The Oblivion of Travel

A lot has happened since my last posting; we’ve been to Venice, Bolzano and the Cinque Terre, and I’ll get around to covering those– eventually.

But today I feel that I must acknowledge something far more important: Over 100,000 Italians have been displaced by the earthquakes that have ravaged, and continue to ravage the area of the Apennines northeast and east of Rome. Entire towns have been destroyed– virtually leveled– and with them countless works of art and buildings of historical, cultural and social importance. More important, though, is that thousands of homes have crumbled to dust and piles of rubble, leaving entire families homeless and rootless and with little hope of a quick solution. How do you rebuild an entire town? An entire region?

We watch the news on television here and can scarcely believe the scenes we witness second-hand, much less process the devastation the people confront daily. They can’t go back to their homes because of the continuing danger of further quakes. In some ways, perhaps the displacement of the people has helped because when the most recent tremors struck, many of the towns that were most fragile and closest to the epicenters were already abandoned because of the previous quakes and so the loss of life, which would have otherwise been expected, was nil. The curse turns into a blessing.

The news coverage shows row upon row of cots set up in gymnasia, churches, public buildings, offices… Children sleeping with their shoes on just in case… Lines for food and water… And winter coming fast. The politicians show up for the cameras– and perhaps truly want to help– but there is little that can be done while the wait goes on for the shocks to stop, for the land to settle, for the work of rebuilding to begin with the clearing of debris.

We were in Venice when the next-to-most-recent quake hit. We knew nothing of it, felt nothing. Our first clue was that we all suddenly began receiving text messages from the United States saying, “I heard that there was an earthquake in Italy– are you all ok?” At that point there was nothing in the newspapers in Venice and the incident seemed to be unreal because there was no visible reaction from the Venetians, and certainly not from the tourists. I guess I thought it was just an after-shock, or maybe I didn’t think much about it at all because it didn’t impact me at that moment; instead we continued our travels without any inconvenience. Inconvenience. As though that were the point…

We finished our visit in Venice and went to Bolzano and then came home to Florence. By then the quake was in the papers, but there was a kind of detachment when we spoke to Florentines about the situation. Our landlord said, “I was driving and didn’t feel anything,” and he chuckled, not in a way that demonstrated any particular lack of empathy, but more as though he couldn’t really feel much emotion about an event that he couldn’t feel physically. Mark, another friend, said that he had felt it, but again he didn’t seem to be emotionally attached to the event. And understand, these are good people, caring people with families they love and people who love them. Good people.

And so we went on with our travels and took the trains to the Cinque Terre, where we ate good food and drank wine and walked the cobblestone streets and then we got new text messages from the US. Another quake. And again there was no visible reaction from the people we met in the streets or in the shops or restaurants; it was business as usual, and it wasn’t as though we could occupy any higher moral ground because we were doing the same thing, “acting as though.” As though nothing was wrong in the world, as though what we were doing was good, and right, and as though the fact that we weren’t being inconvenienced was the most important thing to consider.

And then we returned to the apartment in Florence and once again we were confronted with the scenes of destruction in the hillside towns of the Abruzzo and Umbria and Marche… So we turned off the television, because what can we do but ache and feel the emptiness of our essential impotence, our powerlessness and the futility of our concern?  We could rush off the the area and offer help, but no one is allowed into the region without expertise, and our good-will doesn’t qualify as expertise.

And so, as tourists, as travelers, we continue with our daily routines and wonder at our own insipid behavior, the psychological compartmentalization that allows us to keep moving forward according to our scheduled departures and arrivals, while deep inside something feels wrong, empty, missing.