Thus, if I always imagined the woman I loved surrounded by the places I longed for most at the time, if I would have liked her to be the one who took me to visit them, who opened the way for me into an unknown world, it was not because of a simple chance association of thoughts; no, it was because my dreams of travel and of love were only moments—which I am separating artificially today as if I were cutting sections at different heights of an apparently motionless iridescent jet of water—in a single inflexible upsurge of all the forces of my life.
Marcel Proust Swann’s Way, pp. 88-89. Translation: Lydia Davis
The coronavirus situation has confined us to Bologna for months now, and with each passing day I yearn more and more to travel–especially to non-urban areas like the mountains.
I have never been to the Latemar range in the Dolomites. But someone posted about them the other day on one of the “beautiful Italy” Facebook pages I follow, and the urge to be up high in some remote rifugio–to breathe in the pure air and see for miles and miles–hit me hard.
During the plague of 1630, the groups of men who went around collecting the sick and dead in Milan were called “monatti,” and they wore little bells on their ankles to signal their approach. In Manzoni’s The Betrothed, the monatti are often inebriated and pass flasks of wine among themselves. At one point, they encounter a young mother who entreats them to take her dying baby and to return later that day to collect her.
