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One consequence of the global call to shelter in place is that our individual worlds contract. They become smaller and smaller and smaller, defined by how far we can walk, by our blocks, by our homes and lastly by individuals’ rooms. This is the seat where I work. It’s also the seat where I eat and watch TV. The outside world—the cities beyond our kin in this particular moment—recede into the background and then almost virtually disappear. Is Rome real if you can’t visit? What about Milan? Or Wuhan or Beijing or Rio or São Paolo?
New York City usually feels almost too big to fully comprehend, and it’s such a melting pot that in a way it contains the entire world. A little under a year ago, we spent an entire Saturday traveling the length of the old Silk Road—from beginning to end—by eating our way through Queens. We began in Istanbul and traveled through Samarkand and Tibet and Mongolia and ended in China and tasted a dozen cuisines in a day. Now, even the culinary version of world travel is cut off. With the world shrunk to the walls you live in, it’s easy to understand how prior generations assumed the sun revolved around the earth.
Yet moving pictures, video—a mode of communication barely a century old—can still bring the world to you. Film and TV preserves the world as it was, like light from a distant star. And streaming video can bring you the world as it is right now. And I don’t mean news; it doesn’t help the world feel any bigger or more wondrous. I mean video evidence that life and beauty go on in places far away. If you need evidence, look no farther than Andrea Bocelli’s performance from the altar of the empty Duomo di Milano this past weekend. His voice matches the architectural marvel, and it cuts across time and space and social distance and as a reminder that the world is much bigger and more beautiful than just the rooms of one’s home.
So I encourage you to listen well and allow yourself to take a journey of the mind. Soon enough, we’ll all get to travel the world once more, sip wine in a little taverna, attend the opera, or just watch the action on a street totally unlike our own. Cin cin!
Today’s Film: Pranzo di Ferragosto (2009)
Today’s recommendation comes from writer and journalist Jackie Cooperman. Cooperman covers culture, design, business, and health and wellness for publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Worth, Departures and the New York Post. Based in New York, where she lives with her husband and daughter, Cooperman has also lived and worked in London and Milan. She's delighted to be making her Highly Transmissible debut. Find her work at jackiecooperman.com.
A recommendation: While you’re at home, maybe feeling slightly anxious or even much worse, trying and perhaps failing to be productive, possibly navigating a small apartment with other family members, take a break and transport yourself, if only fleetingly, to the emptied out Rome of Gianni di Gregorio’s 2009 film Pranzo di Ferragosto (“Mid-August Lunch”).
A sweetly observed comedy celebrating the opposite of social distancing, di Gregorio’s story centers on 60-something Gianni, a classic mammone sharing a large apartment with his irreverent nonagenarian mother Valeria. Well-dressed and accessorized, and occasionally straying into French, they are lapsed aristocrats, now behind on their rent. On a hot August day just before the national holiday of Ferragosto, when any Italian who is able to leaves for vacation, Gianni’s landlord Alfonso offers a deal: if Gianni, so doting on his own mother, will also take care of Alfonso’s mother for a night, Alfonso will forgive the overdue rent. Hands are shaken, but the next day Alfonso arrives with not only his somewhat crass mother Marina, but also her sister, the quieter but still quite opinionated Maria. Before Gianni can object, Alfonso’s off in a yellow convertible, his young mistress beside him. Hours later, Gianni’s friend Marcello, an on-call doctor, deposits his own mother, the girlish Grazia, and Gianni is suddenly in hosting a sleepover party for four demanding older women.
Watching it last week—my hands cracked from constant washing, my nerves frayed from worrying for my family, friends, city, country, and planet—was soothing, a glimpse of pre-pandemic life and a hint, I hope, of the normalcy we may eventually regain.
Di Gregorio, a well-known screenwriter who made his directing debut in this film, plays Gianni affably. An excellent cook and host, given to drinking perhaps a bit too much wine, Gianni navigates the sticky Roman heat, searching for the best ingredients to serve his unexpected guests. We feel the piercing mid-day August light, the intimacy of friendship as Gianni hitches a ride on the back of his friend’s Vespa, and the breathtaking view, no matter how familiar, as they go whipping past the Colosseum to fetch fresh fish on the banks of the Tiber.
Grazia, normally restricted to a severe diet by her doctor son, relishes the party, sneaking a plate of verboten prosciutto and later a pasta al forno made by Gianni and Maria, and socializing with ease. The obstreperous Marina, also clearly glad to be rid of her son, slips out of the apartment at night to revel in a cigarette and beer at an outdoor Roman bar, and Maria, forsaken by her own adult children, makes herself quite at home in Gianni’s apartment. Gianni’s mother, often haughty (she notes privately to Gianni that Marina’s brought her a cake wrapped in a bidet towel), eventually warms to her new found friends.
A lifelong Italophile, I’ve lived and worked in Milan, Florence and Assisi. My heart has been breaking for weeks for the country I love so deeply, for the people who’ve taught me so much about welcoming strangers, who’ve demonstrated ease and grace in adding another plate to an already set table, who delight in proximity. It is impossible now to watch Pranzo di Ferragosto and not to notice and envy the ease of its characters’ constant hugging and kissing, the assumptions that it is both safe and desirable to open our home to others, that we benefit by being together.
As we navigate the new normal, with its very real terrors and its frequent tedium, Di Greogorio’s valentine to Italy, and to humanity, provides a welcome reminder of the old normal, and a joyful vision of the conviviality we are currently denied.
— Jackie Cooperman
Reading List:
Few poets speak to the beauty of Rome like Horace. His odes, epodes and satires are some of the definitive works of the ancient world, yet they remain remarkably poignant and resonant. The Penguin Classics edition is a good intro, although it’s worth reading them aloud in the original Latin to get a feel for their lyricism.
For a more contemporary—relatively speaking—account of Italy, consider acquiring a copy of Goethe’s Italian Journey translated by legendary poet W.H. Auden.
Benjamin Reeves is an award-winning screenwriter, journalist and media consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him on Twitter @bpreeves or write to him at breeves.writer@gmail.com.