It is said that proverbs are the wisdom of the people. What I often heard my maternal grandmother say was “God sends the cold according to the clothes”, a sublime simplification of a more complex axiom according to which the obstacles that life puts before us are calibrated on the basis of our actual ability to overcome them. And yet, as a native of the Marche, I have often asked myself how many layers of warm and enveloping padding the people to whom I belong must have to face those waves of cold that periodically arrive, to lash them but above all to make them kneel, without ever managing to knock them to the ground. The only Italian region in the plural, even in calamities and emergencies to be faced: earthquakes, landslides, mudslides, fires, tornadoes and floods. As if the four natural elements decided to make common cause, to wear out people and objects, exhausting the former and sometimes irreparably damaging the latter.

The Courage of Fear

Strange to say, but this was the thought that accompanied me when, on my knees in the middle of the brown water that had penetrated through the front door and entrance to violate and violate that domestic intimacy so dear to everyone, you tried to defend with bucket blows what belonged to your life now and your past. A sort of Wángwéi lín, the boy who placed himself in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, alone like him and too small and helpless in front of that impetuous river – more suited to a Hydrospeed experience than a pedestrian area – that had as its bed the street of your home. Almost unconscious in hoping that the water level would not rise further transforming the apartment into a trap, with the framed poster of Kill Bill first hung in the corridor and now stuck under the crack of the door and held down with some rags to improvise an illogical, but in that moment of panic seemed efficient, bulkhead in an attempt to block its way.

On the surface of that water, angrily pulled out of the window, float pieces of what you have experienced, between a photo with colored hair taken during a crazy trip to Ibiza, an Einstürzende Neubauten sweatshirt, the many passes and boarding documents collected on sports business trips and that letter written but never sent, ended up in the bottom of a drawer buried under old clothes and absurdly resurfaced, concluded with a mocking “It can’t rain forever” borrowed from “The Crow” and which you now hope is a favorable weather forecast, not just a figure of speech. Seeing the edge of that stream descend under the step that stands sentinel at the front door seems almost a liberation, after having seen it navigate from the firefighters’ dinghies that were carrying two elderly people to safety only half an hour ago. You have never been so eager to turn that damned handle, making everything that leaden sky dumped down and visited you under cover of darkness make the return journey from there, without even having the courtesy of a knock on the bell.

The (apparent) calm after the storm

Then we go out into the street, almost in unison as after the final whistle of a match won by the national team at the World Cup. There is no electricity, much less the courage to ask each other at what point of the walls that humid and cowardly invasion has placed its autograph. But the strength to roll up our sleeves right away, yes. You can read it in their eyes, some moist and red, full of anger but also pride, pointed straight in the face of those who remind us once again how small and insignificant we can be in the face of the resentment of a planet that, after all, has only begun to respond after having forced it for so long to just take it.

The center of the village is starting to fill up again, but this time with what has been irreversibly damaged, from household appliances to furniture components, arranged along the walls almost as if they wanted to throw what they have done in the face of the storm, as if they wanted to shout “Look what you’ve done”. Piles of stuff that filled everyday life now piled up, thrown away not with spite but instead placed down, as if they wanted to pay tribute to the honor of war to those who have surrendered in front of a stronger adversary and give them a deserved catwalk. All done with dignity and silence, without an undercurrent of complaints. People who are perhaps rustic and brusque, but tough and proud, harsh and fertile like the land that generated them. And rediscovering today as yesterday, while a shy and consoling sun tries to smile emerging from a cloud, that they are from the Marche: it’s worth more.