LETTER FROM VERNAZZA: We have a fatal tendency to underestimate scale in nature. A very little bit of mountain can hammer a village
THE VIA Roma in Vernazza came back to life before our eyes one bittersweet evening this summer.
We had been haunted by its emptiness every night for the previous week. After the builders finished their frenetic labours each day, there were hardly any echoes of the exuberance we had always associated with Vernazza’s little main street after dark.
It felt weird to hear no music spilling out from the bohemian Blue Marlin bar, no sociable chatter from its two rival ice-cream shops. But on this particular evening we found that the Gelateria Artiginale had reopened, and was buzzing. The co-owner, Valentino Giannoni, was taking a break outside.
We went over to congratulate him on his new shop. For 15 years, we have been visiting this small village in the Cinque Terre region of Italy’s coastal northwest and have received countless exquisitely crafted ice-creams from Valentino’s expert hands.
“Thank you,” he said, smiling wanly. “I am happy too.” Then he added: “But I can’t stop feeling sad that my father cannot see this day.”
Pino Giannoni, an accomplished painter, was one of the three people killed in the disastrous flash floods of October 25th last year. The Via Roma was buried under nearly four metres of mud and rubble within a couple of hours. It was some kind of miracle that there were not more deaths. Valentino has written the most heart-breaking of several moving accounts of that terrible afternoon. ( savevernazza.com/testimonials/). He describes how the rising waters turned their little shop into a trap in a few minutes.
His wife, Carly, and three-year-old son, Zen, took refuge on floating refrigerators, while he, Pino and their partner Dodi struggled in vain to secure the doors. In an instant, the force of the flood swept Pino away down the street, across the piazza and on out into the Golfo de Poeti beyond it.
His body was found more than two weeks later, hundreds of kilometres to the northwest on the French Riviera.
Everyone who worked on the Via Roma that day has grim memories, and the joy of the street’s recent resurrection, while real, is also restrained.
Modern Vernazza had seemed such a safe haven, such a blessed spot, that one can still sense the shock and dislocation that the floods – and subsequent months of evacuation to neighbouring villages – caused to its inhabitants.
This is a place that has gone from grinding poverty to a comfortable lifestyle based on quality tourism within little more than a generation. Inevitably, some people wonder if it was all too good to be true, a fear surely as old as human culture itself.
It is a great tribute to the villagers’ resilience and work ethic that the huge mass of mud, rubble and dismembered cars that choked its main street and piazza has been cleaned away in six months.
The Cinque Terre was created from a mixture of heroic collective labour and rugged individualism. The region is made up of very steep slopes falling down to the Mediterranean. Over many centuries, its five coastal villages painstakingly built up a vast network of terraced agriculture, all the way up to the summit ridge that separates the region from the Val di Vara.
That same spirit of solidarity has rebuilt the village, but it would be romanticising the place to pretend that it is universal. Small business owners claim that local landlords are profiteering from the disaster. Some cannot reopen due to raised rents.
Critics say the town council is not planning for the daily needs of Vernazza’s native citizens, but for the minority who can make most money out of tourism. The village’s only remaining hairdressers, wrecked by the floods, has been replaced by a high-end fashion boutique. Medical services are less available than before the floods.
Those who have vineyards above the village complain that there is no assistance from the Cinque Terre National Park, which is supposed to promote traditional agriculture, for the financial and physical burden of restoring collapsed terraces.
The most surprising thing to a visitor, though, is not how much visible damage, but how little, there is to the hillsides. The scars of the landslips caused by October’s unprecedented rainfall look almost insignificant in the context of the whole landscape – the point being that there is an awful lot more trouble stored up there, where the last disaster came from. We have a fatal tendency to underestimate scale in nature. A very little bit of mountain can hammer a village.
So it is extraordinary to find that the children’s playground is being rebuilt exactly where it was, right above the river that carried the mud and rocks into Vernazza.
We bought a delicious fig and ricotta ice-cream from Valentino, and strolled down the restored Via Roma, fearing the worst, as one does so often these days, but hoping for the best.