The Villa at the Edge of the Empire

by Farrell, Fiona

  And suddenly, there it is: L’Aquila. The eagle. Though the name is as likely to refer not to the noble bird but to the multitude of springs and creeks, the acculae, that flowed down from the hills to join the Aterno River on its way to the Adriatic. The city passes in and out of view as the train rattles down from the pass, built upon a hilltop and spreading around its base. The landscape is dotted in an apparently random fashion with apartment blocks and those anonymous white concrete buildings that could house light industry or medical care or shelves full of merchandise of some kind. I had read that the town was sited on a former lakebed and was prepared for a smooth saucer-shaped profile, but this is rockier stuff. More up and down. Foothills curve back towards the Gran Sasso — the Big Rock — d’Italia, the highest peak in the Appenines. The train accelerates across a plain, then slows, and we draw into a station. Above us stands the town, its skyline punctuated by the giraffe heads of cranes.

  I walk along the road to my hotel, which is only 100 metres or so away. There’s no traffic and the footpath hugs the base of a city wall, propped up by wooden scaffolding where it sags and threatens to fall. After a bit there’s an archway, a gate just large enough to admit a single car. I walk through into a tiny square cobbled in those small stones the Italians call sanpietrini, little St Peters, for the saint who was the rock on which Jesus planned to build his church. Small cubes of volcanic basalt, laid in swirling feathery patterns. They are tough, they permit water to drain away between the cracks, they adapt to irregularities in the surface and to the movement of the ground should it decide to move. They are also fiendishly slippery after rain and lethal in high heels, so not universally admired. But here, in early evening, carpeting the square and swirling ahead up a steep road, curving for the corners, they shine and are beautiful.

  On one side of the square there is a chapel, plain faced, of white stone: an arched door at the centre, a roundel above and on either side beneath a frieze of small carved pennants, two sundials, sketched in long, diagonal criss-crossed lines with astrological signs: Capricorn, Libra … The church is dedicated to San Vito, patron saint of dancers, comedians and epileptics.

  It’s a curious place, mysterious and austere, but it’s not what first catches the eye. Across the square, broad, shallow steps of those slippery sanpietrini lead down to a fountain, an enormous declivity surrounded on three sides by high walls of pink and white chequerboard marble. All around the base of these walls runs a double tier of stone troughs, surmounted by a frieze of ninety-nine carved heads: horses, lions, knights, ladies, monsters, each with a pipe clamped between its teeth from which flows a steady stream of ice-cold water. The air is sweet and cool and loud with the splash of it.

  The Fontana delle 99 Cannelle. One of the principal glories of this city.

  L’AQUILA WAS A PLANNED CITY. It traces its origin not to some Victorian colonial theorist, but to a Holy Roman emperor, marking a corner of his territory. The Hohenstaufen monarch Frederick II, Emperor and King of Sicily, not to mention large areas of Germany, northern Italy, Burgundy and Jerusalem, founded the city in 1240 as a bastion on the border with the Papal States, with whom he was in more or less constant conflict. The popes fought back with the weapons at their disposal, excommunicating him four times, to no apparent detriment. One pope sneered that Frederick was a man who ‘wished to rule the world while remaining seated’, but a brief examination of his relatively short career — he died at fifty-five — does not bear it out. It was a life crammed with war and crusade, and here in the region of Abruzzo, the establishment of a city.

  Tradition has it that he selected a fine defensive site on a promontory and then peopled it with the inhabitants of ninetynine surrounding villages. The exact number has been disputed — maybe it was more like seventy-five — but ninety-nine sounded better to the medieval ear, being one of those mystical numbers: thirty-three times three, a symbolic figure. However many there may have been, the process is clear: a number of villages took possession of areas within the new city, each gathered around its own church, piazza and fountain, making of the city as a whole a federation of fractions. The frazioni have endured in an intense, localised neighbourhood loyalty that runs deep.

  Frederick planned his city as such frontier cities have been planned for centuries, on that Hippodamian grid of streets meeting at right angles. A wide central avenue runs along the crest of the hill at a gentle slope across a central square for worship, markets and public life. Narrow streets cross the avenue at right angles, lined with stone buildings — shops on the ground floor and living upstairs for the resettled villagers.

  The city thrived. It had a strong religious presence, drawing pilgrims to large and beautiful churches dedicated to charismatic men. It also functioned as a market town for an agricultural region famed for its sheep, who dawdled in flocks of thousands from the valleys each summer up into cool mountain pastures and returned each autumn before the snows came. The region bred cattle too, big silvery grey beasts with harp-shaped horns. And horses. Crops of fiendishly fiery red peppers and saffron flourished, each purple flower bearing its precious, fiddly scarlet stamens. On the export of these crops, and the crafts that developed around raw materials like leather, wool and silk, the city became wealthy. Its craft guilds were powerful and part of an unusually broad-based governing council.

  The arts of civilisation were cultivated here. L’Aquila was quick to seize upon that dazzling new technology, the printing press, introduced by one of Gutenberg’s assistants, and rapidly became a centre attracting highly skilled specialists in the dissemination of knowledge from all over Europe. Merchants and religious orders built fine churches, nobles built their palaces as a scrummage of rulers of French, German, Austrian, Spanish and English origin vied for control of the region. The evidence of conflict lies outside the city in the countryside, where, unusually for Italy, hilltops are held by castles. Despite repeated invasion and plague, the city prospered, poised on that trade route between north and south.

  By the first decade of the twenty-first century L’Aquila was a small city of around 72,000, augmented by a large student population of 20,000 enrolled in a university that had been founded in 1952. Departments of biotechnology, science, engineering, humanities, economics, medicine and sports science occupied abandoned palaces. After the war, the city had been shrinking for several decades as nearby villages emptied and rural people sought a less picturesque but easier life in New York or Sydney. The university was part of L’Aquila’s revival. It helped to sustain a vibrant musical and artistic life. It is a small city, only a sixth the size of Christchurch, but it possesses a symphony orchestra, a fine arts academy, a music conservatory, several choirs, a film institute and a nationally respected theatre, the Teatro Stabili di Abruzzo.

  L’Aquila was also sustained by its role as the administrative capital of its region. In Abruzzo, farming now mingled with light industry specialising in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals and components for the aerospace industry. Tourism, too, played a part. L’Aquila has never been, perhaps mercifully, on the international tourist map, unlike the Tuscan stars to the north. But it has a quiet beauty. This is a region where Italians come to hike in the summer in the national parks that, since 1922, have spread over mountain slopes and abandoned pasture. In the winter, Romans come here to ski.

  THE FONTANA DELLE 99 CANNELLE, which remembers the founding of this city, had a practical as well as a symbolic purpose. It was a place to fill a bucket, to do the laundry. There are photos taken only a few decades ago of women scrubbing at the long troughs, their sheets laid out to dry on the broad steps. This evening as I cross the square it’s to a fading echo of women’s voices, the smack of wet linen, red arms scalded with cold, the squeal of children playing on the slippery cobbles.

  Tonight there is only the sound of water. No mopeds grinding gears to climb the road leading to the centre of town. No television chatter from the houses up the street, no clatter and hum. The fountain is deserted, and it is not just
because of the passing of history and the advent of the washing machine. The whole town is silent. On 9 April 2009, on just such a night, at 3.32 a.m. the city was jolted from sleep.

  Two great tectonic plates underlie this region. It is another thing L’Aquila shares with Christchurch. Both are cities on narrow stretches of land thrust up by planetary movement. Beneath Abruzzo lies the junction of the European and African plates, and for twenty-two seconds they exploded into action. A 6.3 quake took the city in its grasp. Three hundred and nine people were killed, including eight students crushed in a modern concrete-slab dormitory at the university. More than 1500 in the city were injured and by morning 65,000 people from a total population of 72,000 had been rendered homeless.

  That quake was not unexpected. Italy is the most seismically volatile region in Europe, with four active volcanoes and numerous earthquakes. They have been recorded over thousands of years, so much part of life that classical writers developed words to define specific characteristics, just as Inuit were reputed to have 41 words to express the nuances of omnipresent snow. ‘Ostes’ were quakes that manifested with a single violent shock, ‘palmatias’ produced a slight shaking, ‘rhectae’ were quakes that left fissures in the earth, while ‘chasmatios’ created chasms. ‘Epiclintae’ were quakes with a marked horizontal motion, ‘concussio’ shook violently, and the defining feature of quakes called ‘mycemetias’ was their rumbling. The Eternal City itself has been shaken repeatedly. That’s why there is that big bite out of one wall of the Colosseum. It collapsed during a quake in the fourteenth century, depositing a handy load of worked stone that resourceful Romans carted off and reused in surrounding buildings.

  L’Aquila has been devastated several times since historical recordkeeping began: in 1315, 1349, 1461, when an eyewitness reported ‘all the houses and many fine churches fell to the ground’, in 1646 and overwhelmingly in 1703, when perhaps 5000 people died and the city was reduced to rubble. Its modern appearance owes much to the style of rebuilding following that quake, in Baroque fashion blending classical columns and architectural detail with a certain cool austerity. More recently, in 1915, the region was shaken by a quake that killed 30,000 people, 12,000 of them in Avezzano only 50 kilometres south of L’Aquila. Avezzano was at the epicentre and lost 96 per cent of its total population.

  L’Aquila, therefore, is a city where the people, like New Zealanders, live intimately with earthquakes. They, like us, know that they stand on shaky ground.

  IN THE MORNING, I WALK up the road into the city. The little lava cobbles feather round the zigzag turns like something fluid, like water. Not a single car passes. Houses stand empty-eyed behind wire cordons, their gardens dry grass and weed. I cross a ring road beneath a high viaduct sagging at one end around cracked concrete. Up here, the street is lined with post-war blocks of three or four storeys, some with small business premises on the ground floor. The signs remain: a hairdresser, electrical repairs. Windows are boarded up or broken as if there were nothing inside worthy of protection, just as at home cups remained unwashed on café tables, papers lay scattered on office desks, a mattress lay gutted in the garden of an abandoned flat. What once had value, no longer has value. It is all just stuff. Walls here are marked with the same enigmatic civil defence signs — 1.v.24 — you see at home. Signs rapidly scrawled in yellow or red, like those the Hebrews drew hastily in blood upon their walls, willing a vengeful God to pass over.

  The cranes rise overhead, slender and motionless on this holiday weekend. The city is so unnervingly silent. Narrow alleys run at right angles to this street, still piled high with rubble and the random objects of twenty-first-century abandonment — a plastic dish rack, a CD, a shopping bag stuffed with mildewed clothing — and there is that scent of damp stone and decay that feels like the essence of tears. Many of the alleys have a kind of makeshift verandah of wooden scaffolding at second-floor level, forming a trough to protect those passing beneath from falling stones or tiles. They meet in the middle and make the streets into dark tunnels leading to a distant patch of light.

  The city has been vacated. When the quake destroyed their homes, 65,000 people were forced to move wherever they could. The government arranged for temporary accommodation in hotels on the Adriatic coast. Some people moved in with relatives or to holiday homes. Wherever there was level ground — in city squares, in parks or surrounding fields — 171 tent settlements, the ‘tendopoli’, arose, to house some 20,000 people while the government hastily set about providing something more substantial.

  You cannot get private insurance for earthquake damage in Italy. Instead, responsibility for rebuilding homes falls squarely on the shoulders of central government. In L’Aquila, the government’s first move was to construct apartment blocks in the surrounding countryside: MAP (Moduli Abitativi Provvisori) buildings, made of cheap materials, intended to act as a temporary solution, lasting only until homes had been repaired or rebuilt. And 185 CASE (Complessi Antisismici Sostenibili ed Ecocompatibili) buildings providing 4600 quake-proof apartments for 15,000 people on nineteen different sites around the city, which Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi hoped would form the basis of permanent settlements.

  Both schemes have since come under fire: MAP houses for being so shoddily built of inferior materials that some have proved uninhabitable, the CASE settlements for being constructed in haste on sites chosen simply because they were available at the time. Tenders were awarded for CASE construction on the basis of quake resistance and strength but insufficient attention was paid to the provision of services like shops or health centres or access to public transport or premises for the re-establishment of those same small businesses — the hairdressers, the electrical repairs — that had sustained the urban community. Some complexes have had to be vacated, their roofs split open, rain pouring in. Builders have been taken to court, accused of price gouging and poor workmanship.

  But the schemes have supplied a need: rent-free, fully furnished interim accommodation, while homes in the city await repair. The CASE may be cramped or inconvenient but they are a home, in a country accustomed to private home ownership. Unlike New Zealand, where only 49 per cent of us now own some version of the quarter acre pavlova paradise, 80 per cent of Italians own their own home. Five years on from the quake, the neighbourhood communities of L’Aquila remain dispersed while the centre stands empty. People live on in their temporary homes, still paying mortgages on ruined properties, while the notion of what ‘temporary’ might mean extends into the future, just as it does in Christchurch. This year, next year, sometime, never … No one knows when the people of L’Aquila might return. Some reports mention thirty years.

  I walk uphill through abandonment, the same gritty dust crunching underfoot that feels exactly like home and the wire cordons and the signs prohibiting entry, the signs naming the companies who are at work on this site, the signs labelling this the Zona Rossa, the Red Zone, the signs reading ‘Lavori in Corso’, work in progress. Larger buildings are sheathed entirely in plastic as if they have been wrapped for safekeeping on a shelf, which is precisely how it is, for nothing in this city is to be demolished. The entire place is to be rebuilt, stone by stone. On some, the image of the façade that lies beneath has been screenprinted to actual size. A little breeze drags at the wrapping, and the plastic bellies in and out as if breathing.

  A man is walking downhill towards me with a terrier on a leash. We stop to talk, the only people on the street. He was born here, he says, gesturing toward one of the side streets, but now he has a new apartment in Onna. It’s a village nearby. I have seen it on the map. Forty people died in the quake in Onna. His apartment there is comfortable but he comes back every week just to walk about here, in his old neighbourhood. ‘It’s so quiet,’ I say. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The silence of the tomb. Brutto. Molto brutto.’ It means ugly, but it sounds worse in Italian. Thuggish, aggressive, an assault on the senses.

  Up ahead at an intersection there is some movement. People are strolling up an
d down, there’s a café open. The Corso is a pedestrian boulevard along the crest of the hill, lined on either side by public buildings of dignified eighteenth-century demeanour, their ground floors recessed for several blocks to form a continuous arched porchway. The street has that theatrical air you sense often in Italian towns. It feels like a stage set, with its centralised perspective bordered by structures of uniform style and dimension. This is a place awaiting the entry of a cast of characters: a figure in velvet coat and knee breeches emerging from the wings that are the side streets to stride purposefully towards the Piazza Duomo. A group of women in long skirts and white aprons bearing their washing in baskets back from the fountain down the hill. Or some ragamuffin children, barefoot, racing from downstage left, in pursuit of a cat. The Corso was planned before the car, for people and conversation. I am at the heart of the city.

  FRANCESCO AND I WALK THE length of the Corso. We join the Sunday crowds strolling between empty buildings, boarded up or protected by cordons. From time to time, we pause when he meets an old school friend or someone wishing to enquire after the health of his father. The Corso has always been a meeting place. ‘When I was a boy,’ Francesco says, ‘we always used to meet here “sotto i portici”, under the arches.’ It has always been the setting for the essential Italian ritual of the evening passeggiata, the leisurely walk, stopping to chat with friends and neighbours as the sun sets and the business of the day is over. People still come here from the CASE and the suburbs to wander, to reconnect, but in circumstances that have altered radically since 2009. The fabric of the city has changed and with it the routines of urban existence, those little patterns of human behaviour we bag together and call civilisation. They have changed here, just as they have changed in Christchurch.