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Locked down but not out in Italy

Singing from the balconies! One nice thing about this crisis ... solidarity! “Guess you’re not living like a tourist anymore,” was the funny, truthful and somewhat gut-wrenching message of a friend the day the lockdown in Italy began. Today is day 6. My beloved Italia has been hit hard with the COVID19 epidemic. With the second largest elderly population in the world, the epidemic has meant a disproportionate amount of deaths in the country. So though I haven’t been worried about contracting it myself, this isn’t about me or someone like me who, if contracted it would probably have a sucky couple of weeks and then recover. It is about if someone like me contracted it and then spread it to a person with a complicated health history or an elderly person with a weakened immune system. Eerily orderly: Lines for the grocery store, each person one meter apart In a country with no concept (and no physical room really) for personal space, and in a city with reproachable hygie
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Returning to Un-tired-ness


I am back in Rome and enjoying the normal life here that I love so much, a fact you may have noticed from my past blog posts on strawberries and oranges.

However today's fascination came from a word that showed up on the screen of the cross trainer on my first day at a new gym in Monteverde: defaticamento. It is one of those wonderful, untranslatable words. In context, the English equivalent is cool-down. My time was up on the machine and this Italian cross trainer instructed me that it was now time for defaticamento.

When literally translating the meaning of the word though, it is more like "un-tiring-ness" which is amazing. And to me this had more meaning than just the five minutes after a work out. These last two days have been my defaticamento, a time to un-tire myself.

I thought that my last month back in the U.S. might have been time for that. It turned out to be quite the opposite however. With 1 day in Baltimore, 1 in Washington DC, 4 more in Baltimore, 2 in Toronto, 5 in Montreal, 3 in Baltimore, 1 in Annapolis, 1 in Washington DC, 1 back in Baltimore, 6 in Charleston, 1 last one in Baltimore and then a flight to Rome.

My first week back was also a whirlwind with two birthdays, a wedding, an engagement, a birth and a pregnancy announcement (none of these mine by the way). So yesterday and today have been an unwinding, an un-tiring-ness.

And as I do in lovely Roma, my relaxation has been to soak in the warm sunshine, to breath in the dry and breezy air and to walk around the windy streets of which I never tire.

Eleven hours of sleep and roman sunshine and I feel like I am awake again and ready to tackle the one area that I haven't traveled to much lately, the workings of my mind...

But perhaps I'll have to get a gelato first to be fully energized for that journey. Cioccolato fondente seems a promising fuel for the trip.
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