The Villa at the Edge of the Empire

by Farrell, Fiona

  His statue stands outside the Palazzetto. The poor wee man has been transformed. He strikes an heroic pose, in armour, no trace of drool, a lion curled like a tame mastiff at his mighty feet. Silvia has made an intensive study of such art: the art of manipulating reality to create and maintain the illusions of power. This artist has done a fine job. Today, he’d be snapped up by some political PR department, framing the imagery of the kindly leader, only today he would dispense with the armour for something more casual: shirt loose perhaps, beer can in hand, a man of the people. This is an artist fit for the protection of San Bernardino, patron saint of PR.

  AS WE PART, FRANCESCO HANDS me a book. It’s a beautifully produced text in Italian and English recording an exhibition of paintings, statues, rare texts, ancient maps and valuable letters rescued from the rubble of the city. People had stood by and watched as the fire department using cranes entered dangerous buildings to rescue a fifteenth-century edition of Plutarch’s Lives, or applauding the reappearance of a rosy-cheeked Madonna and her plump baby, as if someone alive after long incarceration was being rescued and raised up into the light.

  In 2009, there was an exhibition. In a truly dramatic gesture, the Italian government had shifted that year’s G8 conference from the security of Sardinia, where planning was already well under way, to this city, L’Aquila. Three hundred million euros had already been spent creating a fit setting for the meeting of the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, the United States, Britain, Japan, Russia and Italy, but suddenly all that was set aside. A military barracks in L’Aquila for the non-commissioned officers of the Guardia di Finanaza was hastily reconfigured, 1000 rooms were created for the attendees and their monarchic retinues, security systems were put in place and a conference room was designed. In July, only three months after the disaster, the leaders gathered around the table. And maybe it was a talk fest, pointless window-dressing, and nothing would be changed as a result of all this activity, but here they were: the heads of powerful states, seated round a big circular table, surrounded by a photographic montage of the region’s snow-capped mountains screening the exterior reality of a city in ruins.

  I am no fan of Berlusconi: too sleek, too rich, with the television stations at his fingertips and the bunga bunga parties, another of these comic-book leaders of the twenty-first century, another Mr Burns, minus the acne, his skin as smooth as highly polished veneer. His administration did not always get it right. Francesco gives me other publications relating to L’Aquila that record disaster, scandals, torch-lit processions of commemoration, vehement and repeated protests at governmental ineptitude, the people of the wheelbarrows clearing rubble, impatient at endless delay …

  But in relocating the G8 conference, the Berlusconi administration made the perfect gesture: world leaders seated centimetres from chaos. I look at their photograph and find myself liking them the better for being there, for surely each of them, Obama and Merkel and the rest, must have felt a tiny flicker of anxiety at the thought of coming to L’Aquila. Earthquakes are so very indifferent to status. We are all equally vulnerable before their power, yet here they are: a group of people gathered in a room. It is a new and more kindly imagery of power.

  Francesco contributed an essay to the book about the city’s musical history, for a city is not simply a visual artefact but a palimpsest of sound. He begins with the crowning of the hermit Pietro and the about-to-be-pardoned singing and dancing on their way to Collemaggio. Then proceeds century by century to the present day, to Rubinstein and Rostropovich and the founding of the sinfonia and the conservatory and the sounds that continue to fill the air of the city.

  The flap of plastic. The creaking of a crane. The sound of water flowing from ninety-nine pipes …

  Among the other contributions is one from the under-secretary of state at the Department of Civil Protection. He mentions an earlier disaster, at Vajont. As I read this I suddenly remember the image: a savage sliver of concrete driven down between two vertiginous mountain slopes. In 1963, it was the tallest dam in the world, built to supply hydro-electric power to the industries of the Northern Italian plain, part of the post-war dream of unbridled economic growth.

  As it was being built local people warned of risk. The land was unstable, prone to slip and earthquake. Already the construction was triggering minor tremors. But the dam went ahead, just as the Clyde Dam went ahead in New Zealand a few years later on unstable country, over a known faultline lying only 15 kilometres below ground, built by Rob Muldoon and a gaggle of politicians in a mood to Think Big, rather than Think Wisely.

  One evening in Vajont, after heavy rain, there was a landslip. Forty-five seconds later a 250-metre-high tsunami surged over the dam and down the valley, sweeping away the villages in its path. The air pocket that preceded the surge was so strong that it stripped the clothes from its victims. Two thousand people died.

  It was a childhood image of horror to match Tangiwai and the railway carriages with their passengers and Christmas parcels toppling into the swollen river. I’ve never forgotten it. But in this context, prefacing a book about L’Aquila and its restoration, the under-secretary wants readers to remember not the disaster itself, but the subsequent response. The government of that time had moved survivors to new settlements and actively discouraged people wanting to return to mountain villages that had survived unscathed. Tragedy in that instance was ‘tackled by staking everything on the future without a thought for the past … communities were scattered and historical links and bonds that asked only the chance to continue were severed.’ In L’Aquila, officialdom would take greater care to preserve continuity.

  That’s why this city will be restored. They are planning for the future with reference to the past. Restoration makes sense to people in a country where hundreds of thousands of children are educated each year to see themselves as part of a tradition, rather than as individualists or entrepreneurs.

  I walk around this city in the company of people for whom such thinking is so engrained as to be automatic. When I try to describe the clearance of central Christchurch, they are bemused: Silvia’s husband says it sounds like Stalinism, like North Korea. When I try in a fumble of Italian and English to describe the complexities of dealing with EQC and household insurance, Silvia says it sounds very complicated. Are there not protests? Yes, I say, but they are not directed at the government, but at the insurers who operate within the jurisdiction of the government.

  In both Abruzzo and Canterbury the people have a reputation for being strong, not given to garrulousness. Francesco speaks of the ‘dignity of shepherds’ and he is proud of it, this restraint acquired by people living in a tough environment. In New Zealand, too, garrulousness is discouraged. We like our heroes to be understated: to come down from the mountain saying no more than ‘We knocked the bastard off’. Other people may have revered that mountain, calling it Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the World, or Sagarmatha, Mother of Oceans, but we preferred that masculine, unemotive ‘bastard’. Over the past four years it has become common for government and politicians to congratulate Cantabrians on their ‘resilience’. We are ‘stoical’. We are ‘strong’ and ‘southern’. To complain is to be a ‘carper’ or a ‘moaner’. It is a sign of weakness. Viewed from another city in another country, however, this resilience can also be seen as a weird suppressed passivity.

  ONE CITY REBUILDS, ONE CITY tears down and in both cases it is with the absolute certainty that this will all happen again. We live in restless places.

  A flick of the tail of Maui’s fish and we are lost. This island, this waka come to wreck on the primeval reef, could broach and sink and all of us, her passengers, could find ourselves thrashing about in a depthless ocean. Our settlements with their houses and CBDs are no more substantial than the nests of shorebirds: those irritable oystercatchers who scoop a nest in the sand, ignoring the evidence of high tide and its flotsam of branches and broken shell. Like them, we take a chance on getting through. The faults must shift, the volcano m
ust blow. But we take reassurance from the talk of 600-year cycles, 1800-year cycles. They seem like good odds. We make the calculation: maybe not in our lifetime, maybe not in our children’s lifetime. Or then again, maybe tomorrow. In forty-five seconds everything could be tossed into the air.

  In Italy, too, they have learnt over millennia to live with low-burning uncertainty. And there, too, stoicism has been a recommended response.

  In the first century AD, a couple of hundred kilometres south of L’Aquila, the citizens of Pompeii also took their chances, building their villas with the bulk of Vesuvius at their shoulders. The volcanic soils were rich, the port was deep and convenient for trade. Twenty thousand people lived in the region, prepared to take the risk not so much of volcanic eruption, for Vesuvius had not exploded in over 1800 years, but of earthquakes.

  ‘Campania had always been nervous of this threat but had remained unharmed and had many times got over its fears,’ as the stoic philosopher Seneca put it, introducing a treatise on the subject of earthquakes. The portrait busts show a man with a rather worried brow, full lips and a dimple on his fleshy chin. In AD 65, he was sixty-nine, no longer young. ‘Old age is at my back and accuses me of having used up my years in fruitless pursuits.’ He now wished to ‘traverse the world, to seek out its causes and secrets’. He wished to write about the phenomena of nature: rivers and lakes, hail and snow, wind and comets and thunder and lightning. And earthquakes. ‘De Terrae Motu (Concerning the Mobile Earth)’ is one of the studies that form part of his Naturales Quaestiones.

  Natural Questions is an extraordinary book. My father had a copy, one of that row of second-hand volumes in their faded grey jackets that occupied the bookshelf behind the sofa. Throughout my childhood it stood — with its brothers Livy, Catullus, Xenophon and the rest — alongside the history of the 19th Battalion, Kiwis with Gloves On and some skinny red volumes of the pre-war Thinker’s Library. Not a book I ever read. I remember those little grey volumes more for the smell of their foxed paper, the ornate font of their title pages. They were simply part of my home, like the citation from the king thanking my grandfather for making the ultimate sacrifice which hung above the dining table. I read Seneca briefly at university — a verbose and grotesque tragedy with an absurd pile-up of corpses by way of finale — and loathed it for its extremity, its bloody unlikelihood. This quieter man, this philosopher, took longer to find. It was only after I’d been shaken out of bed one spring morning that he came back, as such books do: the quieter man, thinking about earthquakes and how we might respond to them.

  He is writing about an event that had taken place only three years earlier. In AD 62, the citizens of Campania were living as we live, who build our largest city on an active volcanic field, store our nation’s greatest treasures in a museum on a waterfront that rose from beneath the sea a little over a century ago, and holiday on the shores of the caldera left by one of the greatest volcanic explosions in history, an explosion so massive that it was noted by commentators in both Rome and China. We sit on the deck, admire the view, forget the volcanic cloud that rose and fell, billowing out in a pyroclastic flow that buried all the surrounding land beneath hundreds of metres of ash, overtopping the summit of Tongariro. We pour a drink. It is so beautiful, this lake, and it has not exploded, not seriously, since AD 282 …

  The coast round Pompeii was equally charming, ringed with the holiday homes of the wealthiest of Rome’s citizens. On 5 February 62 BC, its citizens were calm, soothed by current belief that quakes were unlikely to happen in winter. When the city began to jolt in a quake estimated by modern analysts to have been a 7.5, it caused panic. Villas collapsed, statues split apart, a flock of hundreds of sheep died in an instant — probably from the inhalation of noxious gases — and afterwards, records Seneca, ‘people wandered about in a state of shock and deranged’. Which sounds familiar. Like the unreality of standing with our neighbours in our pyjamas as the early morning dark filled with the shrilling of car alarms. Like the hypnotic pit-pat of tramping feet on that February afternoon as people crossed the city on foot, to find their children lined up in their classes in the school playgrounds, to find the people they loved most who might also be safe and also walking towards home, or appallingly, might be one of those trapped beneath the concrete slabs, the tumbled masonry, the fallen boulder.

  The quake that struck Pompeii is now largely forgotten, eclipsed so definitively by the explosion of Vesuvius seventeen years later. But at the time of that explosion, the citizens of Pompeii were busy repairing quake damage. They were mending infrastructure, dealing with cracked sewers and broken water conduits. They were rebuilding the civic centre, and it was proving a slow process. Only one temple, dedicated to Isis, guardian of the city and prototype of the Madonna, had been completely rebuilt. The forum’s major temple dedicated to the three civic deities, Juno, Minerva and Jupiter, was still undergoing repairs when it was buried beneath 30 metres of ash.

  AS A PHILOSOPHER, SENECA’S PRIMARY purpose in writing about the earthquake in Pompeii was to define a mode of thinking that might ‘comfort the fearful’, for that is the instinctive reaction: fear. ‘For what can anyone regard as sufficiently secure if the world itself is shaken, if the one thing that is immovable and fixed so that it supports everything that converges on it, starts to waver: if the earth has lost its characteristic property of standing still? Wherever will our fears find rest?’

  Other kinds of disaster are mitigated by leaving some means of escape. A fortress will protect us from enemy forces, a harbour wall from storm, and during plague we can move away to a safe distance from contagion. Disasters are normally particular in their impact, but earthquakes, Seneca says, are ‘greedy’. ‘They overwhelm entire regions, sometimes covering them in ruins, sometimes burying them in deep chasms. They do not even leave evidence to show that what exists no more did once exist, for ‘the soil spreads over the noblest cities without any trace of their former site’.

  Unsurprisingly, they arouse fear, but that fear can be moderated by the exercise of reason. The consolations offered by the philosopher are rational, though not especially cheering to my mind. Death, he says, is inevitable, and when it comes, it will make little difference ‘whether a single stone crushes me or I am buried by an entire mountain’.

  Why fear cataclysm when the cause of our death can be trivial? Why, a cut on a finger can kill us. ‘Should I panic at the sea emerging from the sea bed … overwhelming me, when some people have been choked by a drink that went down the wrong way? How foolish to tremble at the sea when you know you could be killed by a drop of water.’ Be brave, counsels the philosopher. Do not follow the example of those who have fled Campania, for who can promise that the place to which they have fled will be any more secure? Earthquakes are universal. ‘It is a defect of every piece of ground that it holds together only loosely; it is weakened by many causes and while the whole endures, parts collapse.’ It is wise counsel, though it lends poignancy to those pots of paint and plaster that were discovered, along with the bodies of their owners, buried beneath the ash and debris of Vesuvius’s pyroclastic flow. Fear and flight may, in this instance, have been the more rational response.

  Nor should people blame the gods for disaster. The Earth, like our own bodies, is upset by certain defects. Fear can be assuaged by attempting to understand its primal nature, for the ‘chief cause of fear is ignorance’. The philosopher, therefore, will inform the fearful of current theories concerning the origins of earthquakes, just as in other essays he explains contemporary thinking concerning lightning, thunder and other awe-inspiring phenomena, for

  is it not worth acquiring knowledge in order

  to remove your fear? So let us investigate

  what it is that moves the earth deep beneath

  the surface … why the earth sometimes

  shakes … sometimes splits apart and gapes

  open … sometimes diverts into itself rivers

  known for their great size … at times ope
ns

  up veins of hot water. And at times makes

  them grow cold … It produces thousands of

  marvels. It alters the shape of the terrain, it

  brings down mountains, lifts up plains, makes

  valleys swell up and raises new islands from

  the deep. The investigation of this subject

  has many benefits, but none is finer than the

  fact that it captivates people with its own

  magnificence and their motives for studying it

  are not gain, but wonder …

  What follows is the most wonderful catalogue of speculation, from the very earliest theories to the most recent, supported by copious reference to events around the Mediterranean.

  Some have supposed the cause lies in water. They have suggested that the Earth floats upon a primal ocean like a ship, and the proof of this is that, in major quakes, springs burst forth like the leaks through planking in a hold. Seneca dismisses this theory because, if it rested upon water, the Earth would be in constant movement. He does allow that there might be a vast reservoir beneath the surface of the Earth from which all rivers flow and as proof quotes two centurions dispatched by Nero to discover the source of the Nile who, having crossed interminable marshlands in a small craft, came upon ‘two crags from which a huge volume of river water cascaded down’, presumably from this subterranean sea. Should such reservoirs be moved by slips or flooding, or be whipped up by winds penetrating through gaps in the Earth, perhaps, postulates Seneca, they would cause a quake.

  Or perhaps the cause lies in air: dense clouds form like thunder clouds below ground from which fire bursts forth, shattering everything in its path. Or maybe fire burning deep within the earth consumes everything about it and when the ground is ‘robbed of its underlying supports’ it crumbles, just as a building, ‘when its joists are burnt through, or what was supporting the upper storeys is damaged … sways for a while before collapsing and continues to remain unstable until it has come to rest on something solid’.