will result only in the cheap new housing estates (see below) being built on the outskirts of the city, and that the claims of the citizens for a proper restoration will soon be forgotten. Unfortunately for Berlusconi, the people of L’Aquila have very long memories and never give up on anything.

I might have driven into L’Aquila unsure what I’d find, but I drove out of L’Aquila knowing exactly what I had left. The people of L’Aquila are young, organised and media-savvy; they even hosted a special Christmas Eve mass for thousands in the half-collapsed Santa Maria di Collemaggio, pronouncing it the Cathedral of L’Aquila until the real Cathedral can be restored. They televised the whole event and used the moral and ethical leverage of the night, invited the Italian media and all the restoration workers to the front of the church, and held mass below the temporary plexi-glass roof and within steel-braced walls and columns. They wanted to leave no doubt in the Italian government’s mind what the city wants and still expects...

Unlike last Easter where I was just glad to be here, now I am very happy to be involved and going back, seeing my family again, checking on their slow journey back to their homes...

 

Happy New Year everyone – may your new year start as positively and joyfully as mine did :

Walter x