Alix: Nothing matters but love--or sparkling water.

Bergamo, my hometown, is so gorgeous it’s distracting. 

Even those who’ve lived there their whole life—especially them, actually—will pause to note, often out loud: Isn’t Bergamo just beautiful? 

Bergamaschi are practical, tough people; rule-followers with an infamous guttural accent I tried to get rid of my whole life. They are altruistic and have a strong civic sensibility, but can be curt and perplexingly cold. It’s not poetry or romance that they are known for, not a leisurely dolce vita of aesthetic pursuit. It’s work—il laúr—our cult of it. 

Yet Bergamo is so absurdly pretty—the old medieval town propped atop the hill, surrounded by imposing Venetian walls, and the Alps in the background—it manages to pause even its own people, proud of the city they made as they are mountains and springs that surround it.

But it takes a gorgeous day of blinding light to really show it off, one like I saw the other day in a picture in the news, with a headline that said, of the coronavirus epidemic ravaging the city, that "it's like a war." In the photo, a couple of undertakers, seen from outside the gate of the locked-down cemetery, were taking a casket out of a funeral car—alone. There were no flowers.

It’s a shame, I thought when I saw it, that the world doesn’t know how pretty Bergamo’s cemetery is, surrounded by mountains. How comforting and understanding those mountains feel, on the horizon, like the heartfelt embrace of an otherwise stern person. 

For 29 years they have been looking after my dad—my most handsome, forever young father—and every time I enter the cemetery, walking up the path to the place where he rests I, too, stop to think: Isn’t Bergamo just beautiful?

We often think of the place we come from as our mother—our motherland. But my hometown, Bergamo, is my father’s land. It’s a place where I have always felt safe—restless, yes, and never quite fitting in, incapable as I am of understanding its dialect or cooking its foods—but safe, as I imagine it must feel, having a father.

Except now Bergamo isn’t safe—nor are any fathers in the city. Or mothers. Or anyone, really. Anywhere else either, for that matter.

My mother comes from a small town in the mountains in the south, a place nobody, even in Italy, knew about—until forty years ago, when a devastating earthquake made it front-page news. She lived in Bergamo by then, and suddenly people recognized, with compassion, the previously obscure name of the place she called, all the more in a moment of tragedy, home. 

I grew up witnessing the enormous aftermath of such a tragedy, and as a child, I remember finding so much reassurance in Bergamo’s geology, in its being one of the few spots on Italy’s map that isn’t at high risk of seismic events. 

Yet now I am the one watching the place I call home go from “a city near Milan” to the symbol of a pandemic that is ending the world as we know it. I watch the obituary pages of my local paper, ten times as many as they would have been on any old March, featured in the world's biggest newspapers. And I miss home with all the intensity of grief—the sharpest, most unconditional form of love. 

It is death and disease that have stopped my city this time. There aren’t enough caskets left, nor enough cinerary urns. No capacity in crematoria, no space in morgues. People die alone, without funerals, as their families quarantine. Nobody is singing from Bergamo’s balconies. 

“La bellezza esiste solo se è amata,” my mother told me the other day, on the phone from our living room inside the city’s invisible siege, “beauty only exists if it’s loved.” She was reassuring me that because it is loved, Bergamo will still have its beauty once this nightmare is over.
  
As I watched the unbearable images of military trucks, driving through streets that I know by heart to take our dead somewhere else to be cremated, I still thought, isn’t Bergamo just beautiful? In my head, I can still hear all my fellow Bergamaschi say that, even now, with love untainted—as sharp and unconditional as grief.
 

(To my great disappointment, some formatting bug is not making emojis or other formatting show up properly. Sorry about that. I guess it's kind of appropriate, though.)

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Bergamo's Venetian Walls are one of UNESCO's World Heritage sites. The view from atop them is majestic, and at night the flat is all sparkles. Even better, however, is the view from my high school's balcony, which is higher up on the hill. On a very clear day you can see the Monte Rosa from the principal's window—although maybe that's just a legend, who knows.

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In 2018, one of Bergamo's hospitals had a very special patient check in for some high-precision testing. It was Andrea Mantegna's Resurrezione, a 15h century painting initially dismissed as a copy, which underwent X Rays, a TC scan, and a Tomosynthesis (a diagnostic technique used in mammograms), to help art conservators see hidden layers of paint. 

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Nazim Hikmet, On Living (excerpt):

I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees—
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
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San Pellegrino, where the (best) water (on the planet) comes from, is a thermal town in one of the valleys that surrounds Bergamo. It is a Stile Liberty (Italian Art Nouveau) gem, with a Grand Hotel that looks straight out of a Wes Anderson movie. Their most elegant café, Il Bigio, is known for fruit gelées—my grandma, who was from a small town in the mountains above, always made it a point to stop there for a treat. 

 

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Ermanno Olmi's movie, L'Albero degli Zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs), is a movie about peasant life shot entirely in Bergamasco—Bergamo's dialect. It is a masterpiece of gentleness (in my favorite scene a grandpa teaches his granddaughter to plant tomatoes with the greatest care) all the more so because of the harsh-sounding language. It won the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 1978. The movie looks kind of like a Caravaggio painting—and indeed Caravaggio, where the painter was born, is a town near Bergamo. 

 

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 Please consider donating to Bergamo's main hospital. You can do so here or here. 

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https://twitter.com/SarahLizChar's eyes are always the first to see Alix. This issue's bunny lives on Mia Mabanta's arm. 

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