Captain Reverend Mother

The car dashboard read 48.5°C (119°F!) today. A decade practicing Bikram (hot) yoga did not help prepare me.

The heat in Naples is different from the heat I grew up with or experienced in other parts of the US. The air here stops moving. Stops. It just stays, with its faint dampness. We stand in the driveway or walk down a street with our arms out like fools, waiting for a breeze that never arrives. The only moving air I have experienced in the past month is either from the air conditioner or across the deck of a boat in motion.

Stopping is the theme of August.

The roads emptied the first of the month. On my way to work, I now drive through parts of town where every shutter is rolled down and nothing is open. Two weeks prior I could barely manage a left turn without divine intervention. My work commute dropped by twenty minutes.

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Ferragosto explains the empty roads. The Emperor’s holidays, Feriae Augusti, since 18 BCE, Augustus put it on the calendar on the first of August, so everyone could rest once the harvest was in. The Catholic Church moved it to the fifteenth and gave the day to the Assumption of Mary, when God is believed to have taken her body to heaven. Rest by decree and doctrine. Shops close anywhere from a week to the whole month and hang a sign in the window, Chiuso per Ferie (Closed for Holidays)

What a novel idea and lovely practice! Except when it comes up against the fact we have been in the process of buying a second car and the transfer paperwork failed to clear before the country shut down, so now the car comes in September.

On a recent quiet commute to work, I was lost in thought about how we absorb the rules by which we live. Like in the US and other global high-pressure societies, busy means important and exhausted means successful. Nobody ever sat me down and taught me that. The capitalist, Protestant work ethic was in the water. Now I live in a country running entirely on other rules, and the ones I brought with me have stopped looking like laws of nature.

Foreigners love the Italian phrase dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. A German visitor said it to me a few weeks ago. In six months here I never once heard an Italian say it. Italians just close shop, drive to the water with three generations and a cooler, and sometime around September they (eventually) come back.

I take rest and other time off seriously. A few summers ago, I started taking Fridays. The military leave policy runs generous, so I bank days through the year and spend them on my family. I cannot say, however, I have mastered the sweetness of doing nothing bit.

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Sabbath made the top ten, commandments that is. The mandated is pretty clear: rest. Six days we labor, the seventh we do not. This goes for the land too. Scripture tells farmers to sow for six years and let the fields lie fallow in the seventh (Exodus 23:10-11, Leviticus 25:3-4). Soil that rests returns stronger. I come from a family of farmers, all who seem to know this long before it was ever written.

I love the idea of Sabbath. As much as I would love to “keep the Sabbath holy,” the best I have been able to get is keeping Sundays as a screen sabbath, sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday. Phones, tablets, television lie fallow for 24 hours. (Thank God!) Of all the battles in the long screen war, this is the one I won (and on which I won’t budge). This is my favorite time of the week. It also has been our day for family adventures.

Last Sunday we drove an hour-and-a-half north to the Cipresseta di Fontegreca, seventy hectares (131 American football fields!) of cypress along the Sava River. We went up on the theory that the whole country had gone to the coast, only to be surprised to see scores of families already spread under the trees with folding tables and coolers, and grandmothers doing nothing in a highly organized fashion.

The path in begins at a shrine to the Madonna of the Cypresses, then climbs up through the trees, crossing and recrossing the water on small wooden bridges. By August the falls come down to a trickle, though the pools underneath stay full. The water was so cold it took the breath out of our chests, and clean enough to drink, though given the number of people wading in it upstream of us we decided against.

The cypress grow sideways, with branches growing out instead of up, a variety found almost nowhere else. A canker took out cypress across the Mediterranean and left these ones alone, some standing here since before the Sack of Rome (1527). Scientists come to study the trees resistance. Inquiring minds like mine want to know their secret too, even though I was happy to just sit there and enjoy the cooler microclimate thanks to the shade, elevation, and icy mountain streams.

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Stop. God commanded this first, then an emperor. This week nearly every shop in Italy will hang a sign saying it stopped, no explanation, no apology.

The Italians have been practicing this for two thousand years. I have been at it a fraction of the time without knowing that was what I was doing.