Yesterday it was water, water everywhere and nor any drop to drink! But we were not stuck in the Sargasso Sea surrounded by slimy things that crawled with legs upon the slimy sea. With all the rain and sleet we’ve been having Longoio suffered a burst aqueduct pipe and so we had to fill up our bottles from the local spring. Fortunately Gaia, our water company, proved very efficient and after some drilling the burst pipe was located and duly mended.
In the meanwhile I decided on a morning ride with just a sprinkling of rain to have a look at the snows which have fallen over our local mountains-
The otherwise very green Prato Fiorito, the haunt of Sabbath witches and the graveyard, through its landslides, of at least one village in the past, looked very snowy indeed.
My replacement scooter, this time a Honda after the old Aprilia Scarabeo had finally given up the ghost, managed the watery roads rather well.
The Refubbri river, normally so placid, had turned into a raging torrent with some spectacular waterfalls appearing.
There was a slight hint of sunshine this morning but who wants to go out in this weather now? I’m told that Abetone, our nearest ski centre just under an hour’s drive (or scoot…) away, has received another half metre of snow but regrettably ski centres throughout Italy are still closed as a result of the health emergency.
Which brings me to a very confusing linguistic point. The Italian government is now talking about its ‘recovery plan’, after the pandemic has finally gone away. It uses the term written in English. However, there is a similar sounding word in Italian, ‘ricoveri’, which translates as ‘hospital admissions’ – quite the opposite of the English ‘recovery’. So I never quite know when the news is good i.e. the ‘recovery plan’ is receiving increased funding, or whether the news is bad the ‘ricoveri’ are ever increasing!
I just wish Italians would be prouder of their beautiful language instead of importing foreign terms all the time into news items in the mistaken opinion that these have somehow more ‘authority’. Yes, they use that English word as well instead of saying ‘autorità’. This year it’s the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death. The ‘sommo poeta’, who laid down the guiding principles of the Italian language, would surely not have approved. Of course, there’s nothing very funny about the ‘Divine Comedy’ especially when Dante finds himself in the Inferno (now I am using Italian when I should say ‘hell’…but the brits have appropriated themselves in revenge of an Italian word to better describe certain ghastly conditions – like the one the world finds itself in right now). The word ‘comedy’ is used here to mean that Dante is writing in the low ‘vulgar’ or ‘comic’’ language of Italian instead of the high ‘tragic’ classical language of Latin.
The term ‘comedy’ can also mean that this wonderful poem, perhaps the greatest literary work produced in western civilization according to T. S. Eliot (who placed its themes of universality even above those of Shakespeare’s plays) does not, indeed, have a tragic end but rather culminates in that last line expressing the transcendental joy of the love that moves the sun and the other stars:
‘l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.’
It is this line, and other quotes from Dante, which Lucca has sensibly turned into festive decorations for its city as these photos taken by a friend demonstrate.
Now that leads me to consider that my mum had a Dante exquisitely illustrated by John Flaxman, the neo-classical artist. I wonder where that volume is now.
(Dante meets Beatrice)
