26 September 2011

On Settembre Lucchese, Memory and Hope

A Taste of NH amidst Murabilia



            September in Lucca. It is perhaps the month with more activities scheduled than any other. Locals are back from their August vacation. Hoards of tourists no longer crowd out local pedestrian traffic although a Sunday evening passegiata will now squeeze to the margins any tourist trying to get through on a bike. The hot weather moderates a bit and special events abound. One could view the Tiro della Forma competition (Tuscan Cheese Rolling Championships) near the river Serchio, stroll through four of the ramparts up along the walls amongst the displays of plants, flowers, gardening tools and furniture and food offerings at Murabilia Murainfiore (Flowers on the Walls Festival), learn about writing in the Middle Ages and try writing with a feather and ink yourself or view a live attempt to sack Lucca from outside its walls at Ante Diem Sanctae Crucis, Lucca’s Medieval Festival, visit a newly re-opened museum in the building where Puccini was born, catch the last concert or two of European youth performing works of Liszt in the Orto Botanico (Botanic Gardens) or out on Piazza S. Giusto, join the thousands of spectators lining candle-lit streets and squares to watch the three hour long procession of Luminaria di Santa Croce as the Volto Santo is brought from San Frediano Church to the town’s cathedral San Martino and watch stunning fireworks afterwards, participate in a three-thousand strong group of walkers and joggers—many participating with their teammates in glitzy club shirts—chatting away with each other as they completed a course along the walls and streets, came upon a two hundred strong chorus singing Ode to Joy toward the end of the course and as they finished received a big bag of barley tagliatelle pasta to bring home, or watch the much faster and smaller field of athletes from all over the country compete the next day as part of Lucca Corri in Piazza in the Italian National Championship 10k Road Race. And no, that’s not all that’s been going on, but hopefully the point is clear:  we’ve been wide-eyed and curious, going from one special event to another and looking to see what’s coming up next. What’s new for us is routine for the locals, perhaps, but they have seemed to appreciate these events just the same.
Halfway through the three hour procession at Luminaria di Santa Croce
            
         With Settembre Lucchese going on and having been in Italy for over a couple of months the ten year anniversary of a far more somber event across the ocean snuck up on me; it wasn’t until I spent some time with an article in the newspaper a few days earlier that memories of 9/11 came back into focus.
            It was the first day of classes at our small New England prep school. We’d already completed the first two periods and students and faculty were walking across campus on a sunny day to our daily all-school assembly. As I passed the maintenance facility a radio left on outside was reporting something about a plane crash in New York City and that it may have been deliberate. A concerned-looking math teacher passed on what information he had and asked me if I knew anything else. When the headmaster confirmed that there had apparently been a catastrophic terrorist attack in Manhattan, three hundred forty-five adolescents and their teachers had the rumors and snatches of news feed they’d already heard verified by the most important authority figure nearby. Like so many Americans, we felt the ground fall out from beneath us. Our world changed fundamentally in an instant. We felt anxious and uncertain about the future. Was there any hope?
            Here in Lucca ten years later I felt a bit removed from that moment and those feelings as the date approached, but the last Corriere della Serra from a couple of days before the anniversary jerked me back from my reverie of pleasant September entertainment pursuits. It featured articles, photos and interviews with American authors who’d chronicled some element of the event in their fiction. Where were you? What are your most vivid memories from that day? How did it affect you? Will New York ever be the same? Although some thought there had been some sort of lasting change in the city’s psyche generally most agreed that, after several months, NYC seemed to move on. They were certainly not talking about those whose husbands or wives or children never came home that day, those who worked hour after hour for days in rescue efforts and witnessed sights that would haunt them for years to come, those who later became sick because of breathing in toxic fumes working on clean up, or those who lost their homes or workplaces, but in general, as a functioning city and as a collective consciousness it seemed that life was returning to normal after a few months and that maybe, slowly, some feeling of hope was returning.
Toeing the Line in Anticipation of the 10k National Championship

            Those articles and photos brought it all back home; I recalled how it had been a momentous time in our lives in another way, too. We’d married in ’99 and hadn’t yet had kids but were becoming more and more serious about starting a family. Like many others considering it we began wondering if we really wanted to bring children into a world that seemed so bent on hate and destruction. Luckily, we soon saw more clearly and recognized the initial fear, pessimism and closed-mindedness that had temporarily soured our thoughts. Due on Graduation day but making her appearance a few days later, in early June, our precious daughter arrived into the post 9/11 world and transformed our lives with at least as equal intensity as the shock of the tragedy and most definitely with more lasting effects. Although we do sometimes look back fondly at our pre-parenthood days (spontaneous outings, peace and quiet whenever we wanted it, sleeping past 6:45am and the like), bringing Ingrid and little brother Nikolai into this world is a decision we have never regretted.
There she is!



            In mid September the cycle of the seasons for us in New Hampshire means heading back to school and back to work, leaves starting to show ever more yellow, orange and red, days sometimes reaching the 70s F and nights frequently in low 40s or even low 30s, mosquitoes less and less noticeable. The familiarity of the seasonal routine is distinct for us in some ways in Lucca. The highs have been reaching the mid 80s and nighttime lows only drop to about 65 F (though luckily now it’s now starting to moderate a bit), the leaves in trees are still green, the grass still needs mowing regularly, we aren’t really aware of any changes in the lives of the very few fauna we’ve noticed around here, and there is no work for us to go back to this sabbatical year. So it is a bit disorienting. On the other hand, as happens every September, our children are returning to school. Yes, school is different here in Italy. For example, Ingrid attends Monday to Saturday from 8:15-12:45, she’s the only foreigner and the only one who doesn’t speak Italian—yet!— while Niko goes Monday to Friday 8:15-4:00 but has twenty-nine classmates—most of whom are younger—compared with eight fellow pre-schoolers last year. While the details have varied, we intend, among other things, for school to bring some sense of normalcy to our foreign life in Tuscany, some hint that time is moving forward, that some routines are being established, that connections are being made. While a lot has changed for us this year, back-to-school is a concept our family can make some sense of.
Day#1: We're off to School!

            I recently attended the last day of yet another cultural event offered here in Lucca this month, an exhibit in the Palazzo Ducale called Lungo la Scia di un’elica. It chronicled the great emigration from Italy to Northern Europe, South America and, of course, America. I was given a passport and entered a model of a typical ship that hundreds of emigrants would live in for weeks. The exhibit showed how little most of them had to eat, the challenges that faced them when they arrived and knew nothing about their new world or its language, the racism they encountered. The exhibition ended with profiles of some twenty-first century immigrants to Italy along with facts and figures showing how the face of the country is changing rapidly and presenting some of the difficulties that these immigrants, too, have faced as well as the benefits they can bring to Italy and its aging population. Similar in some ways to the residents of New York City after 9/11, these immigrants and the emigrants before them faced enormous problems Some didn’t make it, while others couldn't take it and moved away. Overall though, all three groups remembered those who had died before them, adapted and found some glimmer of hope to begin again in their own way.
            While our family has had nothing comparable in degree of difficulty to these experiences by any means there are some similar elements we can relate to concerning immigration and emigration, and when I reflect on all of the activities we’ve been lucky enough to partake in here and at times start complaining about the extremely loud roads we live next to or the foul odors entering our house from ancient plumbing systems or how people routinely stare openly at us or how we still have difficulty communicating I realize our problems are very small indeed. We have family, we have health, we have home, we have food, and we have love. It’s so easy to gradually succumb to losing sight of the forest for the trees. I think also of how without the reminders of a ten-year anniversary or an article in a newspaper I can tend to easily slip into a state of not exactly forgetting tragedies like 9/11, but just accepting them as something that happened in the past, maybe granting them a brief acknowledgment but without much desire to further plumb the depths of understanding and learning that I could draw from them were I less complacent, or less taken by the novelties around me.
Lead Pack Nearing the 5k mark in Men's 10k Championship
            
            The hate coming from prejudice, intolerance, or simple naiveté—whether manifested in the terrorist actions of 9/11, the bloody reprisal it sparked or the racial and ethnic tensions worldwide—is not always easy for me to understand and solutions to it on a broad scale even more of a challenge to grapple with. It is certain the world will not change with billions of us merely contemplating these problems, however. Fortunately there are many with the intellect, passion, structural-thinking and managerial skills to organize broad-based attempts at solutions and willing to commit themselves to a life of such work. For me, I know that these people exist and are doing great things, but it is also apparent that I need to work at solutions with myself and my family, that the solution really starts there, at the individual level. Anniversaries of tragedies help me from forgetting, but ultimately I have to ask myself, ‘What have I done concretely in response to these reminders?’ Far too often the answer seems to be ‘not much’.           
            In some small way we hope that by living in a different country with a different language, different cultural assumptions and a different history our children may grow up more likely to try to understand others and to examine their own assumptions as they encounter new situation after new situation as their lives unfold, thereby perhaps counterbalancing some of the misunderstanding, unwillingness to understand, prejudice and hate that remain around all of us. Could we do this back home? Sure. Hopefully we have been. But maybe such a dramatic change as this, our year in Italy, will be an especially opportune time in our children’s development as they learn to deal with not being able to understand their teachers or classmates at first, for example, but then persevering, surprising themselves by uttering their first complex sentence in Italian or by walking to the bakery with each other and successfully buying bread and bringing it back to Mom and Dad. Maybe these months abroad and all of this change will help Ingrid and Niko in an especially robust way to create their own routines and memories, to move on while carrying with them stories of their experiences, trials and tribulations, a richness to draw from as they navigate a complex world filled with so many choices, a multidimensionality that will give them confidence in the future and perspective and help them find a personal happiness and peace to share with others.
View from Terrace 11:45pm Beginning of Fireworks after Luminaria di Santa Croce

            So maybe these Settembre Lucchese pursuits haven’t been so frivolous after all. The honoring of a religious relic, competing at the highest levels in a race, joking with friends in a fun run, learning about Medieval warfare or village life, admiring amazing floral compositions or someone’s cultivation of three hundred heritage varieties of apples—even enjoying fireworks—in every one of these events we have found some reverence, or courage, or love, and certainly a healthy dose of awe. What a great recipe for helping us to both remember the past, focus on the here and now, and give hope for the future. Sounds kind of like what Ingrid and Nikolai have done for us. Settembre Lucchese. I highly recommend it.