2/3/2020

“As the virus started crippling northern cities, strict measures of containment were making their way to central Italy.  I had just returned to Rome from working on a wildlife project in the country-side.  The streets were deserted; the pleasant weather proceeding imminent tragedy.  After spending a day indoors I went for a walk with my mask on.  I felt trapped, struggling to get fresh air to my lips humid with condensation.  Indoors I had felt worse, bored and uninspired.  This walk was all I had and it felt like it might be the last one allowed.  While walking it struck me to do what, as an Italian, I usually fear: re-interpret our great, huge, insurmountable historical heritage.  Referencing the past for us is usually not a good idea, it will most likely fall into cliché, and it will probably bore your own country-men.  However, this sense of suffocation pushed me to call on the greater heritage of our past in an effort to mentally escape our physical lockdown.

The following morning I walked to a park overlooking the city, Villa Borghese.  By the time I arrived my mask was full of condensation, large droplets of water gleaming back at me as I removed it. I felt safe in the natural setting of the park.  I wasn’t sure if cops would be patrolling the area, so I acted discretely and swiftly as joggers ran to and fro.  I loaded my film, checked light exposure, popped the mask on a bust and fired twice, a full-body shot and a close-up, and proceeded this way making my way through the illustrious names of the past, looking for personal solace in their stoney eyes or in the lovely spring weather.

It is now forbidden to visit the parks which have been closed.  I have been indoors for three weeks.

Masks and death mute us, however the words of these illustrious figures still ring clear.  Their memory is a sign of hope, of the timelessness of man’s fate through hardships.  We are in war, and as Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote from the trenches in France during the First World War “we are as / in autumn / on trees / the leaves.”  My personal sense of angst has been brooding much before this crises hit.  I feel like an outsider in society too often, walking through the loaded shelves of supermarkets, items neatly packaged in plastics, thinking of the destruction our need for commodity is bringing upon our beautiful planet. Nature. We need Nature. To listen to it and love it.  We have been deaf for decades and COVID-19 is only the latest result of our blind desires.  Now we are on complete lock-down and She is returning: fish are populating the canals in Venice, swans and hares are seen in central Milan, dolphins in the Mediterranean costal cities.  

It is my most profound hope that this wave of death which is shrouding our country and the world will bring about profound change in our spirits, so that we too may have thoughts worthy to be cast in stone.  

Rome tonight is mute as the ambulances keep sounding.”