POTHOLES IN PARADISE

 

I first sat down to write this as we prepared to celebrate Thanksgiving, a tradition we’ve brought from America and maintained for half a century. We did celebrate the holiday but there have been many distractions over the past five months to keep these observations from being set to paper. Life in Umbria, the green heart of Italy, provides much to be thankful for, from its beautiful medieval towns dotting the hilltops, relatively low population density, and wonderful food traditions, to its proximity to both Rome and Florence, two of the major repositories of cultural artifacts in Italy. By the reckoning of the UN, Italy holds the largest number of major treasures of art and architecture in the world. Less known is that it also has one of the most effective health care systems in the world, vying with Japan and Switzerland for having the world’s highest life expectancy.

At a time when my country of birth is enabling and collaborating in the world’s first live televised genocide, invading or threatening other sovereign nations and imposing illegal economic sanctions to destroy their economies, and my country of residence is doing disgracefully little to oppose or even criticize these actions, it may be in dubious taste to complain about minor flaws in the wonderful place where I live. On the other hand, how can defects be remedied if the public is blind to them or pitifully passive. Much of my time is taken up reading and writing about politics and the rapidly worsening things going on in the so-called western world. I’ll take a break from that to simply report on some of the little things that could be better in our green oasis in the growing precincts of the new feudal order now laying waste to the environment, our painstakingly evolved culture, and the rule of law. 

Potholes- Despite the title of this essay, I have no complaints to issue about potholes. I have mentioned some in earlier writing, such as the partial collapse of the road leading from our village down to the the Tiber, but after a mere six or eight years, that problem was resolved with a huge infusion of money and deep concrete piles that have created a fifty meter long tract of road which will surely outlast Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England. We also had a large sinkhole open up in the middle of the same road further down the hill. No one was injured and that hole, big enough to absorb a bicyclist and rider, was fenced off, filled and covered in less than twenty-four hours. The Comune (county or township) of Baschi, in which we live, is large (68.2 sq.km) and has less than 2800 residents. The job of the comune to maintain all the country roads that connect its villages, is nothing to envy. Given the circumstances, the pavements are rather good. 

big hole, eventually fixed years ago

The major two-lane road connecting Todi with Orvieto runs along the edge of the Tiber River, mostly through the Comune of Baschi, and over its 30-35 km length it has many bridges and covered galleries. This road is administered by the Provinces of Perugia and Terni or by the Region of Umbria and over the past five or six years most of these bridges and galleries have been slowly and carefully restored. The authorities are to be commended. There seems to have been a meticulously thought out plan to reduce the number of heavy trucks using this road to get to the toll-free E45 heading north rather than sticking to the autostrada. At each workplace, the road would be temporarily reduced to one lane so there would be a system of traffic lights to control the alternating direction of traffic, and each project would carry on for several months. The typical cycle of the lights is four minutes, which is a minor nuisance to us but it seems to have achieved the desired results. The road is safer and less trafficked. 

without and with paint, the difference
between night and day, especially at night.

In the past I’ve complained about road repaving being done in patches of about forty meters in length. That practice seems to have been reduced but one anomaly remains. Whenever a stretch of road is repaved, within a few days, the stripe painters arrive to paint stripes along the edges of the road, and/or the centerline of the road. These are extremely helpful in negotiating our narrow and curvy roads, especially at night. However, there must be some law or protocol that insists that such stripes be painted only following the repaving but never as routine maintenance. Roads that are pleasant, even scenic, during the day sometimes become a nightmare to negotiate in the dark when old pavement turns pale and is indistinguishable from clearings, driveways or flat bits of terrain. In some places, reflectors are installed at the sides of the road but where most needed they are often knocked down and seldom replaced, leaving dark zones where you just wonder where the road will be going just past the reach of your headlights. Some of the paving remains serviceable for as much as twenty years but the paint should really be redone every five years or at least within ten. 

 In recent years our area has become overrun with hikers from Camino dei Borghi Silenti. It’s all very organized, with three and five day itineraries of walking between destinations on trails in the woods where possible, but often there are connecting stretches that use the roads. For most of us, the hikers are a welcome and cheerful addition to the area. When I’ve spoken to any of them, I’ve found them engaging and interesting. They come from all over Italy, often from the northern provinces where people are perhaps more interested in hiking. Many stop at the Circolo Bar for refreshment, and now and then some will stop to eat at the restaurant in town. 

panicked walker jump-off point

As I’ve said, our roads are curvy and narrow so the presence of groups of walkers can create some potential for accidents. I would suggest that the Comune make a bit of an effort to keep the grass cut along the edges of our roads where people walking must step off the road to get out of the way of on-coming traffic. Vipers do exist here even if they are more a nuisance than a threat. They only have a strike radius of about 20 cm and they don’t come after people. Stepping off a road into waist high grass to avoid an on-coming bus is not something people should have to do, and that’s true for people who live here as well as for the hundreds of people who come here to walk through our scenic countryside. 

occasional surprises

small car on narrow road;  buses here are huge! 

Well intended laws with negative consequences, Abandoned villages and Flawed professions. These were to be three different subjects but they are all interwoven, and so I’ll try to suggest how they reinforce each other. 

The borgo at night

Our village of Acqualoreto was recently described in an Umbrian newspaper as having eighty-six residents, a figure gleaned from either Facebook or Wikipedia. CityFacts indicates the population as 107. Whatever the correct number was, it’s now about six less than it was when the newspaper story came out last September. Much of the original fortress/village was built about seven centuries ago. The population of the area usually refers to both the village and the surrounding farm houses which were added later to house large numbers of tenant farmers and their families. The population had its ups and downs over the centuries but is said to have peaked at five hundred around the start of the Twentieth Century. Following WWII, most of the farm houses were abandoned as people moved to the cities and the population dropped precipitously. 

I’m not sure how many people currently reside full time in “the borgo”, as the once fortified outpost is usually described, but I can count only nine. Many of the unoccupied houses are owned by people who live in Rome or other cities and come here for weekends or the summer so defining the population is always misleading. However, one thing is clear. The population is shrinking. The birth rate is extremely low and the average age of the residents is high. Few people who visit the area fail to acknowledge the beauty of the place. Our village overlooks the Tiber Valley but within a few kilometers there are many other villages overlooking valleys and a backdrop of often snow-covered mountains. Places such as Melezzole, Tuscolano and Santa Restituta are jewels but all suffer from declining populations. Why? The first obvious answer is that there is a worldwide move to cities and a vast abandonment of small scale agriculture. While true, both of these movements may be slowed or partially reversed in time as many large cities grow more unlivable, industrial agriculture continues to ruin more land and diminished aquifers can no longer sustain intensive mono-culture agriculture. Those are possibly long-term world-wide considerations but higher quality agriculture has already shown signs of making a comeback in Italy. 

For the present, what are the barriers to population growth or maintenance here? The abandoned farm houses are typically large and most have been bought by people from outside the area, and restored to serve as large vacation homes or to generate income from short term vacation rentals. The wave of such renovations happened mostly in the 70’s and 80’s and the people, often artists, professors, journalists, actors and other independent professionals, who brought about those renovations are now either old or dead. The values of those restored houses have now risen to where they are out of reach of young families raising children. 

Looking through today’s homes and gardens magazines in Italy, it is hard to believe that most of the houses in villages like Acqualoreto had no running water less than a hundred years ago. Most of theses houses have few rooms, thick walls with low doors, and many levels, which do not correspond to the levels in adjacent houses. Women of the village carried water in large terracotta jars on their heads for 400 meters from the public fountain to the village. Most of the washing of clothing and bedclothes was done in that same chambered public fountain. Today’s young Italians have grown up with all sorts of new conveniences, from things as basic as water, gas and electricity, to newer blessings, from cars and washing machines to telephones and computers, and they obviously expect all those modern conveniences. It is now common for families to have as many cars as family members. Cars and medieval villages were never a good match. 

People who dream of retiring to a small village may not demand large amounts of space but they invariably want at least a small amount of private outdoor space. Our villages were not built with this in mind. The early inhabitants worked in the fields from dawn to dusk and when they returned they might drink or play cards at a taverna but it’s unlikely that they would be having cocktails with neighbors in a private garden. If they had a garden, it was likely to be a small patch of land on the edges of town where they would grow fruit and vegetables for their own use. 

The lack of available garden spaces in the antique cores of the villages is an obstacle to their repopulation. However, there may be some potential solutions. The outdoor spaces are public and must remain so. They have been centers of social interaction until recently, when people still lived in the adjacent houses, and with more people, they will grow livelier again. Some of the newer desire for private outdoor space could be met by developing roof gardens, but this brings us to the subjects of rules, regulations and red tape. 

Very few Italians leave a Last Will and Testament. The government does most of the work for you. The country may seem to have a strong anarchist element but this is no libertine paradise. If you have a family but dislike them all and would prefer to leave all your earthly treasure to your dog, or perhaps to that longtime mistress that nobody knew about, don’t live in Italy, or at least don’t die here. Italian law, the last time I was informed about it, stipulated that at least half of whatever you own, will be divided equally among your surviving heirs. Without mention of the dog or other named beneficiaries, the whole estate will be divided equally. Individual heirs can reject their inheritance but most do not. 

This seems to me a humane and wholly well-intended policy. A few coddled ne’er-do-wells seems a lesser price for society to pay than a colony of privileged chihuahuas or dobermans being served filet mignon by people getting by on ground insects deemed edible by the likes of Bill Gates. Nevertheless, as always, good intentions have hidden costs. I’ve mentioned above that most of the medieval houses consisted of two or three rooms. Not so long ago families were much larger than families today. If you just think back two or three generations of the policies I’ve mentioned, you can imagine four children inheriting a house of three rooms. Maybe one of the children will move away to the village of his or her new spouse. The others will marry and have children of their own. After WWII many of these people moved away to jobs in Rome, Terni, Torino, Pomezia and even abroad, but some of them have tended to return to the villages in August, or to remember dead ancestors in November, so they have maintained their share in houses that by now might as well be turned into corporations, given the number of owners they have. Does anyone know, or keep an up-to-date record of the owners of all these houses? Are any taxes being collected on these houses, many of which have not been lived in for many decades? While all houses are subject to water and garbage fees, the houses specified as people’s principal place of residence are exempt from property taxes. We are well aware that some of those taxes and fees are being collected but just how systematically? How many of the people claiming the first house tax exemption are dead? 

My wife decided to sell the little two room apartment that her mother had lived in before she died nearly twenty years ago. She really did not expect that anyone would would want the place but when she mentioned her desire to sell it, four people expressed interest in buying it within a week. It wasn’t worth much, although more than the geometra overseeing the sale involved had suggested. An agreement was struck quickly with the son-in-law of some of our ex-pat friends in the village. Everybody, except those who also had wanted to buy it, was happy and eager to proceed with the sale. Two and a half years later, the sale was completed. As in all real estate transactions, there were some fees and some taxes to be paid. There may be explanations for a 2-1/2 years delay in the sale of a tiny property. As an architect I will admit that architects often have a degree of professional disdain for other related and sometimes competing professions. This conflict in mind-set is most often seen between architects and engineers; in Italy it is far more pronounced between architects and geometras, a category unknown is America, but closest to the British Quantity Surveyor. There are good and bad practitioners in every profession and I’ve had cordial relations with many geometras, including the one involved in this sale. A notary was also involved in this case, and some of the delay originated there. That’s a category of professional I’ve never understood at all, something like the fireman mandated by the union on diesel powered trains. I will not get into the possible errors or omissions of anyone in this particular case, but if the sale of a two room dwelling for a price more often associated with a used car than with a house can take something like thirty months, either the professionals involved are failing at their jobs or the system is broken. 

This was not a unique case. We have close friends from Ireland who bought a house in the country here about twenty years ago. When they sold the house four years ago they faced a problem in that a property line dividing their property ran diagonally through the covered space at the side of their house where they regularly hosted guests for drinks. All these transactions, the original purchase and the subsequent sale, were overseen by notaries and geometras attesting to the regularity of the documentation and proceedings. If they are certifying for a fee that everything is in order when there are significant defects in the building documentation, should this not be regarded as fraud, or at least negligence? 

Since the end of WWII the Comune of Baschi has made enormous strides in the improvement in the lives of its people. In the 50’s there was no public water system and there were no schools, as there was no mandatory schooling of children. Acqualoreto had three or four qualified teachers who taught from their own homes. Schools were then built in Acqualoreto, Morre and Collelungo, later to be replaced by a consolidated school at the intersection just up the road from the sports complex, another major addition, and about equidistant between Morre and Acqualoreto. Currently, that school is suffering from a lack of students, despite serving five or more villages. Given the remarkable advance in amenities, it is sadly ironic to see the area suffering from major depopulation. 

I have no idea when the catasto was established to record the ownership of buildings and land. I’m guessing but I suppose that land ownership was the more pressing concern. The catastale maps do say that they indicate recognized fields, forests, and olive groves, rather than being precise indications of surveyed dimensions, even as they record parcels of land in square meters. While the uses of land may change, those changes should not be so difficult to record. How do you record changes to a building that was built without detailed drawings and how do you approve modifications to bring buildings into compliance with laws created centuries after the buildings were erected? Quibbling over whether a primitive bathroom installed in a building built before there were bathrooms was ever really a bathroom is the architectural equivalent of theologians arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and yet these costly debates do rage on. Houses these days need bathrooms, and if the people of the Comune, along with consultants operating within it, were working to serve the people they work for, they would be helping people to create the bathrooms they need rather than impeding their improvements based on a distorted sense of reality. 

I haven’t been involved in building activity here for three decades but when I was briefly involved locally it seemed to me that new building standards devised in Scandinavia or other Nordic countries were being imposed on Italy by the EU. While I fully support efforts to make buildings more energy efficient, there has been a lack of recognition of the realities of building, and especially of renovating, in the warmer countries of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, where the protection from heat has always taken precedence over the conservation of heat required in the northern countries. It is not all that difficult to adapt European-wide codes to new construction but more thought should be focused on the particular problems of modifying the vast existing stock of structurally and aesthetically sound buildings to meet modern needs. 

Railroad developments: About thirty years ago when my three daughters were all attending University in Perugia, there was a little two-car train that ran on a line that connected Terni with the center of Perugia. I believe it continued on to Sansepulcro in Tuscany on at least some of its runs. It was convenient for students and for other people who just wanted to go to either of the larger cities for shopping or sightseeing without the hassle of driving to them. Then, for reasons I’ve never understood, the line was allowed to degrade. The stations along the route all had ticket offices, usually with other functions. The fellow in Ponterio (Todi) also sold hunting supplies., from ammunition to camouflage outfits.  When such places closed buying tickets became more difficult unless you bought them on the train where they cost more, although I believe the conductors that checked the tickets were eventually eliminated since no one could get tickets. Cleaning of the trains was also shut down in further cost cutting moves and the trains began to resemble subway cars in the Bronx of the 1970’s. Italians stopped using the trains, which for a while left them to the exclusive use of prostitutes and supermarket parking lot assistants commuting from Perugia to Todi. It wasn’t long before it was decided to abandon the Central Umbrian Line entirely. 

Many years have passed and perhaps new officials have been elected or hired who have decided that the little railroad line wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Work has been going on now for several years to reset the tracks on new PC concrete ties. So far we haven’t heard when the tract from PG to TR will be reopened but assuming it is run better than the late stages of its defunct predecessor, it will be welcomed. 

In the late 80’s I commuted to Rome for a couple of years. I don’t recommend it to anyone since it was about a 2-1/2 hour trip each way. Five hours of travel is a lot to add to one’s work day, but it also destroys flexibility by creating rigid times to to leave the office to catch your train. At the time, it seemed that there were growing numbers of people living in the residential areas around Orvieto and working in Rome. The trip from Orvieto to Rome took about 70 minutes, which is not so much more than getting from one side of Rome to the other. Indeed, in my case, forty-five minutes of my commute was taken up by getting from the station to nearby Parioli on a crowded bus. Train service to and from Orvieto has been severely reduced since then. I wonder what’s happened to all those people. I also am curious about why InterCity trains have been reduced so much, but I think we know the answer. 

In recent years I’ve been going to Bologna every month where I stay with my daughter and her family for a few days. The InterCity train from Orvieto to Bologna takes about three hours, with five stops along the way. It’s an easy trip, where you can read, write, watch the passing scenery, stare at your phone, or maybe even talk with your fellow travelers. In any case, it’s less stressful than driving or riding in a car, and less expensive if you’re traveling alone. There are three main categories of trains connecting the many cities and towns of Italy: RV (Regional Veloce) which connect all those towns which otherwise have no train service at all. There may also be a RNV (Regional Not So Veloce) stopping at little places where they’re the only train of the day, or other more strictly local categories. The more stops they make, the cheaper the ticket and the longer it takes to get where you want to go. IC (InterCity) trains connect major cities, stopping at intermediate cities where many passengers start or end their journey. Most of my trains to Bologna start in Naples or Rome and go on to Milan or Trieste, but few travelers ride them from start to finish. 

More recently we've seen a vast expansion in the number of high speed trains such as the Frecce Rosse, run by Trenitalia, the successor or offspring of the FS (Ferrovia Italiana) or by Italo, a private competitor. They now connect most of the major cities of Italy at high speed and high cost. They cost about double the price of an IC train for a trip of similar length, which in turn costs about twice what a RV train ticket costs. The high speed trains are wonderful for businessmen and well-off people living in the major cities. They are certainly competitive with airlines in terms of speed, convenience and reliability. Their needs in terms of track access are prioritized by investors and managers of the empire in Milan, Brussels and New York, to the detriment of the smaller but culturally rich cities throughout Italy such as Orvieto. 

In the past couple of years, for a month or two, usually in the autumn, most IC trains going through Florence were terminated in Prato, the first stop north of Florence, forcing passengers to transfer to faster and more expensive trains from Florence to Bologna, or to transfer to a double decker bus in Prato for little additional money and an hour or two of extra time, which offers unusually high level views over the cars of the countryside alternating with an unending sequence of close visual encounters with drivers of huge trucks an arms length away while easing through the stop and start traffic jams in multi-lane tunnels. Interesting to experience one time and better than transferring from a late high speed train which starts far enough behind schedule to force the itinerary to slip to multiple changes and long waits in stations without seats and a total trip time of eight hours or more. All of this, as I understand it, was to allow improvements to the tracks so that more high speed trains could be accommodated. Travelers to Orvieto, and other intermediate stops along the way, deserve better. 

Before leaving the subject of Orvieto, I will leave one more observation. An enormous improvement to the city was made in 1990 when the huge new parking lot behind the existing Orvieto railroad station was built and connected by covered stairs leading up to a passage below the tracks and then up again into the station. From there it was only a few steps across Piazza Mattiotti in front of the station, which is just large enough for taxis and other cars dropping off train passengers, to the entrance to the newly rebuilt funicular. Originally constructed in 1885 with a hydraulically run mechanism and abandoned for twenty years in 1970, the funicular, rebuilt with an electrically driven mechanism, now carries passengers up 157 meters to Piazza Cahen at the top of the rupe at 15 minute intervals, where they can get smaller local buses to take them further into the pedestrian-friendly plateau city. 

This substantial project is referred to as the "Welcome Hub". The parking area at the bottom provides free parking for hundreds of cars next to a large parking area for tourist buses which charges a €45 fee per bus, and an area for campers. There is an adjacent building, open during the day, although closed in the off season, which offers, maps, souvenirs, tickets for transportation and tourist venues, luggage storage and bike rentals. The exterior construction of the project used local tufo, a porous sedimentary stone derived from volcanic ash, which has been used over the years for the facades of most of the buildings in Orvieto, for walls and stairs, with plexiglas canopies supported by steel beams and painted a bright shade of red along with all the metal handrails and trim. This continuous selection of materials and colors carries all the way up to the upper station of the the funicular at Piazza Cahen, combining aesthetic continuity with excellent functional design. 

The walls of the connecting passage below the tracks were finished with relatively impermeable polished granite in recognition of Italy’s age-old problem of graffiti in public spaces. A covered, open-air escalator was installed to the right of the stairs from the parking level to the passage below the tracks. On the other side a long ramp paved in textured rubber was built to accommodate travelers dragging wheeled luggage too large to be comfortably carried up or down the stairs. Inside the passage a smaller escalator also carried travelers from the passage level up the the main station level, although an elevator was also provided for people with wheel chairs or substantial luggage, just as there is for people ascending to the platforms. All in all, this project was an amazing achievement, considering the divided responsibilities between a number of local, national and private agencies, providing an attractive welcome for visitors to the city of Orvieto and for its residents. 

current state of tufo ramp wall with metal railing

Then something went off the rails. Was it owing to the new gospel of privatization of government assets, or by an uncoordinated  withdrawal of responsibilities for maintenance by the various agencies originally involved? The long escalator going from the parking level to the passage always seemed to be out of order since it was first installed, then boarded up and eventually removed. Then the smaller one inside the passage was inexplicably removed as well. Was the cost of occasionally repairing the mechanism really so much more than the cost of its removal and the cost of rebuilding those granite stairs?  Are there neither competent elevator technicians nor lawyers in Orvieto? Some of the tufo masonry has crumbled without ever being replaced. The rubber paving of the ramps has tears and holes and will probably only be repaired after someone is injured tripping over the irregularities, including the unremoved fallen bamboo branches. Perhaps worst of all, the distinctive red metal trim which visually links the entire project, has faded and sometimes corroded into a rusty brown symbol of decay. Every time I pass through that dismal mess, I think of volunteering to paint it myself. That thought vanishes as soon as I remind myself of my age and condition. Is a reasonable level of routine maintenance an unreasonable dream? 

Orvieto’s mayor, Roberta Tardani, has held that post since June of 2019, including reelection to a second term, and has been widely praised for her efforts on behalf of the city. Orvieto is currently a lively city whose street life includes good shopping, cafes with occasional live music, and plenty of good restaurants to go with its abundant artistic and historic treasures. It reminds me of the atmosphere of Rome of the 70’s and 80’s which I had the good fortune to live in for fifteen years. I would respectfully ask Mayor Tardani to focus her efforts on restoring the Welcome Hub to its original pleasing aspect and to using the power of her office to restore a better level of railroad service to the city. 

*****

That’s enough potholes for now. When I gather my strength for another go, maybe I’ll try a tale of the two very different cities, Todi and Bologna, that I spend a significant amount of time in, reporting on their efforts, successful and not, to improve living conditions in those cities.