This announcement was posted at San Francesco da Paola yesterday and this morning it bore fruit. “You too should participate in this fun initiative!!! Every family can design a rainbow with the words Andra’ Tutto Bene on a piece of cardboard or a bedsheet and hang it on your balcony or window Saturday 14 March. A moment of creativity and of hope. Sometimes words aren’t enough… and so we need children, colors and feelings.”
The children have spoken. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
I got this message from several windows as I walked along via Garibaldi. I don’t know what’s happening elsewhere in the city — I’m hoping that the calli and campielli are smothered in festoons of “It’s going to be all right” sheets and scarves and beach towels and boat tarpaulins and painters’ old dropcloths. Somebody’s father’s favorite shirt…. Mom’s once-a-year taffeta evening skirt… What we can see on the windows may just be the tiniest part of the creative volcano.
Walking up the street, the first rainbows were above the Coop.Actually, we spied them last evening, and it looks like sitting outside all night was pretty tiring.
This is impressive: The world in the colors of the Italian flag, and the Italian peninsula makes a strangely convincing nose. I say “strange” only because attaching Sicily threw the proportions off kilter and now the boot is overpronated.The flag! Some enterprising person pulled it out of mothballs, where it’s been since the last World Cup. But it works too, and will be just as useful for the next World Cup.
Well all right — NO NEED TO SHOUT.
Meanwhile, with the waking-up of via Garibaldi the lines begin to form outside the shops of prima necessita’ (first necessity), the only type that’s allowed to be open. They are orderly and correctly spaced. At least for ten refreshing minutes in the morning I get to see people who are not on my computer screen. They’re amazing! In three dimensions!
Starting from the foreground, at right we see one person waiting outside Gabriele Bianchi’s delicatessen (in Venetian, biavarol); his limit is two persons at a time. At left is a lady with a dog who is not in line for anything, as far as I can tell. Then a few people on the left in line to enter the pharmacy “Al Basilisco,” even though everybody knows it by the name of the founding family, which is Baldiserrotto. At right is a longer line waiting to enter the forner, or bread bakery. The fruit and vegetable stand on the right gets away with people standing along the edges, though I’m a little surprised that they (and also the supermarkets) haven’t installed any plastic or even plastic-wrap shields between the customer and the produce. Beyond that is the line for the Coop, shown below.The line at the Coop is never ends; it’s like that famous imaginary line of all the Chinese (sorry) that never gets shorter. Further down the street are lines outside the detergent/housewares shop, another forner, and on the other side of the canal, there’s one outside the wine store. The fish market doesn’t usually (I don’t want to say “never,” but…) have enough customers to be troubled with organizing a line. The pastry shop is closed, then there’s Alberto, the butcher, who can manage with the space he’s got. And that’s the end of obtaining “prima necessita'” in our little pocket of the world until we go down to the end, turn left, and stand in line outside the Prix supermarket.
What’s interesting about all these lines isn’t so much that people are forming them — though that certainly is noteworthy, being a sort of Nordic, Anglo-Saxon sort of practice that I’d never have thought to see here, where groups of people (I remember the banks) generally tend to arrange themselves as an amoeba. It’s astounding to recall that the same number of people going into stores in via Garibaldi, however many there may be, always used to just go into the store. Whatever store. You just walked in. It was like the vaporetto; if there was space for you, you took it. If there wasn’t space for you, you made some and took it. Even if there were 40 people where now they can allow only one, that was normal.
Now that we’re stuck at the other extreme of the living-together phenomenon, I am amazed that we lived like that. When all this is over, I’m also going to be amazed to see whether we will continue forming lines, or whether the amoeba instinct will re-assert itself. I’m putting my money on the amoeba.
