On the eve of Phase 2

This morning was glorious, as so many mornings have been over the past two months; the shining sun and gleaming water and tranquil atmosphere — perhaps too tranquil, but that’s for another discussion — made our daily dawn walk something lovely.

We started these walks on Monday, March 9, the first morning of lockdown, sensing that we had to keep moving somehow if we were going to be housebound essentially 24 hours a day (legal escape hatch: the supermarket run).  Sneaking out under what was then the barely brightening sky, I felt like we were doing something extremely daring.

A few other people were also out, running, or walking purposefully, with or without a dog.  We avoided each other, we pretended we didn’t see anyone. Everyone seemed to be operating under the Cone of Silence.

So: At 6:30 AM it’s on with the mask and gloves and out we go.  Then nine times over the bridge outside our house (the tenth would be on the return trip).  This was Lino’s idea, and it was a good one.  Next, we walk up to the end of via Garibaldi, turn left, and walk along the lagoon-front (at 6:50 AM we pass the Giardini vaporetto stop), down to land’s end at Sant’ Elena all the way to the Morosini Naval School.

We get the Gazzettino at the newsstand at the Sant’ Elena vaporetto stop and retrace our steps toward the Giardini dock, which we pass at 7:20.  We proceed all the way to the top of via Garibaldi, then home.  A stop at the fruit and vegetable boat may be in order (beat the crowds), then home by 7:40.  This adds up to 2.8 miles, if anybody cares.

After two months of this, we have come to recognize a number of people.  Not that we KNOW them, we just know that at that point there will be the two heavyset women and one heavyset man, evidently relatives or friends (or both), walking a nondescript dog.  There’s the man with his black and white English setter and the catapult-thing that throws the ball amazingly far.  At the brick bridge we will encounter Barbara, owner of the bar/cafe “Vecia Gina” where we love to sit outside under a big umbrella in the summer, drinking and munching and cooling off.

Sometimes by the bridge by the viale Garibaldi we’ll run into Ennio, whom Lino has known forever and I somewhat less than that — he used to belong to our boat club.  There might be Bepi “Stella” out walking his old black dog.  And so it’s a mix of people we know and people we think we know by now, though I recognize them more by their clothes than their faces — logical, considering that almost everybody’s masked.  Lino sometimes whispers “Who was that?” even when somebody has just said “Ciao, Lino.”

This afternoon there were many more people out strolling than ever before, and clumps of kids of various ages yelling in various ways.  Some people clearly were not from around here, but they weren’t foreigners, just Venetians from other parts of the city.  The new regulation says that you can go visit relatives (but not unrelated friends), so I suppose these were social visits to random family members.

But we also saw three Carabinieri walking around, two policemen (Polizia di Stato) in the Quintavalle canal on their jet skis, and not long afterward a regular police motorboat pulled up and three officers crossed the bridge and disappeared, evidently in search of someone or thing.  We both had the feeling that they want us all to know that it’s not party time yet; we all have been warned in a thousand ways that we must, MUST continue with masks and gloves and distancing.  Even the Prime Minister has implored everyone not to act like everything’s fine, because it’s not.  He has also repeated that if infections begin to increase, we are all going to be back where we started, only worse.  He didn’t actually say that we’d be locked inside our houses, but it didn’t sound good.

Tomorrow people will start to go back to work.  We will take our walk, but I think it will be different.  It won’t be a secret thing among just us anymore.