GROCERY SHOPPING (AND MORE) IN PANDEMIC FLORENCE
COVID raged...
Meanwhile, public officials raged too.
Vociferous warnings, dire threats and draconian bans streaked across the front pages of the daily newspapers—scaring the hell out of people without offering a coherent plan.
NARDELLA S'INFURIA: TROPPI IN GIRO. CONTROLLI SUI TELEFONINI.
That is:
[Dario] NARDELLA [Mayor of Florence] IS FURIOUS. TOO MANY PEOPLE OUT AND ABOUT. CELL PHONES TO BE TRACKED.
And tucked in at the bottom of the placard...
TODAY FOR FREE: THE "I'M STAYING AT HOME" SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT.
(For the "Io Resto a Casa" meme, see: THE APOCALYPSE COMES TO CAMPO DI MARTE)
Total lockdown...
Cabin fever on steroids...
How do you cope?
The bottle is one answer.
But where do you get the bottle?
Hotlines proliferated, ready to mediate your pandemic needs— at a time when all circuits (human and telephonic) were melting down.
Then a designated "Call Center" (with a sleek English name) for shopping from home.
But meanwhile, local purveyors were managing on their own —as best they could.
Your friendly neighborhood trippaio was stuck at home, stewing away at Florentine-style innards of every sort.
Eager to unload whatever he could...
Thus home delivery, just the two of you, without an annoying "hotline" or "call center" in the middle.
It is always more satisfying to make your own way and bend the rules —at least a little.
So, there's Plan B.
You sneak out of your house...
You knock on a window...
And something happens...
Then you return home with whatever you crave, plus a warm glow of complicity...
...ready to brave a furious Dario Nardella...
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...with a hearty serving of ribollita (Florentine bread soup, if you need to ask).
But what about other essentials?
You could get whip-lash reading the daily newspapers.
Time and again, the shops in Florence suddenly threw open their doors... just a crack... but with a barrage of special rules.
Masks (and gloves for employees)... rigorous social distancing (only single shoppers allowed)... strictly limited numbers inside...
So, my local supermarket was stocked to the rafters but nearly empty and strangely silent— while a file of hopeful shoppers stretched to my front door three blocks away.
For me, a weirdly long route, three sides of a square...
Tracing the red line from the upper left in Via Antonio Scialoia down to Piazza Cesare Beccaria (just a short jog), then along Via Vincenzo Gioberti and up Via Cimabue to the COOP.
Through the Looking Glass? I always went the other way around.
Let's do that again on the ground:
Down Via Scialoia, with newspapers to read and shoppping carts...
...then along Via Gioberti...
...to Via Cimabue and the Supermarket of Our Dreams...
...site of quick and casual drop-ins for the odd liter of milk, not so long ago.
Another queue, two weeks later and a few blocks away...
The CONAD in Via Scipione Ammirato... There was nothing wrong with it, so far as supermarkets go. But it just wasn't "my supermarket" and that was that.
In the twenty years that I lived in the neighborhood, I walked by maybe a thousand times and entered twice.
But suddenly, in the depths of the pandemic, CONAD called out to me. Wouldn't it be nice to stand in a different line, in a slightly different place, even if there was nothing much that I wanted to buy?
How crazy did that sound?! I normally loathe enforced waiting as much as any Florentine but at that moment, socially-distanced loitering was the best available excuse for being outdoors with no questions asked.
Dallying on the sidewalk in the pale March sun was oddly luxurious, even zen-like perhaps.
And then... right there... I witnessed something beyond my wildest Florentine dreams.
Imagine a forty-something woman at the head of the line...
She drops out and moves to the end, beginning the wait all over again...
Suddenly, a sixty-something local guy follows suit...
Then an older foreign observer, shooting cell-phone photos like mad...
Socially-distanced queues weren't just a supermarket thing.
For pandemic bingers like me, they were a bakery thing too.
For Florentines, staying in character —glum pandemic style— was always an artistic stretch...
...and bakeries are the ultimate providers of comfort food, in good times and bad.
But there was more...
The Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio, my historic neighborhood market, reopened slowly in fits and starts...
....beginning wtih a few outdoor vendors and a fragile labyrinth of crime scene tape over which you shouted to get what you want.
A good idea (in theory) but (in practice) generally ignored.
Why bother? We're all out in the fresh air, after all!
In Italy in the depths of the pandemic, you still ate better than almost any place else in the best of times.
Then you pitch in Marco's specialities from Il Sordo...
...and now you see how nostalgia might creep in, once death and destruction receded into the distance.
FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY:
When I moved back to Washington DC in October 2020— between the first and second wave of the pandemic— I brought the furious Dario Nardella with me.
Now, he looks over my shoulder while a very un-Florentine snow storm rages outside — and I am briefly housebound yet again.
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