Rockilience English Version

sponsored by Dimora Morelli

Rockilience LUCA MORELLI

THE LIFE OF A ROCK NURSE!!

ROCKILIENCE The life of a rock nurse who wanted to leave a mark

by Luca Morelli

Special thanks to www.pexels.com and in particular to the author / user (Karolina Grabowska) who allowed the use of her splendid artistic image used on the cover

To My Father

LETTER TO MY FATHER Dear father, I am writing to you because I miss you.

Now that you are no longer among us, I think back to all the lost occasions in which we could have talked, confronted, and manifested the good, one to the other.

Our character traits did not facilitate communication when you were alive, on the contrary, at various times they became impassable walls.

I am writing to you now, even if it is late, but I want to think that you can hear me.

Today, now that I am a man, I see what you were in a different way.

The severity, your integrity, your autonomy of thought distanced us exactly as they bring us together today.

The education you passed on to me closes the circle of the man I have become.

I owe to you every goal reached without giving up, I owe to you my determination and ability to dream, looking for ever more distant horizons.

I have gained from you the aptitude to understand the world, kindness, and a good education.

Too bad you were not able to enjoy your presence when you were alive, and that you cannot participate in my small, great successes. You would be proud of me.

Of course, not everything was idyllic. My marriage ended and we sold the house in Rome. I went back to live with my mother in Gubbio.

She’s fine, I’m next to her, you have to be calm for her.

They have been very hard years, but not one has passed in vain; indeed, the pain has been a stepping stone, the point from which to start again to transform my life.

I developed a tourist hospitality project in the house you left us.

That house, built with many sacrifices, today welcomes tourists from all over the world; they live in our spaces during their happy holidays and the echo of their laughter and peaceful moments revives the atmosphere of those distant years of my childhood next to you.

I miss you so much dad. We hope to meet one day to give each other all the hugs we didn’t give each other when I was young, and to be able to chat from man to man under an enchanted sky of stars.

Yours, Luca.

PREFACE What binds a battery, a nurse, and a B&B? The answer is simple: life.

Life flows like music, but not like a village dirge, rather like a rock concert that stirs the souls of those overwhelmed by it.

And life for Luca Morelli was a concert where sweet and bitter notes marked his entire existence. And these are the notes that come out of the book to leave in our minds deep reflections on the meaning of life, on the choices we are called to make every day, and the value of a gesture that may seem insignificant but which can change the lives of many people.

This concert of life that flows before our eyes does not leave us indifferent because the story of Luca can very well be the story of all of us. So, in this personal diary-story Luca takes us by the hand, through his music, inside his life to the most secret corners, those that we are often afraid to show.

And Luca becomes a man among men: he loves but he is afraid of loving, he rejoices but he is afraid of the sadness that looms, he lives but he is afraid of death.

But music is stronger than any weakness, and as a good musician he knows when to mark the time, change the register.

His defeats, his wasted notes, instead become great chances to get back into the game, to create new music.

And it is a new background that accompanies him to put on the nurse’s coat again to make himself available to a society tried by a ferocious pandemic. A metal solo gesture that in the story is certainly the most musical part and that manages to touch the chords of our feelings.

But Luca is not a hero, rather he is a witness to those who, like him, have chosen with great sacrifice to put themselves at the service of others. Like him they rejoiced in hearing the sound of the music that the lungs make when they fill with air, but like him they know the last sound of those who leave the heaviness of life behind.

In short, in reading this personal diary you will have the impression of being in front of a large orchestra that plays in unison but of which the strong point is the drums, because behind that instrument there is Luca, and the music is in all of us.

Pierfrancesco Pensosi Journalist of Rai News 24

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Finally, after a long gestation, this wonderful creature was born!! Ever since the idea was born, it was not easy to complete this work. Having no experience as a writer, I was like a child who had to learn to take the first steps to walk.

I was able to complete this path also thanks to all the people who in various ways were involved and helped me to carry out the project. I hope I don’t forget anyone.

First of all, I thank my parents who brought me into the world, and my brothers: Giuseppe, Dina, and Angelo, for their thoughts, their love, their teachings, their example, the values ​​they passed on to me, and for always having endured my eclectic and borderline appearance. Thanks to them, I built my refuge and my shelter in the face of adversity.

Thanks to my uncle Raimondo Cinti, whose life and professional advice and teachings, although he recently died prematurely, resonate in my soul like the double bass drum of a rock drum.

Thanks to my cousin Marianna Tranchida, always intellectually stimulating, as only great minds can do.

A special thanks goes to Paola Merzaghi for helping me with great humanity to tell the emotions through the writing of the book.

Thanks to Alberto Giombetti for his fraternal friendship!!

Thanks to Edoardo Magnotta because he represents in all my projects, therefore also in the book, a professional and human guide.

Thanks to my friend Riccardo Fatarella, who during my stay in Milan, shared with me words and thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of our health system in the face of an unprecedented emergency crisis like that of Covid-19.

Thanks to my great friend Maria Elena Soffientini, who in the difficult and stressful days of work never lacked the support and warmth of friendship.

Thanks to Arianna Poggetti, a special customer of my bed and breakfast, who in the long conversations during the lockdown in Milan represented for me the perfect synthesis between past, present, and future, having seen all my changes. From a customer, in the past of the B&B, she turned into a friend in the present, who couldn’t wait to come and visit me, in the future, at the end of the emergency!!

Thanks to Pierfrancesco Pensosi for the splendid preface, true, authentic, and original.

Thanks to Bobbie Jean Brown, my beloved “Cherry Pie’s girl,” a rock icon of the 80’s and 90’s that I met in Los Angeles, who has welcomed the project with great enthusiasm authorizing the contents dedicated to her. She is a timeless image of a strong and resilient woman.

Thanks to the writer Marcella Nardi, for offering me the first valuable advice on the choices to follow to correctly construct a novel based on a true story.

Thanks to Massimo Boccucci, for helping me with his experience in the field, regarding choices to make when this book was just an idea.

Thanks to Giulia Denti of the nursing direction of the Palazzolo Institute of the Don Gnocchi Foundation, for the special welcome she gave me as soon as I arrived in Milan.

Thanks to all of the professional staff of the Don Gnocchi Foundation who shared with me the unprecedented experience of the Covid department (doctors, nurses, speech therapists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, nursing coordinators).

Thanks to the strategic direction of the Don Gnocchi Foundation, because it has always shown a favorable attitude towards the composition of this novel, never failing to make concessions and authorizations.

Thanks to Elena Gallina for her testimony as a welcoming host for healthcare personnel who moved to Milan for the Covid-19 emergency. In the residence where I was staying, he never made me miss anything.

INTRODUCTION What prompted me to write this book was the desire to fix in time what happened inside me, or rather, what happened inside us, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The honor and burden of being a nurse during those dramatic months, I believe, has allowed me to become like the soundboard of an instrument that gives voice to everyone’s hearing. We have been in close contact with pain, fear, and death. We were the ones who attached a respirator and who often unplugged it, bringing the sick back to life.

We are nurses but we are also people. This book tells you about one of them.

I have never looked for the easiest way, I have always chosen with my heart and a certain spirit of adventure.

I’m like a rock song. They are my rock songs.

In life, as in music, I love the power of lively sounds, those that surprise you. I’m not sitting, I stand up and dance.

These pages will take you into the ward, into a ghostly Milan, and then into the rolling hills that surround the city of Gubbio in Umbria.

They will tell you what prompts a nurse to immerse themselves in the eye of the storm and then take back their dreams, being even more motivated than before.

Life always presents us with challenges which, instead, should always be defined as “opportunities”.

CONTENTS 1. MONSTERS OF ROCK........................................................17 2. ROME, MY CAPUT MUNDI..............................................25 3. THE SPIRITUAL CENTER..................................................37 4. BOBBIE BROWN..................................................................51 5. BED AND BREAKFAST.......................................................57 6. THE DECISION....................................................................69 7. TRAVELING TO MILAN....................................................77 8. GIORNATE IN CORSIA......................................................81 9. A NURSE ROCK...................................................................97 10. THE PHONE CALL........................................................... 107 11. CPAP.................................................................................... 111 12. A SENTIMENT................................................................... 117 13. RAMBLIN ‘MAN............................................................... 129

CHAPTER I

MONSTERS OF ROCK “Hell ain’t a bad place ....

Hell is from here to eternity ......”

IRON MAIDEN

The transition from childhood to adolescence was not easy; but I wonder, in the end, who it is for.

Children inside the bodies of boys, or men inside the bodies of children. Strange beings in flux who change their voices, ideas, and dreams every day.

That little boy who struggled to express himself in society grew up dragging all the frustrations of silence with him.

Teenagers have so many things to say but they can’t figure out how to say them. Inside, they have a world full of colors, of love, of projects that crash on the walls of their bedroom.

In my case, it was a concert seen in 1992 in Reggio Emilia that finally gave voice to what I was, to what I wanted to shout to the world.

There are moments that you feel it, you know, that will remain indelible over time. They are not solemn events, much less spectacular, yet while you are experiencing them you perceive that they will transform you inside and that, you can swear, you will revive them in your memory album when you are old.

To break the crystal ball in which I used to exist, there was the concert “Monster of Rock;” that was My

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“Emotional Big Bang,” the date in which I blossomed, opening myself to the future.

It was not a concert like many others: all the greats of rock and heavy metal have performed in this European festival born in the late 80s, bands of the caliber of Van Halen, Iron Maiden, AC / DC, Aerosmith , Black Sabbath, Motley Crue, Metallica, and Cinderella.

I am not exaggerating when I tell you that that evening changed my life forever.

It was as if the music and the power of those instruments managed to free my always compressed existence, as if they authorized me to undo all my knots with sounds that could interpret exactly what I heard.

I remember the train journey, accompanied by my mother, to reach Emilia Romagna. From the window I could see Italy passing by with its skies and postcard landscapes, while at every stop metalheads in flesh and blood headed to my same concert.

Tattered jeans, skulls, crosses, punk hair. If a bit of rock music was being written, I would finally be at the center of it. It was a crescendo of emotions, amazement, and longing.

Arriving in Campo Volo I felt for the first time it was exactly where I wanted and had to be: that was the sacred place of all historical music festivals, that was the fulcrum on which life took place.

The wait for the concert was as beautiful as the concert itself.

My mother and I lined up in front of the gates. I remember that I was very worried because I was afraid of not being able to enter. One step away from my personal paradise, the very idea of staying outside its doors caused

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me tremendous anxiety. A boy next to me, interpreting my face, reassured me.

“If you have a ticket, you are sure to go in, man. Rock doesn’t pull fast ones.”

Just thinking about it makes me feel tenderly for distant fifteen-year-old me. I already felt great and instead I got lost in the little things, in the naivety of the first few times.

The gates swung open, a river of people poured into the stage, thousands like me waiting for the sacred monsters of music, only a heartbeat throbbing in the air.

For the first time, I felt part of a group, I touched that beautiful feeling of “belonging.” It didn’t matter that I didn’t know anyone, I was part of “them.”

That little boy who has always struggled to hold a conversation with his peers could now communicate with the whole world without even opening his mouth.

The presence of my mother, who I initially feared would be out of tune in the rock setting of that memorable day, actually instilled curiosity and sympathy in the young people around me.

I took courage and pushed myself under the stage, and there, imposing, immense, above me: the frontman of the Warrants, a blond Viking with the same iconic presence of the Christ of Corcovado, but without even having to open his arms.

Jani Lane was an almost mythical creature in the “heavy metal” music scene of Los Angeles, a semi-deity.

I remember he passed away prematurely while I was on vacation in Alaska with my ex-wife; I even remember the date: it was August 11, 2011. I turned on the radio and they were announcing his death live. I thought: “You gave me birth a second time, at 15, under that all-Italian stage;

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I’m here, in your house, holding your hand on the day of your death.”

When the first song of the Warrants began in Campo Volo, I started dancing as if I could not do anything else, abandoning myself to a vortex of energy that pushed me to turn, arms open and eyes to the stars, while the fingers of the hands grabbed and scratched the air.

The world was mine; I was the world.

This is the power of music: a dam laden with water for too long that opens into a free-jet waterfall. It flooded the valleys of my existence, sparkling the air with drops of happiness.

In the excitement of the moment, I dropped the jacket that I had bought especially for my rock concerts. My heart stopped, I was convinced that the crowd would trample it, that I would lose my jacket. The music tore through the sky and I was searching the earth.

Then, in the crowd, I caught a glimpse of a fan bending over to pick up something that had fallen at his feet. That delicate gesture stopped time for a very long moment of courtesy; he handed me the jacket and I crystallized that moment forever.

My “jacket” was much more than a jacket: it was my stage clothing, it followed me to all rock concerts. It became a symbol, enriched with patches and writings.

And with each trip it acquired more and more value because it is on that fabric that I managed to collect the autographs of the greatest sacred monsters of rock music.

It even accompanied me many years later, in 2017, in London, signed by all the members of Iron Maiden. The day before, I had gone to the Metallica concert at the O2 Arena and right there a girl, in the front row under the stage, had revealed to me that there would be the presentation

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of the new book by Bruce Dickinson at Piccadilly Circus.

Do you think I missed the opportunity? ...

Metallica, after all, have always brought me good.

I also chased them in San Francisco, two years later, in 2019, where I was lucky enough to attend an unprecedented event: they performed alongside the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in the brand-new Chase Center, the temple of American basketball where the Warriors play today. Overlooking the Bay, on a splendid sunny day, I witnessed the birth of a live record that has already entered the history of rock.

Their music, married with the classical sounds and instruments of the past, ignited the spark of magic: it was like witnessing live a musical dawn that slipped into the sunset, and the coming and going of impetuous waves of my feeling that they stretched to the shore of my thoughts, subsiding.

The 90s gave me the perfect soundtrack for my adolescence: rock concerts exploded in Italy too, giving all of us pure happiness, devoid of all the contradictions that would come later. Society could then aspire to the dream.

The Twin Towers had not yet fallen; these were times of peace and economic well-being. And I felt myself a spectator and protagonist of that time, crossing it, concert after concert, singing and dancing on a carpet of serenity.

How could I have taken that well-being home with me? How could I have snatched a piece of that happiness to always keep it with me?

Learning to play an instrument, it was the answer I gave myself.

The drums would be my voice to reach people.

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So, I started taking lessons, I even formed my own group.

We were called Sex Spirit: a singer with guitar, a bassist, a lead guitar, and me on drums.

We did the first rehearsal in my garage, without soundproofing, improvising a recording room. The first song we played was El Diablo, by Litfiba; and the first public performance was an unexpected success.

If there really is a seventh heaven, I sat on it on horseback that day.

In a huge hall, inside our high school, we played like a real band. It was better than rehearsal, we played inspired and everyone cheered us; the girls finally began to notice me. We were young men on the barricades, trying in our own way to make life a rock poem.

Where I didn’t know how to charm girls with conversation, I could charm them with the rhythm of my drums.

It was the tool to tell about my passion and my fears, but also the desire to reach the end of the world.

The day of the second decisive choice for my growth also occurred: joining the Flag-waving Group of the city of Gubbio. It was like that first concert: the female world, and not, began to notice me, to appreciate me; and I received this attention without having to use a single word, the most hostile instrument to me in those years.

I played the tambourine, and my role was esteemed.

In addition, the company was made up of people older than me who vied to make me feel their affection.

It is not easy to explain the importance of the customs of a land to those who were not born there, but as I see it, every city and every country should keep their traditions

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alive through music, historical customs, and those rites that anchor the people to their own territory and vice versa.

My memories related to the trips with the Sbandieratori Group are among the most beautiful I still have today.

We toured all over Europe. Each trip pushed us further and further, and we held the bulwark of our Gubbio high.

Pride, gratification, tradition, pride, youth, sacrifice, self-denial, amazement and even collegiality in a single team of friends.

Among the many events, the one in Alsace was the most moving, in the town of Thann, twinned with our town by the same saint, Ubaldo.

Sometimes I was a flag-waver, other times I was a rocker.

In 1993, my parents decided to accompany me to Turin for the Metallica concert. 565 kilometers one way.

My mother joined at the last minute, although only my father should have accompanied me. I don’t remember why, it doesn’t matter, but that trip became a symbol of our family precisely because she was there too, because she insisted on being there for me, next to me, to share a happy moment of mine. My parents did not go to the concert, physically, but they did the trip with everything a family embodies.

They realized that the music had opened my lungs.

They felt my new breath of life, and in their own way, they wanted to tell me that they understood.

This was the meaning of that journey of over 1000 kilometers made in just under 24 hours. Yet, it was my turn to become an adult to rediscover my parents with new eyes.

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Everything I took for granted then, concealed precise indications of love. Never lose them on the street, keep them close.

Parents often wonder if their children will forget quickly as they grow up. Well, the answer is no.

Those 1000 kilometers made with and for me are a caress that I still feel on my face today after 30 years.

When I came out of the concert, I was the happiest boy on earth, with a full, round, dreamy, satisfied happiness.

The return trip melted into that perfect happiness that vanished, the three of us at the edges, leaving that shared emotion standing forever among the pillars of our being a family.

CHAPTER II

ROME, MY CAPUT MUNDI “it’s a beautiful day don’t let it get away you are on the road but you have got no destination” U2

In high school I enrolled in a two-year preparatory course that offered two directions, one of which was for the profession of nurse, which I ended up choosing.

I had to wait until the time of the internship, however, to feel a particular enthusiasm for that type of study. My choice was born from a family context that had always encouraged and educated me to make myself useful to others, but the internship phase was the real litmus test: hours of study were added to the hours of practice in the ward, yet the pressing pace charged me instead of exhausting me.

It was then that my rock group broke up; each of us was faced with new personal priorities, new centrifugal thrusts that gradually reduced the space to play seriously, for we were used to putting our soul in every test, in every meeting.

It was no longer a question of musical notes, we were the ones who were different.

When you are young, setting up a band is like building a second identity strengthened by the idea of a group, and the icing on the cake is the charm that inevitably emanates when you perform in front of the audience.

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Our cake was finished, we had devoured it piece by piece. Clinging to the crumbs undermined certainties and serenity.

That emptiness, however, gave way to love in my life, an unexpected, fresh breath, capable of sweeping away the vortex of negativity into which I had fallen.

I met her at 21 years old, at a nurses’ party.

The first love arrives like this, like a breath of wind behind you. A cascade of the present that cascades over the past, washing away any thoughts. Here and now!!

While from tomorrow on, we will deal with it tomorrow.

We had many things to share, she and I, including the idea that study was a path to be pursued. Together we entered university.

I had to straighten my aim, after choosing a wrong direction in the wake of what I had studied in high school. After six months, I enrolled in Political Sciences in Perugia, with a political and administrative focus. I gave my best in that context. I did not limit myself to studying, each exam was an opportunity to open a gap in my knowledge, to deepen, dig, become an adult and not just educated.

I remember like it was yesterday, the public law exam I took with the president of the faculty; she was feared by all for her severity and intransigence. I took home a 28, motivated by saying that compared to others I had distinguished myself by demonstrating analysis of the arguments with admirable skill.

That day my father joined me in Perugia, we toasted in the bar next to the school, while I read in his eyes a pride that doubled my happiness, filled it from within.

Subconsciously I believe I carried within me the desire for emancipation from the small town where I was born. My

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dream, even if it did not yet have a precise name, was to reach an intellectually and socially high role - the famous “make a career” - and to form a family at the same time. It was my idea of ​​redemption.

After university, I did an internship at a training school in public management for employees of local authorities.

It was yet another spark to dream even bigger. I would have liked to become Municipal Secretary; there are no managers of a local authority more important than a city clerk, you practically become the legal advisor of an entire community.

Everything vanished in an instant, life called me back to Gubbio as soon as I finished my course of studies. It was like feeling torn in half, half a page stuck to the origins, half a page looking for new adventures.

In 2005, I accepted a job as a nurse in Bologna. I couldn’t have started over in a better place. Bologna is an ideal cradle of life for young people. The arcades under which you stop to chat when it rains, a beer in hand, and the best years ahead. The hopes of millions of students have inhabited its ancient streets, filled with the restaurants in the center. Clean faces, books under the arm, a few cigarettes smoked in a hurry before entering university.

I was fortunate to start my first professional adventure there. It was like starting flat and not uphill, and the conviviality that permeates the air there gave me the right energy to go towards newness.

Only then came the opportunity to pursue the profession in Rome. In the Eternal City.

I moved there with my partner and marriage officially sealed our life together.

Being in a strange city wasn’t easy at first. It was difficult to settle in and make new friends, but my sporting

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passion for the team from the capital that was hosting me opened some doors. I didn’t just follow Roma matches at the stadium, I patronized the Roma Store assiduously.

The owners of the shop, seeing me often, took a liking to me. They were my first friends. As soon as they had the chance, they got me into the most important events of the team. I remember the days before the Rome-Genoa match, they invited me to prepare a huge banner to be displayed in the stands: we had written on it a real declaration of esteem for a particular player.

“We are all Christian Panucci.”

I remember the laughter, the hands stained with red and yellow paint, the nostalgia for my land fading away.

I knew that my new friends knew the player, but I never, ever expected the surprise they had in store for me.

At the end of the game, Panucci came to meet me, handing me his shirt, in front of a stadium full of people. If I still think about it now, my heart beats up in my throat, as it did then.

Another indelible memory is linked to a meeting with a family of fans during a match at the Olimpico. A family from Trastevere, passionate about football, even more than me. Husband, wife, and three children with whom I flaunted the colors of Rome until I was exhausted.

In the gestures of waving the flag, there was all the love for the team but also the pride of belonging to a group of friends who have the same passion for the Giallorossi team. The virtually infinite forms defined by the flag reminded me of the carefree years I spent together with the flag-wavers of Gubbio during my adolescence. The two things, even if completely different, held hands.

When you choose to represent a faith in something, whether it is sporting or for your origins, the strength and

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the will to communicate it must pass through your hands.

As they cleverly cut through the air, the fabric comes to life and dances like the wings of a butterfly.

In a stadium, as well as in a square full of spectators, the flag gives value to a message. And I was proud to be there, in the “Distinti Sud” curve, with that family, with whom I shared such a strong passion.

I only discovered later that the father of these kids was a very important person and that he knew the then Roma coach, Luciano Spalletti.

He told him about me, he explained to him who that young man was, sitting next to them, who during the matches stood out among the fans waving his arms. On the day of the Sampdoria-Roma match, before the team entered the field, Spalletti started talking and welcoming the players, he talked about me to the whole locker room, giving my name. He said, “I congratulate you on such a moving and unique faith.”

On Sunday there was Roma, the rest of the week was my profession as a nurse.

At that time, I had started working in a clinic on the outskirts, in the Tor Marancia area.

Early in the morning, I would leave my house near San Giovanni in Laterano, let the vision of that basilica fill my eyes with beauty, and then, next to the most imposing and oldest obelisk in Rome, I waited for the 714 bus that would take me to the Eur. The bus was overflowing with workers, all, like me, looking for their place in the world, to win a salary.

The medical director of the clinic thought highly of me. At first, I thought he was impressed by my degree in Political Science, but then I realized that he especially

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appreciated the way I dedicated myself, body and soul, to the required tasks, and my desire to make a contribution without limiting myself to simply carrying out a task.

He was an intriguing man: he came from a prominent family who owned several clinics around the world, even one in Moscow. He was enlightened - so I like to describe him - moderate and of great culture, but also demanding and rigid with those who did not consider himself up to the profession.

I thought: “If you want to enter into a relationship with the whole world, eliminating diversity and distance, these are the qualities you must possess.”

The manager knew he could count on me. Sometimes I think he found in my curious disposition a bit of the young man he had been. I remember that one evening I was with friends in a pub in front of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore to have a beer after work. He called me on my cell phone and asked me to go back to the hospital urgently. He told me: “Luca. Hi, it’s me the director, an emergency has arisen in the hospital, I ask that you take a taxi and I will personally take care of the expense. I know that you have finished the shift but if you are here, I will feel calmer.” I replied: “I’ll be there in a few minutes.” And so I went.

He didn’t think I was just any nurse.

In the days when the son of the famous secretary of the Socialist Party Matteotti was hospitalized in our wards, he asked me to take care of him personally.

Imagine the emotion felt in finding the son of one of the most representative figures in the history of Italy in front of me. For me, who had studied political science, it was like being catapulted into a history book.

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That ninety-year-old elderly gentleman received important visitors. One day, the family of the founder of the Communist Party arrived, the corridors of the ward were transfigured, step by step, into the columns of the past on which our democracy was built; I, on tiptoe, an involuntary spectator.

From every experience in my life I was able to understand right away, and not later, the scope, the opportunities that were hidden behind them, large or small. Listen to me: if the soul is open to knowledge and the ambition to improve remains, every day can offer a starting point for growth.

At that time, I felt I was at the starting blocks of my existence. Ready to shoot, to track my personal bests.

Every muscle was full of energy, the head buzzing with ideas. Perhaps many, too many.

There were days when I struggled to put these ideas in order, and it was in those moments that my father’s absence beat like a toothache that became acute again.

I knew, however, that I could count on Zio Raimondo, a figure who was able to replace the paternal one, which I had missed so much, very well.

He was a determined man, Zio Raimondo, who came from a humble family; his father a miner had sacrificed his life to work, falling ill with silicosis in the mines of Belgium. Since childhood, my uncle had breathed the true meaning of the word fatigue, the value of desire that pushes you beyond difficulties. For me, he was a poet.

He had a degree in engineering and had managed to fit fully into the entrepreneurial class of Northern Italy, working at Montedison. He was a professional equal to no one, upright, tenacious, capable of deserving the title of knight of labor, he was my model of life.

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One day, since he was in Rome on business, he came to see me. He took me to dinner in a historic trattoria near the Ara Pacis. Spring made the air pleasant and the scent of flowering plants sweetened even the chaotic comings and goings of cars.

Zio Raimondo knew me better than many others, he knew that having grabbed a permanent job in the hospital was not a goal for me, but only a stage in my life.

He told me, over a wonderful plate of artichokes alla giudia: “Luca, you have to think very well about the future and invest now in an extension of your studies.

Specialize in something that makes you an even more sought-after person on a professional level. Luiss offers master’s degrees of the highest profile. They could offer you a career in management, even if you would completely depart from your studies. Or you could stay in the health sector, attending a master’s degree in management related to the hospital world.”

I knew that he would have preferred the first route for me, but I chose the second one because it seemed the most natural to me, as well as the most suitable for my pockets.

“Uncle, thank you for your valuable advice. I will do a master’s degree at Luiss and I will make you proud of me.”

I never wanted that dinner to end. Next to him I felt at home. I felt like I had a father figure at the head of the table. I drank from his words while learning life.

But my night shift was looming.

And so, I enrolled in a prestigious master’s program at Luiss.

The university studies had left in me the desire to learn even more, to enrich my knowledge, and that type

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of master’s degree would have enlightened me on the managerial, managerial, and corporate aspects of the healthcare world.

Uncle Raimondo had assured me that he would train me professionally, he ended up also training me as a man.

It was a new period full of satisfactions. I excelled in my results and the teachers held me in high regard. It was unusual for them to have among their pupils a nurse eager to acquire new knowledge, capable of dreaming big.

The bubble burst in 2009 when I lost my father. A devastating needle into that happy moment. I remember that in the days of his death I had an exam to take, but I could not keep the course of the study in that sea of ​​sorrow. It took some time before I recovered my usual determination, but one of the character legacies that my father passed on to me was precisely resilience: the strength to never give up, to soften the blows of life.

His absence faded when I concentrated on my research and it worsened when I could not share in my successes with him. To write my final thesis, I got in touch with some of the most charismatic teachers and managers in Rome. Although I came from a different reality, I always received a generous welcome; curiosity was the weapon that opened my way in every field and that differentiated me from other students. Only I felt under my skin the discrepancy between the two worlds I frequented: the everyday as a nurse in the ward and the studies that catapulted me into a decidedly higher social and cultural context.

The little free time that I had left was dedicated to conferences on public health: those of medical sciences and those of in-depth study on the economic and managerial aspects.

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My hunger for knowledge was insatiable. From one side of the city to the other I ran, so as not to miss any events. Rome was an inexhaustible source of opportunities, fragments of the future of which I would not have wanted to lose even a piece. It seemed to me that I was collecting pieces of the puzzle for my future, on the foundations of the many dreams I carried inside.

In the meantime, albeit at a distance, I cultivated relations with the management figures of Umbria in the health sector. It was thanks to (or because of) one of these figures that I was proposed to take on the role of head of the room in an important private clinic in Perugia, a position that was really coveted for a young man of my age.

I accepted immediately; I don’t know if I was more honored by the proposal, or if I unconsciously harbored the desire to return to my homeland to form a family in the place of my origins.

It was a real leap into the void, now that I think about it: leaving a permanent job in Rome, one of the most fascinating cities in the world, getting away from the many prestigious contacts that I had laboriously woven ...

I think that was the seed of my discomfort, the crack in the grit that had not shown up until then. As hurriedly as I had accepted, I turned around and decided to return to the capital, where everything was blowing in my direction.

I started working on a new project together with an entrepreneur known in the healthcare world. First, we created a non-profit research startup for scientific innovation and then, a second one of nursing services for home care.

But once again, the happy fibrillation of new professional projects was discolored by the marital crisis that gradually swept through my soul.

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The end of the marriage was the push into the abyss.

The bitterness, the failure, the sadness were logical emotions in the face of the collapse of such a beautiful project as that of walking next to a person for life, but to me they had the effect of an explosion that sends everything to the air without leaving even the foundations standing.

I can’t explain why I lived it like this, I still don’t know how to explain it to myself.

I only know that of that postcard that portrayed me at the center of my family, with a wife, children, a beautiful house and a rewarding job next to me, only the crumbs of a shattered dream remained in my hand, as well as paperwork to tidy up.

First of all: to sell the house we had bought together in Rome.

For me, it also meant leaving my city of choice for the third time; I didn’t have the money to buy a new apartment of my own.

Returning to my native land dressed in mourning and not in celebration was horrible. I had left her full of dreams and projects, holding my beloved woman by the hand, it seemed to me to “go back to the start” as in one of those board games that, with a roll of the dice, throw you in the queue of everything and everyone.

I do not deny that I have gone through a very hard period.

The wounded heart left me helpless, as I was used to taking life events like a bull by the horns.

The sadness silenced me and the inability to react depersonalized me.

My dear ones, the ascent was long, proceeding in small steps, following Ariadne’s thread that led me out of

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the labyrinth of pain. The magic door, once again: curiosity, which pushed me to approach meditation and inner analysis.

And then Uncle Raimondo gave me a push too, just standing beside me, as my father would have done if I could have felt his strong hand on my bent shoulder.

I spent a lot of time chatting with him, discussing and putting on the table the knowledge acquired in Rome. He advised me, encouraged me, and was the first to anticipate the implementation of a dream that I kept inside: to give birth to an entrepreneurial project linked to tourist hospitality.

He was a wise man. He illustrated the tools that a good entrepreneur had to activate, not without reminding me to avoid the longest legs of the journey. He was an invaluable professional guide and father figure at the same time. He was my anchor, but also the balloon in flight from which to glimpse new horizons.

CHAPTER III

THE SPIRITUAL CENTER “We are all God’s people Gotta face up Better grown up yeah yeah yes there was this magic light” Queen

The period I lived in Rome transformed me inside.

Big cities are like titans in front of which, first you feel small and defenseless, then over time you begin to know all the facets, dimensions, and weaknesses, until the day you manage to lead the challenge and you feel as successful and strong as they are.

The master’s degree done at Luiss, then, was that white horse that allowed me to proudly cross the adventurous Roman days, full of events and stimulating encounters, galloping towards the future with the belief that nothing could stop me.

But if I galloped, my marriage was traveling at a different pace, it was a subtle feeling that I didn’t allow to become larger. Yet, at times, it was as if you were looking at us from the outside: two young people in love, who left together from the Umbrian land to the capital, traveling along parallel roads that would have led them to different destinations.

I cannot deny you that the most impactful transformation was mine. The permanent nurse had suddenly

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become a model student who attended courses in management and finance, who interacted with teachers, health directors, managers of a certain caliber, who received fascinating professional project proposals.

My values had ​​ remained the same, but the priority scale had reversed a couple of steps.

The marriage began to falter exactly like a ladder that doesn’t have well-aligned rungs.

And its end came faster than expected, as well as realizing that my life in Rome ended then and there.

The house we had bought together, we were forced to resell it, and I was not yet established in my projects to the point of being able to invest in a new property.

There was no other solution than to return to Gubbio, to my mother’s house.

I think, in the hustle and bustle, I didn’t fully understand what was happening to me. Like when you fall on the street and are so worried about getting up and out of danger that you don’t even feel the injuries you have done to yourself.

I was busy solving the bureaucratic problems: the sale of the house, the move, the effort of managing the projects activated in the city from Gubbio; the days were a centrifuge of tasks that left me neither the breath nor the mental space to realize what had happened.

Then, once I moved permanently, the blow came violent, knocking me down.

The first few weeks I was deceived by the pleasure of seeing friends again, and I must say that all four of them went out of their way to be close to me. Carefree evenings together, like in the old days, would have fooled anyone.

For a while, I deluded myself that everything would be fine: I had returned to my native land, I was returning to

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the womb from which I was born, I recognized myself by mirroring myself in the faces of my people. I rediscovered the beauty of nature, the peace and silence of the countryside.

But soon, this refreshment was not enough for me.

A large part of me was now transformed forever, I felt like a citizen of Rome catapulted to Gubbio. Not the other way around.

I felt like a Formula One car, which up to that moment had sped fast, crossing important milestones, locked in a garage with no more petrol.

That joking image at first became concrete, palpable under the skin, intrusive. Dramatically painful.

I had the horrible feeling of having thrown away everything I learned in the master’s degree, all the contacts cultivated with my self-denial and the excellent results of the exams.

Everything was discolored. Everything was losing consistency.

Slowly, all of my strength left me. My gaze on reality blurred and there were no lenses that could help me see clearly.

I grasped for my days. More and more tired, more and more helpless.

The door that I had closed behind me in Rome opened to hell, my personal hell.

What had broken me into pieces, mind you, it was not fatigue, it was not the fear of having to face a new challenge, those things I would have been able to face very well, they were the daily bread for my innate tenacity and determination. No, the enemy I faced - and which I was not ready to face - was the lack of prospects.

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My brain was unable to glimpse a horizon, to focus within itself a goal to be reached, an opportunity for growth in a small “big” city of which I knew (or at least seemed to know) all the limits and borders.

It wasn’t fear of the unknown, it was fear of the known.

I who had faced transfers, different jobs, interacted with men of culture, figures of great social standing without ever pulling back, if anything pushed by the desire to know and to test myself, I had awakened as a helpless ant in the shadow of the planet.

It was “the nothing” that terrified me, not the whole.

On my return to Gubbio, at that time I only saw nothing there.

Thus began the worst period of my life: like a slow and inexorable detachment from reality. Nightmares at night, night during the day, my night of existence.

I opened my eyes in the morning and each awakening was accompanied by a thud in my heart: I had not dreamed, that life was just mine. I saw myself from above, from outside. A being lying on his destiny. Not standing, not sitting: lying down.

And that’s how I wanted to be, as if to believe I deserved only that.

Getting dressed, washing, and organizing the day were tasks that I considered useless even before tiring.

My mother did her best to look after me. I was back as a child to follow step by step.

Her presence, so much I needed it so much, reminded me how helpless I was. And at times, I almost heard the sordid noise of that gear I had fallen into and could not stop.

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The more helpless I was, the more tired and fragile I was, and the more tired and fragile I was, the more helpless I was.

Days turned into weeks.

I remember trying to tackle some mundane tasks like going shopping.

I left home, with the list of things to buy very clearly in mind, and then once I got to the supermarket, I couldn’t remember anything.

I had incredible memory lapses.

I admitted it to myself: I was not self-sufficient.

I had a little jolt of reactivity when I signed up for a regional announcement that offered a small amount to work in a specialist clinic. I had come up with the idea of​​ being able to take on that position in the wake of my past profession as a nurse.

I began to serve in the clinic but the discomfort haunted me, it came to look for me.

The tasks within the working hours I carried out automatically, it was almost simple. Then I would go back to getting lost in the emptiness of my time and space.

The secretaries of the center were all very kind, they sensed my discomfort and even took me home in the evening.

There was no point in dressing in the clothes of the worker. To act as if it were that ...

My intelligence was beating me in the face that this, far from being a job, was a makeshift that humiliated all my skills.

And it was spending too much time.

Besides, my mother was terribly worried about me.

That new version of Luca had scared all his friends too.

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After a while they stopped recognizing the old me in the new one and they stopped recognizing themselves within me.

It was a total detachment from my history as a man.

The point of no return.

And it was at that moment that I made one of the most important decisions of my life.

Exactly when I touched the lowest point of the well, I took the initiative.

Listen to me: whoever said that you have to hit rock bottom to give yourself a push and get back up must have been there personally, because things went exactly like this.

I learned of a spiritual center that had long since been settled in my region.

It was an eastern meditation group that hosted people from all over the world. Anyone who wanted to regain contact with nature and with himself would spend a short time there.

In Gubbio, people were very suspicious of them; with us the Catholic origins are very rooted, while the center was of eastern setting.

I told myself that I was not interested in the confessional aspect of the center but in the spiritual sphere of that experience, I simply wanted to give myself a chance to be brought back to the essential.

I needed someone to show me the lost way and the center promised to lead anyone back, with small steps, to the pleasure of living.

So, I took what little I needed and moved there.

If I think about it today, it was an act of great love for myself, the first after many weeks in which I had stopped believing that I deserved something beautiful or a future.

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I didn’t give too many explanations to others, nor information on what I was going to do. I just left.

The day I arrived, I breathed my first positive feeling in a long time.

Despite leaving home and my mother’s reassuring presence, I finally felt in the right place.

It was a large farmhouse surrounded by nature and this already favored the sense of peace; I had by now a boundless hunger for it.

The stay program, however, was anything but based on idleness.

The days were marked by precise rituals meant to channel our energies and which favored the “cleansing” of the body and soul.

Upon awakening we were invited to do meditation.

On an empty stomach. Then we had a rich and healthy breakfast. After that, we were assigned tasks related to the care of the garden and everything that contributed to the proper functioning of the community.

Even though I had lived through different experiences in my life, it had never happened to me to work the land. Needless to say, it was very tiring, especially on days when the sun was beating down on the fields. But focusing on the potato harvest, the weeding, the carpentry restorations, took us away from our negative thoughts for a few hours and tired our limbs just enough to aspire to a restful sleep. Our anxieties and obsessions which, especially at night, become ferocious animals that bite the soul, were as if calmed.

The guests of the center were of different origins and had different reasons for being there, many spent time

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there for the pure pleasure of meditating and experiencing the magnificent landscapes of Umbria.

A common thread, however, brought us all closer to each other, and it was the desire to get in touch with oneself, going in depth.

The dialogues were full of reflections, of emotions. The cultural level was high, and I felt I was enriching myself day after day.

Only at times did I feel the nostalgia of sociality, the light and young one that I had left behind. In the center, the average age was higher than mine, life experiences more constructed, more complex than those I had experienced.

In any case, it was brief moments that I pushed back, certain of the benefits of the path taken.

Among the many small tasks that they assigned me, the one I preferred was the role of escort for guests of honor and for those who could not reach the farmhouse by their own means. I went to pick up new arrivals at the airport or I would lend myself to make known the beauties of my land. A true Umbrian, I knew how to tell it better than anyone else, adding small anecdotes, unknown to most, which especially intrigued foreigners.

I made friendships with some of these visitors that has remained over time.

I remember a wealthy, beautiful woman with whom I spent a lot of time talking about our lives. The dialogue flowed simply, as if we had known each other forever. She returned to Umbria several months later and I made her visit the Frasassi caves. Then we had lunch in a small local trattoria. And on a white and starched tablecloth, the crumbs of our sufferings fell, told without false modesty.

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Remember this: sometimes opening up to those who are little more than a stranger helps to review the past in a new perspective, without the emotional contamination that drags into long-standing friendships, channeled into clichés that are difficult to unhinge.

Greg, an eclectic and very nice gentleman, was also an acquaintance from the center who transformed into a friend. He often came to eat with us at home. On beautiful spring days we liked to be in the garden. I drank his wisdom and he listened to my experiences of study and nursing. It also happened that we remained silent, as we used to do in the center. But none of our silence was empty or sterile. The silence was filled with the universe.

We allowed nature to communicate its beauty, its perfumes, and its harmonious sounds to us.

There is nothing more musical than the symphony of meadows, woods, and streams. Even a twig that breaks in the wind emits a complete and meaningful noise, you just need to want it to find a space in your thoughts.

One day, Greg, looking at our garden, asked us to create brick shapes to make it even more pleasant, and the idea immediately seemed very fascinating to me. I knew that a mind like his would surely generate something beautiful; I contacted the masons the same day in which he handed me the project.

I knew for myself when the right time had come to leave the spiritual center.

The purpose of that community - it was clear to me by now - was not to bring one-way support to people, such as transferring the contents from one container to another, in a passive way. If we must speak of rebirth, this

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was a passage into feeling an active part in relationships, in everyday life.

I was not just a patient to take care of, but an individual who in his small way had contributed and donated things of himself. I had told, but also listened. I had been a guest but also a host. I ate the products of their land but not without giving in exchange the strength of my arms to cultivate it.

The culmination of that journey was to realize it: I had entered annihilated and helpless, now I was leaving aware of having given meaning to time.

The next step would be mine alone and entirely internal: managing the days out there, without losing the mental energy that I jealously guarded in my back pocket.

Some time ago, a psychiatrist had prescribed me drugs in order to stop the drift of the most difficult moments.

I accepted because I understood that depression was like a wound that was bleeding profusely, and you had to run for cover quickly. But I also knew it wasn’t “the solution.”

The medical training to become a nurse allowed me to perfectly understand all the harmful aspects of the continued use of certain drugs.

So, with those few but very precious energies accumulated in the spiritual center, I began to reduce chemicals by alternating them with physical activity. Slowly I unhooked from the first while anchoring myself to the second.

I trained every day, even twice a day. Endorphins triggered by moving muscles were my new drug. A new sense of well-being took hold of me, prompting me to get out of bed very early in the morning, to leave the house and walk the adjacent streets and countryside.

Physically, I noticed the changes in my body, these fueled my self-esteem.

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Following the directions learned at the center, I tried to maintain a correct diet by ingesting healthy products.

In short, I had restarted the car.

My thoughts also underwent a metamorphosis: at first confused and slowed down, now they were alive and present. The memory lapses had definitely decreased, I was beginning to rediscover my curious and dynamic nature.

Spring arrived both inside and outside of me.

The days got longer, and it was as if the light of day invited me to enjoy the present for one more minute, one more minute.

The scent of freshly cut grass fizzed in the air and bees buzzed on the table left set for lunch.

I saw my land again as a foreigner who comes from far away, every landscape amazed me, every little thing an emotion.

I had definitely left hell behind and was ready to resume the journey.

I remember that the first thing I instinctively wanted to do was to go and see my group of flag-wavers.

I remember it as if it were yesterday: I rang the door of the stately building where they gathered, with agitation in my chest, doubts in my heart.

How would they welcome me? What would they ask me? I did not fear their judgment, I wondered if I would still be a skilled drummer.

They welcomed me with open arms.

The generous smile of everyone who, without needing to speak, was the sweetest “welcome back.”

Many of them, much older than me, had always considered me a kind of mascot to grow.

I realized that I had not lost all the references of my life before, the friendships that could have held my hand as I

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walked on the wire, placed up there, between my before and my after.

Just on my arrival they were organizing a trip to Sarajevo, guests of the Italian ambassador, to celebrate the Republic Day of June 2.

I couldn’t have wished for anything better. A trip, in the company of friendly people, that could inebriate me with new emotions. I left with them and I left with myself.

As soon as I set foot in Sarajevo, I returned as a child to an unexpected toy land.

I walked aimlessly, getting lost among the shop windows, the monuments and the local beauties.

It was because of one of these moments that I even forgot to go back to the hotel with the group.

After months and months of imprisonment within the walls of depression, I decided to savor my freedom again. To grasp every moment and let myself be infected by the infinite nuances that emotions have.

I wanted to laugh, watch, walk, and then run. I wanted to talk, sing, and listen.

A girl I met on the street was like a goddess to be admired without missing a single glance.

The other flag-wavers arrived at the hotel, frightened to note my absence.

What if a mood swing or a moment of panic stopped me at the corner of some street?

They toured the whole city intending to find me, to come to my aid. When they saw me cross the entrance, in the evening, with the peaceful face of a child satisfied from a day of play, it seemed not even an hour had passed since our first performance.

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Our demonstration the next morning was triumphal, we proudly represented our nation, we were there for that.

Our trips had always made us feel as ambassadors of Italian culture, they made us feel important not for ourselves, but for the whole of Italy.

After the parade, we were welcomed into the Italian embassy for a banquet shared with the ambassadors of other nations. Going around the tables at which institutional figures from all over the world sat, made me feel at ease again, in my real skin.

The trip to Sarajevo holds a special place in my memories, I consider it a gift that life gave me with perfect timing, and the greeting card read: “existing is beautiful.”

CHAPTER IV

BOBBIE BROWN “She’s my cherry pie cool drink of water, such a sweet surprise, tastes so good, makes a grown man cry sweet cherry pie” Warrant

Yes, life has been kind to me. It has given me so many opportunities, so many stimuli. The secret, however, was learning to listen to it in the midst of the noise of everyday life.

In 2019, for example, I listened to it in the truest sense of the word. And I want to tell you about it.

That summer I went on a trip to America. A vacation that would have rewarded me for the many hardships I went through to start the B&B. Yes: I started a B&B and I’ll talk about that too, but now let’s go back to the summer of 2019.

I didn’t want it to be a holiday like any other, I wanted it to be unforgettable. I had planned the trip to America mindful of the wonderful experience I had with my ex-wife, when we had toured around the United States for a whole month.

America had struck me, I had fallen in love with space, I have now found this mistake. I loved its landscapes but also the culture of a people always on the move, responsive to the new, open to the different. It is, as they say, only a surface impression, but it is still one of the places where I felt most welcomed.

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I was homesick for that land, so I decided to return to her by including an obligatory stop in Los Angeles in my program.

A star I have always admired was presenting her new book in a famous bookshop in the city, and the very idea of ​​seeing it live thrilled me from an ocean away.

From the moment I set foot in that metropolis, halfway between collective fantasy and the sun, I felt in fibrillation.

Everything is covered with a patina of dream, the light, the colors, the rhythms, it seems to move inside a huge film set where everything is possible. People walk around dressed as if they were in a show, even the cars look bigger and compete for who has the most flamboyant bodywork, the women - which I tell you - are beautiful. Those who moved on roller skates, among the palm trees of Santa Monica, framed by the first breathtaking sunset of my California trip, reminded me of the 1950s pin-up girls seen on postcards.

I was ready to experience the great circus, but above all it was the idea of meeting ​​ Bobbie Brown live that tickled me inside.

On the morning of the book presentation, I prepared myself as if I were going to an important appointment. I took a long shower, ate an invigorating breakfast, and wore the elegant suit specially brought from Italy. Everything had to be perfect.

In her eyes I would have been one of many admirers, but that mattered little to me.

I lived that eve as if I had to prepare myself for a têteà-tête. Exhausted and electrified at the same time.

I was early, so I sat down for coffee in the cafe next to the bookstore on Sunset Boulevard, chatting with the

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waitress. When the time came, I adjusted my shirt and walked through the door of my daydream.

There were few people, mostly some journalists sitting near the small stage in front of a billboard that portrayed the star in all her beauty.

The book was called “Cherry on top,” and the cherry displayed on the cover recalled her red lips. Despite the passing of the years, the girl who had been the companion of the Warrant frontman was still a beautiful woman.

Brilliant, ironic, and determined.

Before her entrance a rock song played, the intro of “Cherry Pie,” then she entered, illuminating the whole room with her charisma, and her platinum blonde hair remained intact.

She broke the delay by immediately making a few jokes, stripping the atmosphere of its formality.

As she talked about her golden years, the Mötley Crue patch on my jacket broke the ice in its own way, without me even noticing.

Behind me and unbeknownst to me sat another woman who had plowed the glorious glam rock scene in the 1980s, Sharise Ruddell, at the time companion of Mötley Crue singer Vince Neil. Both she and Bobbie Brown, in those years, had taken part in the videos of the most famous songs of their companions, and teenagers from all over the world had fallen in love with them at least as much as with the music.

At one point, she sat down next to me and started talking.

I was paralyzed with embarrassment - so it’s true that anything can happen in Los Angeles…

She had seen the Mötley Crue patch on my jacket and had wanted to meet me.

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But that is not all. The LA angels aren’t kidding at all, and so shortly after she wanted to take me to Bobbie Brown to introduce her to me in person. If the gates of heaven are on earth, I had found myself in front of them.

I asked her for an autograph on the book and to be able to capture that moment.

Listen to me, if you ever happen to caress destiny, the day that cheers shamelessly for you, make sure you have a photo of that moment. Mine still manages to excite me every time I hold it in my hand.

After the first moments of embarrassment, I decided to turn that meeting into a great memory.

I told them about my bed and breakfast in Umbria, my homeland. I told them that I would be honored to have them as my guests if they came to Europe. I went even further: if they wanted to, we could even consider a partnership, to give visibility to my structure.

I was formulating these phrases and I myself was the most incredulous, but if there is one ability that I have always recognized, it is that of seizing the moment.

Don’t throw away special occasions, don’t reduce them to a selfie; a nurse tells you in all respects, try to take care of the moments that matter as well as to take care of others.

Bobbie Brown gave me a big smile. I was ready to hear a loud NO and instead she surprised me with a musical YES. Luckily, I was leaning against a chair, otherwise I would have fallen to the ground.

We exchanged e-mail addresses and then the rock beauty icon left the bookstore carrying a piece of my heart.

In 2018, I had been to the Pearl Jam concert in Rome and once the evening was over all the fans had found

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themselves at a celebratory party right next door. It didn’t bother me to be there alone, I was used to going to concerts alone, a variant that I clearly preferred to the eventuality in which the friends on duty were not as diehard fans of the rock group in question as I am. In those moments, I wanted to be completely free to experience emotions without having to take care of anyone.

While I was sitting drinking a beer under the Ponte della Musica near the Olympic Stadium, I started chatting with an American girl who lived in a beach town just outside Los Angeles. She had come all the way to Italy to see her favorite band.

The bubble of magic that forms at concerts had enveloped us, giving a few more hours to the adrenaline inside our bodies. Before we left, we exchanged phone numbers, promising to see each other if one of the two was in the surroundings of the other’s life.

And so, finding myself in Los Angeles, with destiny on my side, I did.

I called her, we had dinner together, and we ended up dancing, too.

The perfect ending to a perfect day.

CHAPTER V

BED AND BREAKFAST “What are you waiting for ? what are you waiting for?

You gotta go and reach for the top, believe in every dream you got ” Nickelback

Rebirth.

A word used too often in circumstances not relevant to its meaning.

For me, rebirth meant rebirth.

Despite my young age, in a few months it was as if the whole world had passed over me. I had lived through the most varied experiences, I had changed cities, jobs, I was married and then separated, I had studied infinite days and infinite nights, passed exams, reached exhilarating peaks and dug down to hell, all of a sudden, where there was no light, oxygen, or a window to look into the distance, to see that landscape which we all need, called the future.

Slowly, with bare hands, climbing the bowels of the earth, on the slippery walls of oblivion, I managed to rise to the surface, and it was like reappearing to the world.

Here, this is a rebirth. And I want to tell you how far mine has taken me.

At first everything was able to exalt me, to cheer me up.

Back in control of my faculties, I began to ask myself again how I could make them pay off to the fullest. The

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experience as a nurse had been very important and had made me indisputably a professional in the health sector, but at that moment I felt the need to renew everything, even in my daily life.

What could I do? What could I invent?

My thoughts ranged over various fronts. Some days I planned to leave for a big city, others to open a startup that would allow me to get anywhere sitting on the sofa at home. I didn’t realize it, but there was still a part of me that needed peace, refreshment. I couldn’t and shouldn’t ignore it. It would have been like disrespecting what I had experienced shortly before, while I was firmly intent on treasuring my efforts.

I would not have hidden my scars, neither from myself nor from others.

I often thought of Uncle Raimondo’s teachings. He always told me not to take the longest leg of the journey, to design possible dreams, to give the maximum even in the minimum, that it was not necessary to build castles to be great in one’s work.

From nothing, the idea of ​​a B&B took shape exactly where I lived.

Why not?

My father had left us a very large house. As a child it can be said that I grew up in a sort of open construction site: there was a constant coming and going of masons who, one piece at a time, under his guidance, erected walls, knocked down fences, and enriched the property with new spaces.

For my mother and me, that house had grown too big. My brother had moved to another city, and she and I spent our days in a small portion of the house.

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So, one day at a time, the idea of a vacation rental began to take shape in my thoughts. A vision at first overshadowed by worries and doubts, then colored by the excitement of a new beginning.

Drawing on my management studies, I planned the path, drawing up a list of criticalities, variables, pros and cons.

Living in one of the most beautiful places in Italy was at worst a guarantee of dignified success. Gubbio - I kept repeating myself - is not only a town steeped in history and rich in monuments, but also the place where events are held annually that attract tourists from all over the world.

“The time for doing well is now!”

I set up the first three bedrooms. And the winning resource was putting yourself in the shoes of the tourists who would come to my home.

I was wondering: what would I have liked to find as a guest in a house? How would I have liked to be welcomed? I couldn’t offer Grand Hotel decor, no sauna or spa, but I could make my patrons feel special.

The adventure began earlier than I expected, with the first reservations placed over the phone.

I confess that the day when the first tourists physically materialized in front of the house, I almost perceived it as a peaceful invasion of the walls of the house.

All the habits to which my mother and I were, I would say, “addicted,” were upset.

In the previous months that place had become for me like a clinic where I spent time treating depression, a nest, a shell, a boule de neige that kept me protected from the world.

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Now, suddenly it was a place immersed in the world.

Now my home was THE world.

The day I checked in the first guests, I was terribly awkward. But to my surprise they did not seem to mind, on the contrary, they were pleasantly struck by my reserved and delicate manner.

As the weeks went by, I became more relaxed and experienced.

My empathy towards my fellow man was reactivated one guest at a time, no longer in the role of nurse, but in the unprecedented role of hotelier. I told myself that nothing happened by chance, and what profession more than that of a nurse could have prepared me for welcoming and listening to the other?

In the ward it is not enough to know how to administer a drug or take a blood sample. The recovery of the patient passes through physical and emotional care.

The condition of extreme fragility that a patient experiences makes the psychological support of the nurse crucial. We are the link between medical and emotional care. The sick, stripped of everything, of their civilian clothes and family affections, of their usual roles, entrust themselves to the hospital staff like children in search of comfort. A glass of cool water, a comfortable pillow, a pain reliever given at the right time, make all the difference.

It was enough for me to open that chest of experience in the ward and make a gift of it to my guests.

And that’s how the start-up of the B&B slipped along more smoothly than I expected on the tracks of my new life. Faster than expected.

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I went from one room to set up 10 and the reservations were not long in coming.

2019 was the busiest year.

In recent decades, the intolerance towards the rhythms of life imposed by the metropolis have led many people to seek refreshment in a tourist destination capable of offering inner peace, immersion in greenery, or visits to places of worship. And my Umbria is the cradle of spirituality within our Peninsula.

Gubbio, among other things, is the intermediate destination of the Franciscan path that starts from La Verna and arrives in Assisi: 46 kilometers of path that retraces the one undertaken by St. Francis in 1206 AD, through green hills, small churches, and the remains of ancient castles.

Hosting many of the pilgrims, satisfied by that journey, free from the stress of a working year, with eyes full of landscapes and a peaceful soul, was a real gift.

I can’t see the people who come to my B&B solely as customers, I experience them all as an opportunity: of knowledge, of exchange, of personal enrichment.

The walkers all have in common the smile of those who know they have intimately experienced a psychological transformation.

Some paused to tell the mystical aspects of the journey, others the natural beauties, still others the fatigues of the body and the pride of having faced them with dignity.

The lawn of the B&B, after sunset, was transformed into a soft green carpet on which the pilgrims sank their aching and tired feet. The stars hid behind some passing clouds and then returned brighter than before to be counted.

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The atmosphere of those days had something magical about it. Everything seemed perfect to me. Yet, thinking about it today, one did not fully realize its preciousness.

The beauty was beautiful, we did not grasp the extraordinary aspects. Peace was peace, the importance of being able to internalize it to balance the neuroses of life was not evaluated. In short, everything seemed close at hand, including freedom.

We could share a slice of the moon next to dozens of people feeling part of the universe, brothers under the same sky, without fear of contaminating ourselves, if anything with the desire to be close.

In summer the big house was like an orchestra that resounded with many voices, in winter the days got shorter and the silence of the woods descended to the village, enveloping it in the darkness of the evening. Gubbio looked like a nativity scene dotted with small lights. My guests gladly stayed in the room to watch some TV. It was limited to good morning and good evening. And I was a little sorry about it, because I missed the opportunity to go around the world sitting while comfortably in a chair, listening to the lives of others.

I remember one evening I saw a very sad-faced gentleman come back. He was traveling alone, usually solo tourists have chosen their solitude. Yet that gentleman seemed neither satisfied nor serene. He walked hunched over and closed in his shoulders. I was very undecided on what to do, whether to find an excuse to try to talk to him, or to get out of his sight. As a landlord, it seemed almost right to ask him if he needed anything.

I asked him if he had a bottle of fresh water in his room or if he would like some herbal tea.

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Those two words were enough to break the banks of an uninterrupted cry.

I suddenly found myself in front of a fragile and desperate child.

He had lost a son a few months earlier and he confided to me that he was back in Umbria because it was here that they had spent their last vacation together. Riding a motorcycle.

It was a high school graduation award vacation. And the father’s bike, after that summer, would be passed on to his son, as a gift. He explained in detail the whole trip, their lunches in the trattorias, the visit to the basilica of San Francesco - which his son liked so much that he tried to portray her on the back of the road map with an improvised drawing.

He sat in front of me, weeping, sobbing, in the cold of a winter that would never end for him.

He had decided to return to Umbria under the illusion of being able to hear his son close for the last time, imagine the echo of his laughter, see him again in front of a church or at the top of the steps of the Cathedral of Perugia. Instead, as the days passed, the memories had turned into sharp traps capable of tearing his skin and heart.

After a couple of hours, we were both very tired, some for crying, some for having welcomed that ocean of sadness.

Before going to sleep, I will never forget, he turned to me when he was already at the door.

“Thank you, Luca, for understanding that this evening solitude would be too heavy a boulder to carry alone.”

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I’ve always thought: being able to talk to a stranger helps us above all to talk to ourselves, to express our emotions without hiding them behind useless words.

It has happened to me every time I mention my life to passing guests. From such chats, I have always come out enriched, with new ideas for the future.

The next day that man paid for his stay and left. I didn’t mention anything, I left him carte blanche on what to do and what to say, and I understood that he would never return to Umbria. In silence, to myself, I wished him to visit new lands to build new memories.

I have many memories related to the B&B before the arrival of Covid-19.

A couple of American tourists had arrived in Umbria after having touched all the regions of Italy, and I say touched because it is the most correct verb.

They were an obese couple, they could not walk more than a few steps, the distance from the station to a taxi, from a taxi to a hotel was how much their legs could afford.

However, they had decided to visit the world in their own way, to grasp the different atmospheres, the different scents, the sound of the dialects and, needless to say, the taste of typical dishes.

John and Barbara, a husband and wife of about 60, looked like they came out of an American comedy. Ruddy, sunburned white skin, baseball cap, and nice, comfortable white shoes.

When I saw them enter, they were exhausted as if they were returning from a marathon.

They dropped the suitcase outside the door and immediately asked me for a chair to sit on. As I always

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do, I asked them if they would like coffee or fresh water; they, despite it being 4 o’clock in the afternoon, asked me for a plate of pasta with meat sauce, as if it were normal to do so.

There was no point in explaining that I didn’t have restaurant service. They explained to me that, having serious walking problems, helping them find meals would be a very charitable gesture.

After that I had wondered why they hadn’t chosen a real hotel, but they had anticipated my thoughts. They wanted a family atmosphere, able to tell the identity of Umbria, and the reviews they had read about my B&B confirmed the kindness and hospitality typical of Italian culture.

How could I have denied a plate of pasta at that point?

I ran to ask my mother to go to the butcher and get the best meat: we had to surprise our American couple.

That’s when they told me that they would spend a whole week at my facility, never going out because of leg pain.

“We will be content to listen to Umbria from your voice…”

In short, they asked me to be their tour guide but without going beyond the garden of the house.

I went from wanting to burst out laughing to anger and then back to joy in seconds. Could I tell them no?

God, I could also tell them yes, to be honest.

The only time of day when I was free was late afternoon, so I nodded and we met in the garden, with a nice glass of fresh wine, every day around five.

And every day, around five o’clock, I served them a different and typical wine: a red Montefalco, a white from Torgiano, a superior classic Orvieto; every day I

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accompanied them through my wonderful land with passionate anecdotes and descriptions of my places.

I remember that in the first virtual trip I took them to the Festa dei Ceri which is held on May 15th in Gubbio.

It is an event much awaited by Gubbio that attracts thousands of tourists every year.

It consists of carrying on the shoulder, running through the streets of the city, three large wooden candles, each of which consists of a “stretcher” and two overlapping octagonal prisms crowned by the statues of three saints (Sant’Ubaldo, San Giorgio, and Sant’Antonio).

A tradition that was probably born in the 12th century and which, thanks to the passion and devotion of all the Eugubini towards the Patron Saint, has come down to our days following the evolution of time.

The preparation of the event is the moment I prefer, because it unites the souls and in the social fabric of the city creates enthusiasm, the desire to get together in the company of a nice glass of local red wine. Everyone tries to participate: some in the creation of the banners and “ceraiolo” uniforms, some in the typical dishes, those in charge of music, cleaning, and setting up the streets to dress up the city for the party, those organizing meetings to decide the costumes of “ceragioli” who take turns along the way, in short, everyone knows what to do.

Day after day, I gave them the most evocative frescoes of my region but also of my life. In their eyes I read the astonishment of the child when he listened to a story, only that story was the Italian tradition, the story of my people, of my land, and I will never stop being proud to be part of it.

I confess that the day of their departure I was moved.

I knew I would miss them as much as they would miss

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me. The appointment in the garden with a good glass of wine and a walk in memory had become an almost sacred rite for me.

We still write to each other today. Like all of us, they are waiting for the pandemic to become a distant memory.

We all dream of the same thing. In every corner of the world. How long had it not happened to humanity?

CHAPTER VI

THE DECISION “It’s my life It’s now or never but I ain’t gonna live forever I just want to live while I’m alive” Bon Jovi

One day, I remember as if it were yesterday, the phone rang while I was in the garden to fix the flower pots.

I had bought several bright red cyclamen to liven up the entrance to the B&B. The phone kept ringing and evidently my mother was not at home. I looked down at my dirt hands and decided not to answer.

In the evening, it began to ring insistently like an alarm.

It was my friend from Hong Kong. It was she who had tried to call me even in the morning.

I had met her at the world conference that booking. com organized in the autumn in Amsterdam for all its partners. She was the sales manager of an important hotel chain and the chatter between us was almost spontaneous. Then in the evening, among the many entertainment offerings by booking.com, we chose to go dancing together.

In the following months, she came to visit me at the B&B as a tourist. And when she wasn’t too exhausted from her long tours, our chatter still flowed naturally.

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She was a good-looking, but above all, cultured young woman. It was also clear from how she visited Italy. She didn’t just go to the most famous places, she wanted to find out who, in the course of history, had made our artistic heritage glorious, from the architects who had created wonderful palaces, to the poets who had sung the beauty of our hills, to the painters who had embellished the aisles of the churches. Every day, meticulously, she prepared the itinerary to follow.

When I heard her come back in the evening, I went to meet her and prepared a hot herbal tea with some biscuits made by my mother.

A big smile lit up her face, she put her backpack and souvenir bags on the floor and began to tell about her adventures.

The day of the call was at the end of last January.

“Luca… There is an anomalous flu that is spreading in the Wuhan region. Many infected die. Our medical luminaries are looking for a cure as quickly as possible… ” It all started with her alarmed voice, that feeling that she was being chased by someone as she spoke to me.

The next morning, I leaned back over the cyclamen.

How many times in life has it happened to us to pretend that ... How many times have we set the automatic navigator, disconnected the brain, and continued without observing reality?

Here, that was the perfect way to enjoy the last days of Western life in well-being. I had time to rejoice in the booking of a football team that had requested all the rooms of the bed and breakfast, to tidy up, wash, mark my days between work and good humor.

Then came the roar ... The tsunami ... The night.

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February was our purgatory before falling into hell.

I was still fully engaged in running the B&B but not to the point of ignoring what they were saying on the news.

The virus had arrived in Italy and in the North the first people began to get infected. A continent in between was not enough to protect us.

Like a sticky oil slick, Covid was expanding, kilometer after kilometer, house after house, person after person.

It was disarmingly contagious. It almost left us dazed rather than terrified.

The North was under siege at the end of February.

Then they closed the bars, and then the shops. The first signs appeared on the windows with the words “We are at home.” The streets and squares were depopulated while the hospitals were filled to excess. On TV, the ­journalists, encamped at the entrance to the emergency services, told of that restless anthill of shelters, ambulances, deaths. Behind them Martians in suits that made faces unrecognizable. Only in science fiction films had I seen such a thing, but it wasn’t a movie anymore, it was our life.

I soon understood that even the B&B would be overwhelmed by the pandemic, just when I was beginning to enjoy its first fruits.

I must confess: I was angrier about that unexpected shutdown of my new business than about what was happening to our civilization.

On television they began to send the first appeals to recruit medical personnel. I could hear the voice of the journalists repeating the same phrases, while the telephone numbers to contact were superimposed. I heard but did not listen.

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Until one day I listened, and it was at that precise moment that I decided that I would offer myself as a volunteer nurse to do my part in this terrible tragedy.

From March 8th, the B&B fell into an unreal silence.

I walked along the corridors suddenly voiceless, devoid of life. I could only hear the sound of my footsteps and my sad thoughts. I went into the rooms to check that everything was in order, as if a tourist were to arrive at any moment; it was an unconditional reflex now. Nothing was out of place: perfectly ironed linen, towels elegantly laid on the bed, a good smell of cleanliness and a shy sun illuminating the curtains.

Closing those rooms behind me wasn’t just a bad blow to the income, it was a blow to the heart. I felt again stripped of my identity, the one I had so hardly won back after the long work of introspection.

The fast pace of the management of the B&B had helped me to distract myself from the past in all its bitter forms. When I thought back to the failure of my marriage, to my farewell to the city of Rome, the memory was fixed only for a moment, like a single frame, then it was undermined by a practical task: that it was the request for advice for a good restaurant in the area, a bottle of fresh water, check-in preceded by a phone call from the station.

I loved that perpetual ferment. I could work 14 hours a day, but I was happy.

That state of peace imposed on me from the outside was full of shadows instead. I didn’t want to fall back into the mental paralysis that had gripped me the first time, when I sat on the sofa counting the empty hours of the day. I didn’t want to rest or sit still.

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Taking back my profession as a nurse was the most logical, the most intelligent choice. It came first from the heart more than from reason.

My heart said, “I’m going,” and my head replied: “Okay, Luca, let’s get organized.”

The only detail I had ignored was how to communicate the choice to my mother.

On the one hand, I told myself that she would be proud of it; after all, it was on the heartfelt advice of my parents that I had started nursing.

On the other hand, I anticipated her concern.

At dinner one evening, I put it on the plate as if it were very banal service information, among the breadcrumbs fallen on the tablecloth and the grated cheese.

She looked at me with childish eyes; she knew that the last word was no longer up to her, that she could no longer protect me from all the evils of the world, least of all from the invisible ones from China.

I was no longer the kid of the family, the one who had complied with their request to enroll in nursing school.

She was the little girl now, who had to go along with the adult’s choice.

Growing up, the roles are reversed. The children take their own life in hand and the parents lose the reins of command along with the many certainties acquired in the prime of life.

She felt like crying; even the tears did not know which direction to take, I saw them hovering between the lashes, in an attempt to mask a feeling, and then let themselves go exhausted, slipping down her face in a liberating act.

“Mom, you and Dad have always taught me that helping others is personal enrichment. I grew up seeing you committed to giving, in every area. You can’t be surprised

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that today I feel so strongly the call to do the same. Our nation is on its knees. Hospitals scream for help. You have to be as strong as I want to be. I need your blessing.”

I followed this sort of sermon mixed with comfort, a series of recommendations peppered with signs of trust.

She was letting me go my way, awkwardly, but that was what she was doing. It is the most difficult role in the world to be a mother: to be titans able to fight any war in the name of the children and then give them the sword, live with the worries and never let them show.

I needed a lioness mother and she, in her own way, made me hear the roars.

The next step was to submit my resume. Every day the phone rang, and every trill sounded like a grenade that fell within the walls of the house.

Some of the clerks had warm, reassuring voices, others were cold and nervous.

The proposals varied according to the city and the structure, but none convinced me.

When the proposal arrived from Milan, I immediately felt a different transport.

That was where I would go. The idea of ​​moving to a big city appealed to me, it would be an enriching experience.

I wanted to breathe the soul of the metropolis, its beauties and its inconsistencies. Even if the circumstances weren’t the best, I wanted to measure myself against the Italian “city” par excellence. And also the hospital management of the Lombardy region was considered our flagship, so I was professionally intrigued.

The assignment would last six months, a long enough time but not too long.

I said yes in an instant. From my gut. And I recognized in that momentum the Luca of the best times.

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A week passed from joining to the day of departure.

I remember how it was yesterday preparing the suitcase. It seemed like I wanted to take the whole wardrobe with me, maybe the idea made me feel protected. But protected from what?

From the cold of course, for the rest there was no adequate armor other than what they would provide me in the ward.

Yet it is true: when it is necessary to leave for a distant land or to meet a new experience, the ritual of the suitcase reveals all our uncertainties. Think about psychological tests: they ask you what you would pack if you were to leave your life as usual.

Many say a book, others a souvenir photo. In fact, we would all like to carry hundreds of things.

I quickly zipped up all that rumination and loaded the car.

The idea of ​​traveling alone for hours didn’t bother me; I would be in the company of rock music, my trusted partner in my happy moments as well as in difficult ones.

My advisor, capable of spurring me to new reflections or helping me make important decisions.

We often relegate music to our small escapist spaces, but you have no idea how much it can support us in the face of the most difficult and complex choices.

The musical notes dissolve the inner knots making thoughts flow, opening the door to the deepest feeling, putting us in a position to reach the core of our desires.

As for rock, I think it is capable of shaking us, of making us feel alive, of predisposing us to joy.

CHAPTER VII

TRAVELING TO MILAN “So close no matter how couldn’t be much more from the heart forever trusting who we are and nothing else matters” Metallica

Loading my Panda was a game of fitting shapes and ­physical strength. I didn’t want to give up even a sock.

I felt too naked in front of the world. My mother watched me argue with seats and bags, cracking a smile. I hastily greeted her, avoiding looking her in the eye for long. I did not want her to read my thoughts nor did I want to discover hers.

The dull thud of the tailgate, closed with difficulty, marked the start of the journey to Milan.

I started the engine and left my Gubbio tormented by the nostalgia of every corner of peace, of every nook and cranny that unexpectedly opened onto the verdant countryside. The sloping alleys in which I darted on my bicycle as a child, the sound of Sunday morning bells.

I think I have covered my whole life in a matter of minutes. But it wasn’t nostalgia, it was the awareness of entering the eye of the storm, the certainty that it would change me forever.

I thought I had enlisted for a war bigger than me.

I questioned my studies which did not specialize me in infectious diseases, much less in states of emergency.

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It was a huge leap into the void, and as I drove that void took on the connotations of the chasm.

Along the highway, as the landscape changed, my reflections also began to transform. I don’t mean that the sky cleared completely, but the open horizon in front of me helped me to glimpse the beauty of the experience that I was going to do.

Long and solitary journeys are for this: to change one’s perspectives.

It was my heart that had put me on that highway. An act of heart and openness to others.

It was instinct that leaned towards the yes, the ears of generosity that had listened to the heartfelt appeal that echoed from one newscast to another.

As with everything in life, we can hear our surroundings or remain deaf. Nobody forces us to really listen, nobody notices it, it is our nature that remains alert to external calls or chooses to ignore them, we are both judge and helmsman of our choices.

And here I am, headed 400 kilometers from home, in the direction of giving.

The first stop I decided to stop at the motorway restaurant near Pesaro. A ritual stage of my youth, when together with friends I left for a rock concert.

At the time, I had a few suitcases and a great desire to have fun. To seize the moment. Music in the car radio blaring, crumbs and coke to keep us awake until the goal.

That memory shattered before my eyes as I entered the totally uninhabited service area.

It was the beginning of the lockdown, in that famous March 2020, without colors but with a single dictate: “Absolutely do not leave the house!”

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The highways were a concrete desert. They could have been crossed on foot. Those few cars that passed me looked like cardboard shapes on an unreal stage.

I had brought with me several disinfectants, gloves, and a supply of masks. I remember before getting out of the car, I equipped myself like Neil Armstrong on the first step on the moon. The idea of ​​drinking a simple coffee took on the contours of a challenge.

I almost took the bartender by surprise, now resigned to the absence of customers. He looked at me with a bewildered air, as if in just one month it had become absurd for a man to come into an open bar for a coffee.

I drank my “lunar” coffee and ventured to the toilet, then carefully erased the traces of that stop from my body.

During the first days of the pandemic, anything that was touched was called lethal.

Only once I got back in the car, I remember feeling safe.

I closed the securities to protect myself from the invasion of the virus.

I turned on the radio by tuning it to Virgin Radio, the channel that continuously broadcasts rock music, a life partner more than a radio station for me, my traveling sphinx, able to ask myself the right existential questions and generate the right answers in me too.

The rhythm that gave me the courage to walk the thread of life.

I’ve never been alone with rock.

The passenger compartment of the Panda was filled with notes that danced around me, bouncing off the ­dashboard, sliding on the windows, crashing to the ground.

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Some days I really think we all need rock choices, rock ideas.

On the strings of a guitar and a round of bass I found myself at the Bologna junction, the gateway to anyone living in Central Italy or the South, which separates us from the North.

Even Bologna was much more to me.

That’s where I had my first work experience. That’s where I put on my first nurse’s gown. And in March it seemed to me to close the circle, to actually trace a straight line to Milan, taking advantage of the air that the Panda swallowed in front of it as the sky darkened.

CHAPTER VIII

GIORNATE IN CORSIA “I, I will be the king and you, you will be the queen though nothing will drive them away we can beat them, just for one day we can be heroes, just for one day ..... .. ” David Bowie

The fading of the daylight had escorted me to sleep after all those hours of travel, but the sound of the phone broke the silence making me jump.

It was a journalist from my region who, having heard of my choice from my social pages, asked me if I could give an interview.

It seemed premature as a thing, since I had just set foot in Milan, but even before I could advance my hesitation, they had inundated me with questions about the reasons that had pushed me so far, about my past and the predictions of the days to come.

I remember that we had agreed on half an hour to fix my answers on paper, and still numb from sleep I had started to write down some reflections.

That first interview was followed by others. Everyone was looking for heroes, more or less consciously, while I tried to tell myself every day that there was nothing special about what I was doing. Being a nurse for me was going back to the job I had done for years.

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After writing, the night was now too close to hope to make up. My mind wandered from the bed to the ceiling, dragging my hidden fears behind it; once it climbed fast on the wave of enthusiasm for the new adventure, suddenly it plunged into the abyss of doubts. Roller coaster from which I got off at about two in the morning, collapsing again in sleep, exhausted.

The next morning, I was a bundle of nerves pervaded by jolts of deep joy and internal surges of pride for the help I could give to my nation.

I was wondering if they could alter the results of the medical examination necessary for my eligibility to work. The measurement of vital signs, the spirometry, the electrocardiogram, every part of my body was asked to cooperate. The will and the heart were not enough. In the wards crowded with those fragile souls, there had to be a medical staff ready for anything, even for the grueling shifts I had heard about.

At the Don Gnocchi RSA I passed all the tests, the human engine was in perfect condition.

They handed me the keys to the residence that would be my new home and I clenched them in my fist as if to really feel the new life that awaited me.

The residence was near Porta Garibaldi, a completely renovated district of Milan in which skyscrapers with futuristic shapes stood out, pedestrian areas enriched by timid patches of vegetation that in the eyes of an Umbrian seemed the ugly caricature of nature, although I imagined the value that could have for a Milanese look at a handkerchief of green in a cement newspaper.

It was what I was going to do for six months: throw my eye out the window they had assigned me. No aperitifs, no nightlife, no shopping; only grueling shifts and

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free time lockdowns. Yet I was happy to be there, in the trenches, in Milan, a city where history and modernity went hand in hand.

The manager of the residence welcomed me as if I were a longtime friend.

Elena was her name: a simple, tenacious, direct woman, anything but formal - as I would have expected in Milan - but maternal in taking care of her guests. Resolute but never impassive. I think she felt even more urgently the duty to be hospitable to volunteers like me, who had gone up north to lend a hand to the most affected part of the country.

When I returned from my shift in the evening, despite the tiredness, I would gladly stop and exchange a few words with her. She always knew how to get me to pull the plug. One by one she told me about the lives of the other guests, safeguarding only a minimum of privacy.

Some had left the residence in late February, just realizing what was happening. Others, unable because of work, or moved by a much more heroic spirit, had decided to stay to try to save their business.

A Neapolitan restaurateur, for example, was unable to “abandon ship,” even though he could not have kept his restaurant open for who knows how long. It was a heartbreaking idea, as absurd as it was romantic.

There were also professionals who lived in the city but who found themselves confined at home, with wife and children, in a decidedly limited size, and came to the residence during the day to work in peace.

Signora Elena was trained to console her guests; during the year she was used to receiving family members, from all over Italy, of patients from the nearby Buzzi

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Hospital, which specializes in the care of children. They stayed at the residence for a few weeks, waiting for their children to be operated on or often saved from extreme health conditions.

I looked at the walls of the house and I thought that they had absorbed tears and despair but also seen many rebirths blossom; Mrs. Elena, the constant gardener behind those delicate moods, wise companion of each of her residents for a short but crucial stretch of life.

The first day of work I put among the pages that I will never forget in my life.

I was more agitated than usual, excited, I felt the fate of the world on me. Would I have made a difference? Would I have done my part to the best of my ability? I hadn’t been wearing a lab coat for so long. After all, who on the Italian territory had experienced pandemics? Perhaps only colleagues who had chosen to volunteer in African countries. Ebola, typhus, leprosy. Broken images, seen on TV, enough to make the most sensitive souls take their eyes off the screen.

The car was freezing even though it was March. I was as cold as an ice wand.

Rock on the radio had melted and warmed my veins a little.

It was at the triage of the hospital that I finally met the head nurse; from that moment she would be my point of reference for everything.

You can’t imagine the relief in being greeted by an open smile, or at least that’s what I imagined behind the mask under a pair of happy eyes.

From then on, we would all learn to “deduce” smiles.

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And to meticulously prepare ourselves for immersion among the infected.

The head nurse placed in my arms a mountain of protections, masks, visors, overalls, caps and overshoes, plus a booklet to read which - she told me - I would have done well to memorize.

Better than a bouquet, given the circumstances.

Nothing was left to chance. Very little was known about the lethality of the virus, other than the worst that could be hypothesized. Entering a Covid ward was like jumping without a parachute. We were all afraid and I considered myself much more fortunate than my colleagues, who in the previous weeks had walked in there without a mask, unaware of the suspected pneumonia, of the risks for relatives, called to do double shifts without too much fuss.

The corridors were full of workers who built barriers, isolated rooms, and attached signs to separate the “clean” from the “contaminated” areas.

I was assigned to the medical department, which would be taking care of any pathology, at least initially.

Medicine is like a huge container of humanity waiting to be defined for its ills. Being in the structure of Don Gnocchi then meant having to deal with older humanity; the number of deaths was high.

Arriving in a hospital in March 2020 is something that has changed me profoundly.

Perhaps this is also why I felt the need to write and share about it.

It was like participating in an invisible war, without being able to look the enemy in the face. I had chosen

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Milan to get on the most efficient armed tank, but that big city was on its knees just like the last provincial city. We are an army of paper armored soldiers.

After the first day of work I got into the car, put my hands on the wheel and stayed there, still, for I don’t know how many minutes. I was tired, very tired. Weighted like a vase full to the brim. I caught my eye in the rearview mirror and found it hard to recognize myself. Who was that man with the haggard eyes and the face marked by the mask?

I activated the navigator because I no longer remembered where I lived. I didn’t even remember the furnishings of the two-room apartment. A clean slate.

There was a small supermarket near the residence.

I would have gladly done without going, but the fridge was almost empty, and I had to have everything I needed to have a good breakfast on hand as it would be the only meal of my long working day.

Two liters of milk, toasts, jam, honey, I took everything that came from the shelves. My memory went back to when I set up the breakfast table at my B&B. Stocking up on supplies felt so different then, I tried to precede the wishes of the guests by imagining their preferences over jam, yogurt… At dawn I would open the windows of the breakfast room and let the white tablecloths glide over the thick old wooden tables. My mother picked some flowers from the garden to give a hint of color, then the tourists began to arrive, their faces rested from a night in the silence of the countryside.

“Seventeen euro and thirty!” - the supermarket cashier looked at me annoyed; a queue was forming, and I couldn’t make up my mind to pay.

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Arriving in the two-room apartment, I dropped the shopping on the table and pulled the blinds, but the sun had now turned the corner of my day.

I missed everything: my bed, my stereo, my CDs, my mother, the plants in the garden, the bells of Gubbio, even the stray cats perched on the fences.

“Dad! Remind me how to be strong when everything seems to overwhelm you. What did you do to take on the roles of responsibility you used to wear? I’d like to pick up the phone and hear your voice.”

No reply. I turned on the music and slowly started dancing. I found myself inside the notes of a song, it gave voice to that tangle of emotions closed in the stomach.

The lights of the street lamps were the starry sky offered as a tribute to my night, and the moon I would have cut out of the pizza box. By now I was there, alone, like everyone else, in front of an uphill road.

The departments of the RSA were well organized. I began to move with ease between the various rooms, and at the change of shift, for the passage of duties, I explained to my colleagues, in great detail, everything that had happened in the previous hours. I knew the names of the patients and their emotional frailties as well as clinical ones. The sick were not only reduced to the larval state, but also the impossibility of seeing and hearing loved ones weakened them even more. Most older people had a hard time even remembering why they were hospitalized and there was no point in reminding them every day.

An elderly lady spent her days calling her deceased husband. She was convinced he was there, a few steps away from her, and stubbornly repeated his name. “Aldo, Aldo, Aldo ...”

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Sometimes our heads exploded but we were resigned to getting used to it.

One day the ward phone rang, and it was her daughter who wanted to hear her. I warned her of the risk that she might not recognize her voice, and instead, as soon as she heard the tone of her daughter’s voice, she came back to herself perfectly. She spoke freely and seemed to be reconciled with everything.

Memories and loved ones are the rudder that ideally brings us home when we are adrift.

A word is enough to hold Ariadne’s thread that leads us out of the labyrinth. I know it well.

When Signor Aldo’s wife was particularly absent, I told her that she had called her daughter and I made up some questions to ask her. Just at the idea of organizing ​​ an answer to give, she made a commitment, forgetting her husband for a moment. Her face cleared up and as I arranged the blankets, she taught me how to make pancakes so loved by her little girl.

The RSAs are retirement homes but you don’t have to think of it as a place where an elderly person decides to spend the last years of his life as if he were in a hotel.

Don Gnocchi, where I served, is a huge center that welcomes people who are no longer self-sufficient and within it has several departments in which work is done to improve living conditions or alleviate suffering. For example, there is a specialized nucleus for the care of people with Alzheimer’s, a center for the prevention and treatment of dementia, plus all geriatric clinics.

Carlo Gnocchi, the priest who started this project, certainly did not imagine that it would become one of the largest and most accredited centers in Italy. During the

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Second World War, he enlisted as a volunteer chaplain among the Alpine troops and with them he experienced the tragic retreat of Russia.

Miraculously saved, returning to his homeland, he decided to welcome the first war orphans; over the years his hospital has expanded, giving space to anyone who needs medical and psychological support.

Even today, within the walls of the building, one can perceive the spirit of a man who strongly wanted to give dignity and hope to the weakest.

The elderly arrive in the nursing homes often lacking in clarity. Unfortunately, it is true that snatching them from their reassuring habits worsens the confusion, but if you make this choice, in general, it is the last card to play.

Being hospitalized in the months of the pandemic was devastating for them. Imagine what it was for those men and women who arrived at the last sunset to have to deal with completely masked figures, faces without eyes or smiles, bodies wrapped in white overalls, all the same and anonymous presences. Imagine how a child would feel if suddenly all the emotional references, the gaze of a mother, her caresses were removed ...

It was the same for them. And we, every time we entered the ward, we involuntarily transfigured into creepy monsters.

When I arrived at the hospital, at the beginning of the shift, I entered the dressing room and piece by piece I abandoned the human form, transforming myself into a Martian. Nothing was left of the man I was. Not the shoes, not the hands, not the hair; not even the voice remained the same because the mask and the over mask distorted it.

Everyone, from the head physician to the cleaning ladies, was dressed alike; the first few days it could happen

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to mistake one person for the other, but no one took it personally. The pandemic was not for the delicate, the hierarchies were secondary, what mattered was to maintain high efficiency and collaboration.

Then we began to recognize ourselves by height, by body weight. You memorized the pace of your colleagues.

Some walked upright, some with the soles of their feet open. Writing the first name on the suits was still the first thing to do. Colleagues brought in drawings and tried their hand at caricatures or transforming the name into a fun puzzle to guess.

It happened to draw big smiles on the mask to approach the most frightened elders. We did everything to reassure them, so as not to have to meet those frightened looks again.

This too was Covid: an aggressive disease not only for lungs and vital functions but also for the dignity of the sick, violently removed from their loved ones and from the whole world.

It was up to us, faceless ghosts, to feed them, administer drugs, to convince them that inside those shapeless cocoons there was a professional who was acting for their good.

How many liquid eyes of terror, how many moans and subdued tears have I brought home in the evening; they didn’t leave me even at night. As well as the sound of the doorbell ringing incessantly, perpetually in my ears.

That sound, more often than not, meant that someone was starting to get out of breath. It was necessary to run and intervene as soon as possible. I lived six months in fear of not arriving on time. We were at the beginning of the pandemic, there were no statistics; and if there were

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patients who gradually worsened, there were also those who suddenly could no longer breathe.

The studies that each of us had completed to graduate as a nurse seemed a distant memory. We all walked in a hurry along a minefield, any unexpected event could cost a life.

Disguising ourselves as aliens did not only create problems in interacting with patients, but our basic needs were also affected. Dressing was such a long process to be carried out with meticulous attention that no one ever thought of changing to go on a lunch break. Drinking water was also complicated, bringing your bottle to your mouth and running the liquid down your throat meant taking off your mask, leaving the ward, taking off your gloves ...

As the days went by, no one felt the urge to eat or drink, nor consequently going to the toilet.

What a human being habitually does from sunrise to sunset was now a foreign custom.

When I removed my face from the mask in the evening, my nostrils were flooded with the surrounding smells. By clearing the functions of smell for hours and hours, we were then struck by any light scent: the aroma of coffee passing in front of the kitchen of the department, the sweat of the efforts of a faceless army that grinded ­shifts without looking at the clock. And then, the unmistakable smell of the rain that touches the asphalt on spring days.

How wonderful it was to be able to smell the scent of life in all its forms.

At the residence some evenings I would prepare a nice pasta with sauce and basil or a fresh mozzarella with tomato and oregano. I was delighted to sense the diversity

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of those spices and I found them perfect in the encounter with vegetables. It was great to smell, but also to touch.

Without gloves, I felt the rough crust of the bread, the peel of the apple, and then the soft shower gel in the bathtub, the cotton on the skin, the fresh and starched sheets.

At the B&B, I personally took care of checking that the sheets were ironed well, and during the summer we let them dry in the sun, at the back of the house. No detergent can give a good scent to linen like the caress of the sun.

We take everything for granted until the day when nothing is more obvious. Feel, hear, savor, look, touch ...

We in the ward were condemned to the deprivation of all five senses, but it is also true that we were given the opportunity to feel the soul of the people. We have been allowed to immerse ourselves in the depths of their feelings. We have learned to touch with our thoughts, to listen with our eyes, to smell emotions.

And those who were forced within the walls of the house had to learn to walk while standing still, to travel around the perimeter of a room, to invent a restaurant, to imagine the flowering trees of the parks out there, to remember the face of their grandparents, the taste of a kiss of their girlfriend, the run up the stairs of the school.

The pandemic has called us all to the imagination, it has razed every right to the ground, it has forced our instincts, it has terrified us, it has bent us, silently providing us with the keystone: collective strength.

We were all alone in one room but together waiting to return to life.

As the weeks went by, colleagues got to know each other better.

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As had happened to me in my previous experiences as a nurse, hospitals in Milan were also a melting pot of different nationalities. Many came from the east, many were Latin Americans. There was someone for every region of Italy.

In the moments of pause, when I was a nurse in a normal regime, it was fun to stop and chat to learn about the traditions of colleagues. The dialects, the meal brought from home in which you discovered the memories of everyone’s childhood. There was a habit of bringing a taste for everyone if the night before, at home, they happened to cook something special. In doing so, recipes were learned from all over the world. Colleagues from the South brought whole boxes of delicacies: Sicilian cannoli, tomato focaccia, almond sweets. During the night shifts, when the aisle was quieter, we could sit and chat, savoring the products of our wonderful Peninsula, laughing at some incomprehensible joke in dialect.

In the Covid wards it was not possible to share anything, only the different dialectal cadences, the different pasts or nationalities to distract for a moment from the infernal hospital machine.

Different origins also meant different approaches to illness and death. South Americans and Poles are the most religious. The most superstitious Romanians fear the evil eye and you can’t talk about some things with them. We confronted and supported each other, respecting everyone’s emotions and different feelings; we exchanged little courtesies to give us strength. In the distressing atmosphere that reigned in the ward, it was essential to keep morale high. It was vital to stay proactive and let yourself be enveloped by the warmth of a kind or funny sentence.

In our hearts we knew how much effort and energy a

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simple joke cost, so we gave even more value to our colleague who was committed to making us laugh.

The patients, for their part, have offered us many ideas; next to the intensive care wards were the wards where, for weeks, elderly people chose to recover in the hospital, knowing that there was no one at home waiting for them.

You have no idea how many seniors are born again upon entering a hospital center. Those who have reached 90 have lost all or most of their friendships, sometimes even their children. It’s hard to find a reason to wake up in the morning. You adopt a dog or a cat who, slyly, curls up at your feet sharing the breadcrumbs that fall from your lap, but that’s not enough.

When they enter a nursing home, the older ones regain the presence of the other, the feeling that there is someone to take care of them. They are the source of our smiles; you understand that they are fine where they are and do not suffer imprisonment and that is enough to make sense of our work.

They also have a lot of whims and like children they say all sorts of things.

I stopped counting the boxes of candy that I had to requisition in my career as a nurse, or the searches in the rooms to check that chocolates were not hidden inside the bags that were supposed to contain linen.

It is not uncommon to find that they try to warm up the fever thermometer for fear of being discharged. As well as finding medicines under the pillow when they plan to self-manage the treatments. We check them on sight and scold them as well, but once we leave the room, we laugh under our breath.

The cursed virus wiped out even these little things that warmed the days in the ward. Everything has become

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aseptic, colorless, monothematic, and dangerous. And the counting of the dead was one of the activities we were most frequently entitled to.

One death among all weighed on my heart: she was a lovely lady until the day before, then a written note was left inside the bedside table in her room.

I found it while I was arranging her papers and gathering her personal belongings. Before opening it, I informed the head nurse to track down family members, but she informed me that she had no next of kin. The closest people to her were us.

So, I opened the note written in an uncertain handwriting.

“Dear all of you nurses, I am so afraid of dying. Yet I should have become familiar with death given my age. This damned virus has made even more fear to those who already had enough, to us poor old people. I write because I am so afraid of dying and every day I see stretchers passing through the ajar door of my room carrying bodies under the black sheets.

So, while waiting for my turn to come, I begin to say thank you for all the help you have given me, for the small gestures of humanity that you have offered me every day without anyone forcing you to do so. We old people seem distant from reality, closed in a glass bubble, instead we see and hear everything, in every possible way. We see how you arrange the sheets, how you hand us a glass of water.

Nothing escapes us because the years have made us sensitive and experts in the affairs of life. So, I want to say thank you because the weeks spent within the walls of this room have been dignified by removing the bitter taste of loneliness that I had long lived while in my home. I know I have

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said all sorts of things and pulled you out of the grace of God, but I also know that I made you smile.

To the nurse Luca I explained all the secret recipes of the sweets that my grandmother made.

Luca is a special nurse, he has always listened to me.

I told him the story of my life so that he can share it with you all when the pandemic loosens its grip. I wish I could do it myself and put one of my special cakes in the oven for you, but if I can’t do it, I give Luca permission to reveal the tricks to prepare a magical dessert, without sugar but delicious because it is enriched with imagination and will to live, as happened to our generation between the two world wars. I embrace you nurses, my sentinels of the heart.”

CHAPTER IX

A NURSE ROCK “When all are one and one is all, to be a rock and not to roll and she’s buying a stairway to heaven” Led Zeppelin

Death comes at the end of the night. It happens very often that older people go out just before dawn. This thing has always made me think. It seems that they are walking on the avenue of the sunset and that they no longer want to disturb humanity.

Death comes announced by a longer and lighter sigh.

Slender bodies with transparent skin that contain bones like sticks. Covid hastily dismissed an entire generation but failed to embitter the faces of these delicate white souls.

When I worked the night shift, I knew we had to be ready to call a son, a brother, to announce the end. But many times there was no contact number on the patient card.

Existences that close in on themselves, wrapped only by a mantle of stars that brings them up to the creator.

We nurses have often felt like children, husbands, wives of strangers. We felt the closest representation of love and a heart. Even for a few minutes, we accompanied each patient to a better life alone, with a thought, a prayer, or by putting away personal belongings for good.

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Small suitcases worn by time and inside a wool sweater, a rosary, and the tram card. Some rhubarb candy and an old newspaper, read who knows how many times or maybe never, taken as a tribute on the street corner.

The RSAs are in between now and never again. Crystal bubbles that protect all those who can no longer stand in the harsh wind of existence.

And we are the glass masters who puff and blow glass spheres into which they can be cradled away from pain.

A blanket on the shoulders, a medicine accompanied by a smile, a caress to fix the tangled hair from the pillow.

The collected atmosphere of the final scenes of their lives was pierced by the sun that came towards me as I left the hospital.

Milan showed the first stirrings of spring. The tree-­ lined avenues began to turn a pinpoint green and the flower beds were filled with wild daisies. I began to smell the scent of violets that brought me back to the spring smells of Gubbio, those that mark the wait for the Festa dei Ceri; it reaches its peak when all the “ceragioli” go to the taverns to take the blessed bouquet of flowers that accompanies them during the overwhelming race of May 15th.

In Milan, there was no one who could see them, the violets in the flowerbeds on the sides of the streets. They seemed wasted, a bit like everything. Even the sun.

I was exhausted from the shift, so my only urgency was to throw myself on the bed and sleep.

The director of the residence now knew me so well that she could decipher my face and understand if the night had been heavy.

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I generally collapsed immediately, even when dressed. The ideal would have been to take a nice shower and get comfortable, but the reality is that I had to rest and unplug my brain as soon as possible.

When I woke up, it could be three in the afternoon, six.

As if I had returned from an overseas trip, I had to deal with mental jet lag.

Was I hungry? Sleepy? Would I like to listen to some music or watch TV? What would I have done if I had been in Gubbio at that very hour?

I used to dial a friend’s phone number and then on the last button give up.

I knew that loved ones were waiting for news every day, but telling the whole shift was almost like reliving it.

I preferred silence.

My mother had been warned from the start that it was not functional to keep telling us the same things. She respected my absences and I think she filled them with memories from childhood, when she held me in her arms and everything seemed so normal.

If I could have carried a bit of Umbria in my pocket, it would have been easier. A handful of earth, vineyards, a breath of wind, the touch of the bells. The voice of the neighbors, the narrow dialect of the old.

Milan was there, a stern companion in an adventure greater than me, silent, but somehow I felt her gratitude.

Milan was on its knees and I was trying to support it together with many Italians who had left home to come here.

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As I mentioned, in the structure where I worked, there were not only the elderly but also non self-sufficient people who could not count on the help of their parents because they were already too late in life, or even because they were left alone.

Cities hide fragile souls that we hardly notice as we pass them at a brisk pace; we hurry to turn our backs because it would hurt too much to ask ourselves how they survive the hectic pace of everyday life. They are invisible, they do not go to public places, they do not produce income, you do not see them in parks walking with the dog, they have no friends. They leave the house just to reach the nearest supermarket under the arm of an elderly parent or a c­ aregiver who accompanies them on a day that is all the same.

They too get sick, and it is there that their fragility shatters, humiliated by an overbearing isolation.

It is in the nursing homes that they find welcome.

Piero was a young man of about 40. He had Down syndrome and had contracted Covid. His mother, widowed, was now over eighty and was the last person in the world who could have cared for him.

When he arrived at Don Gnocchi, he was terrified. He did not speak, and every little thing made him nervous, he stirred in a perpetual motion; the ambulance volunteers had decided to stay by his side until someone physically took charge of him. He was obviously in a daze.

He had a fever and a suspicious severe sore throat, he had to be immediately isolated.

Within hours it had been necessary to put oxygen on him and his psychological condition had worsened from

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the exact moment in which people’s faces had disappeared behind the masks.

He looked at us in anguish, unable to express his whys.

He was not aware of how the world had changed or of the reasons why medical personnel should dress up.

He was devoid of any basic information although we kept telling him that there were good people behind the mask who would help him heal.

No argument healed his anguish. He just needed a human face.

But Covid tried every day to distance us from each other. To keep us from giving us comfort.

Piero was lonely in isolation.

On his medical record was only the phone number of the mother who, I knew, had already phoned the hospital a couple of times. But he didn’t need voices, he needed smiles, eyes, his favorite TV series, the four o’clock ice cream, Signora Amelia, the neighbor who greeted him every day on the stairs. He needed so little and yet so much, he needed exactly what we couldn’t give him.

Among colleagues, we wondered what we could do to ease his psychological suffering. It was agonizing to see him in that state of terror.

His health conditions were complicated but stable. It was the eyes that screamed, they asked for help, they were blades that pierced our hearts.

I had thought of bringing him a little gift, a puppet, a coloring book, but the protocol of the Covid department did not allow us to introduce anything.

It was then that an idea came to me as banal as it was brilliant: I took many small jars, test tubes, a spoon and a plate. With a felt-tip pen, I drew weird and funny faces on

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top of them, all smiling. Some I wrapped them in cotton wool as if they were stage clothes and I presented myself at the foot of his bed. I solemnly announced the start of the show and he suddenly stopped his lament.

“Ladies and gentlemen, here is the Bicchierini family!

Father, mother and two children! I’m leaving to spend a day by the sea! “ And as I made the tubes talk, I paced them back and forth on the breakfast table.

For the first time in many days Piero opened his mouth in a broad smile and then laughed, a lot, with gusto. The oxygen mask was jolting, and his eyes even changed shape.

From that moment, when he saw me enter the room, he recognized me perfectly, relying on the memory of my eyes and my voice. It was the moment in which the Bicchierini family arrived. He had the urge to call his mother again, and I remember hearing him say that “in the hospital it was fine because he finally met some friends who always smiled.”

This is what it means to be a nurse. It’s not about achieving a set of skills. It is the acceptance of human frailties, that goes beyond the duties established by the profession.

It is being in the other person’s shoes and always wondering how they feel mentally, not just physically.

Weeks went by, but the pages of my inner calendar were still there, nailed to the wall of a really tough challenge.

Three months had passed since my arrival in Milan.

The pandemic was loosening its grips and the Italians dreamed of freedom like our ancestors the announcement of the end of the world wars.

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The comparison does not exist and yet those who have lived through the war are the first to argue that this battle was in some ways more dramatic.

I think that the strength of our ancestors was that of having nothing and rising from nothing.

The Covid-19 pandemic, on the other hand, surprised Western countries in the sun of modernity. Travel, entertainment, latest generation cell phones, leisure, comfort.

Accustomed to having a robot clean our floors and reaching London in an hour, we found ourselves prisoners in a room having to ask for permission to do the shopping.

Even science collapsed helplessly in the face of a sneaky and unpredictable virus.

Here, I believe that the difference was not played so much on the type of war but on how it fell on us.

Having said that, I am proud of us Italians. Those first months knocked us out but did not win.

We learned how to make bread (in war everyone did it at home), we learned to dream looking out the window, to live together in a room, we learned that life is a breath and that “time flies and that you have to seize the moment.”

And I, who dealt with death as a profession, had reminders of it every day.

Milan in May looked like a beautiful lady of petals dressed up. Its severity was softened by flowering trees that sprouted from street corners.

All those colors reminded me of the traditional Infiorata festival that takes place every year in my land.

On the occasion of the feast of Corpus Domini, in the ancient villages of Umbria, the streets are covered with a carpet of flowers on which the religious procession then passes. The skill of the Infiorata artisans has been handed

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down for generations and attracts thousands of tourists every year, but for us Umbrians it is a moment to renew the deep bond with our land.

In Milan, I had to be able to grasp the little bit of nature that urban spaces were showing.

The parks, deprived of the voices of children, left the stage to wild cats, a few squirrels, and flocks of birds that glided over the puddles, fizzing with rainwater.

If from February 21st to May 4th we had lived in a cone of shade, now, slowly, like ants authorized to leave the anthill, we began to take back possession of the streets.

In any case, the city was orphaned of its young people, who were holed up in the house to follow remote lessons on the computer; I didn’t see kids around, and on the other hand I saw so many old people die.

My regular appointment with happiness was the child with colored balloons who lived in the front of my residence. Returning from my shift, I hoped to intercept him on the landing, I was even a few minutes outside the door waiting for him.

Unfortunately, I didn’t always find him active; he, unlike me, had a regular life.

He always came up with something new. A billboard with obscure drawings, gigantic toys, dinosaurs, a piece of pizza, one day a bunch of bananas. I just waved my arms around to let him know how much I appreciated his company.

One night, one of the many sleepless ones, I began to write a story, in large letters, on 35x50 cm sheets. The magic would not have been in what I invented but in showing one sentence a day, creating mystery.

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The amazement and joy of the child, 200 meters away, made me go back to being a child myself, a child in need of lightness and imagination.

We nurses wore armor every day and threw ourselves on the battlefield, intent on saving as many human lives, but who saved us nurses from all that evil?

Some colleagues had started taking sleeping pills to sleep. The nights were full of ghosts and at dawn you had to be operational from the first minute.

I didn’t want induced sleep. I wanted a smile to take on my pillow, to accompany me by the hand, in the arms of Morpheus.

“At this moment words fail me, and my vision’s unclear.

Blind to the truth ... but I don’t believe that we’re in this alone ... I’m embracing the fight, I will not live under a shadow of fear The Dream Theater song bounced off the walls of my room.

“Along for the ride:” together for the journey.

I appealed to the lyrics of rock songs. For many, rock is music for young people, for those in need of dancing and having fun. On the contrary, rock conceals the poetry of life. Most of the lyrics are inspired by the suffering and personal experiences of the bands or the desire to convey a positive message about the future of generations.

Rock was my evening lullaby or the trumpet of morning awakening.

Rock was the novel of my life. From song to song, it wrote the chapters.

In my suitcase for Milan, I had also put my concert jacket, the one autographed by international stars. The

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time of live musical events was postponed for who knows how long, but it was the bulwark of happy moments.

I had hung it on the coat rack in the hall. It seemed ready to be taken on the fly and worn for some concert. It was my lucky charm.

Luca was a nurse, yes, but a rock nurse.

CHAPTER X

THE PHONE CALL “Change, now it’s time for change nothing stays the same now it’s time for change” Mötley Crüe

One of the things that really helped me to disconnect from life in the ward was to go shopping.

Although the medical staff was authorized to skip the long lines that formed in front of supermarkets, I hardly ever took advantage of it, except when I was close to working hours.

Being in line made me feel part of a community that was not only always the hospital one. I was a normal citizen who, list in hand, walked among the shelves of frozen foods or stopped in front of the wine department, looking through all the regional labels.

Having a good red wine at home was a guarantee of a relaxing dinner.

And it was just while I was at the checkout, with a mountain of useless things slipping on the roller, that I received a call from Professor Fatarella, DG Policlinico Umberto I, former manager of the health system of the Calabria Region, entrepreneur in the social welfare sector and co-director Luiss Business School Master Health, my teacher in the field of health systems from when I was in Rome.

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He and I had had the opportunity to get to know each other better while I was attending his course and, even though it had been a long time since those days, we had stayed in touch.

It always happens that the phone calls we would most like to receive arrive at the least suitable moments.

With my hands full of bags and frozen food to take home quickly, I was able to answer before he gave up on waiting.

“Dear Luca, how are you? The rumors are circulating and I have learned that you have left for Milan to give support to the medical staff. How are things going?”

“What a pleasure, nice to hear from you. I’m fine ...

I must admit, however, that although I was prepared, the psychological fatigue is beginning to be felt. And then you know, I told you, the B&B I had opened was starting to take off ... I had left the role of the nurse, turned the page ... “ “You remind me of my life path, dear Luca. In my youth I graduated in sociology, then I took a professional opportunity in the world of information technology, then I prepared for competitions for the Municipality of Rome because they needed a sociologist, and then again I became a general manager and entrepreneur in the world of health care.

We have the nature of a manager. It is not enough for us to lead a company to success, we are the leaders of the changes ... And then we are too curious, we want to experience more fields, not stop at appearances. It is vital for us to remain stubborn, to constantly strive to improve ourselves. “ “Thank you professor, it is needless to say how much your words matter to me. They go beyond gratification.

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The moment is really complex, I mean for me and for all Italians. Everyone tries to react with the resources they carry inside. It takes a lot of balance, professor ... And the ability to dream.”

“The future, as we always taught you in class, is a river full of resources that flows fast. It must be followed and directed, dear Luca. Only in this way can we achieve goals that can make us proud of ourselves.”

“Professor, that’s exactly what I learned during the master’s programme. You have not only taught me the analytical approach and all the information contained in the books, you have provided me with a modus operandi towards life. I truly understood the meaning of those teachings in these months in the trenches, you know...”

The phone call was short but full of all those words I wanted to hear.

The frozen foods were safe, and everything still seemed possible within that circle of Dante in which our lives had ended.

CHAPTER XI

CPAP “Heaven from hell? blue skies from pain? can you tell a green field from a cold steel rain? a smile from veil?

Do you think you can tell? ...”

Pink Floyd

CPAP. The equipment for administering oxygen and air at high flows has precisely this abbreviation.

Would you ever have thought that so many people would be out of breath?

The pandemic had the power to wipe out all the fears of the previous collective imagination.

All slaves, in this new world, of the same master, a virus that controls entire communities by taking away any primary freedom. And also freedom of breathing.

In the rare moments when I went out for a stroll through the streets of the center, I found myself in front of horrible concrete blocks, placed there a short time before, to prevent terrorist attacks. You will remember what happened on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, in July 2016. A man of Islamic origins had broken through the promenade with a truck. And similar things had happened in other European cities as well. For that reason, Milan had been given the order to place huge concrete blocks where there was a risk of crowding.

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We forgot those months when taking a plane or visiting certain cities in the world was scary.

Today, no square in the world is crowded. Everyone is at home, crowding the mind with thoughts that haunt us.

Unfortunately, the virus cannot be contained with a wall, or rather, by walling up at home, but they have tried to hold back a part of it.

Some artists of the night had painted those gray surfaces as murals, praising peace and freedom, but that was not enough to mask their ugliness.

The Piazza del Duomo, encased in a marble chess board on which the beautiful neo-Gothic church stood out, was staked by concrete. And now as then, there were military garrisons everywhere. They were there to make sure that the enemies did not slaughter civilians. Now as then, the enemy did not have a face; but the substantial difference: today an entire army of scientists and medical personnel could stem and win the war.

While I was absorbed in these thoughts, a policeman stood in front of me. I almost got scared.

“What are you doing here? Don’t you know we’re in full lockdown? It is not allowed to walk around Milan!”

Without thinking, I answered him.

“Look, you are absolutely right, only if I don’t take two steps, I risk going crazy. I am a nurse who came from Umbria to help out in the Covid emergency. I live continuously in the hospital or in a two-room apartment of a few square meters. I’m alone, I have no one to chat with.

As I live today, my home is just this square. Allow me to touch the walls of the Cathedral and may its marvelous marble give me the strength I need to go on in the months that await me.”

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The policeman was thrilled. I saw his eyes cloud with tears. He took a step back and I had the feeling that he was almost standing at attention.

Without saying a word, he gave way to me and waved goodbye.

In those terrible months we were seen as heroes, even if being so scared us more.

We wished we were normal people, even though we were living bionic lives in the balance.

I came up to the shadow of that majestic cathedral.

The Madonnina shone like a star from up there. I placed my open hands on the smooth and powerful marble. The statues carved with incredible skill looked at me silently.

Some opened their arms to the sky, others pointed to a distant place. My hour of air was over. I had to get back to the residence before it got dark.

Trust me: I really felt better. Walking helps to reflect, to regain possession of our mental spaces.

I walked past the policeman and thanked him, with a nod, for understanding.

I walked and walked and walked. From Piazza Duomo to the residence, it is almost four kilometers.

The streets were deserted, I turned them one by one, betting whether I would find a passer-by or not, but I must have seen a dozen in all. Not even in Gubbio on a winter’s day were there so few people.

“So, so you think you can tell heaven from hell? Blue skies from pain? Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?

A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? “ The Pink Floyd song at full volume penetrated my brain and as soon as it finished, I would restart it. The cell

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phone battery was almost zero, I hoped that at least the music would keep me company in that urban desert.

Music, salvation, joy, oracle of my possibilities, yet unknown to me. A light, a star, the Big Dipper of uncertain sailing at the crossroads of my existence.

“So you think you can tell heaven from hell? The blue skies of pain, a green field by a cold rail? Do you think you can tell?”

No, very often I have not been able to distinguish them.

I touched heaven and found myself in hell in an imperceptible time. The blue skies under which I ran as a child overwhelmed me making me feel a nothingness, and the meadows, which as a child knew of infinity, during the depression were transformed into steel plates, subduing the scenario of my thoughts and the contours of the surrounding world.

No, this city was not the paradise I imagined when I saw it on television.

Although everything was in its place, the buildings, the squares, the waters of the Navigli flowed quietly under its foundations, Milan had disappeared.

It is not a place that gives the connotations to itself but by those who live there. Without its people, a space is like a painting without colors, like a staff without notes. This was Milan in the days of the pandemic.

The cell phone battery went out in front of the elevator of the residence. Were it not that I am a rational person, I would have thought that you, the drums, had understood how important it was for me to get home in the company of music. But I was just so tired.

In the ward I became an invincible being, or, at least, I wanted patients to perceive me so, so that in the most critical moments they clung to the idea of ​​being surrounded

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by someone superior who could save them. I convinced myself that I was strong. Then, once we crossed the door of our houses, and discarded the stage costume, we collapsed to the ground, destroyed.

I terribly envied my colleagues in Milan who, returning home, found their loved ones waiting for them.

Although most of them had opted for isolation in one room, someone handed them a tray with a hot plate next to the door; before going to sleep they chatted with relatives from one room to another. Sometimes they found little surprises, a flower on the pillow.

God how I would have liked to have found a hint of life on my way back from the hospital. This was the hardest test for the nurses who came from the rest of Italy: what distinguished us was not inside the hospital but outside.

Before going to sleep, whether it was day or night, I took a moment to look out the window. It was my fixture with the horizon.

Looking away helped my thoughts. It accompanied them out of the enclosure, freed them by urging them to wander and then led them back to me.

One afternoon, it must have been four o’clock, I had just returned from shift, had taken a nice hot shower and was trying to resist sleep by listening to some rock.

With a nice hot tea in my hands, I leaned against the window looking over the glass. Instead of looking beyond the buildings, as I usually did, my attention was captured by a splash of color that stood out from the building opposite. In a frantic hustle and bustle of green, red, and blue, I glimpsed little feet running behind a glass window.

I could not focus well because, after eight hours of plastic mask and visor, my eyes were very tired.

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Then those little feet suddenly stopped, and two little hands started waving. They were right in front of my window.

They seemed to want to get my attention. It was my first meeting with the balloon baby.

I instinctively greeted him, and he returned the greeting by bringing balloons to the terrace, the splash of color that had caught my attention just before. He let them go, and in an instant they were already beyond the building, microbial dots headed who knows where.

I remained there, mesmerized by that poem, by that gesture so simple yet so wonderfully alive.

When was the last time I had seen balloons heading towards the troposphere? When was the last time I had picked up some balloons?

That child “poet” had been able to interpret my thoughts, giving an unexpected caress to my bitter day.

I tried to say thank you, but he would never have read my lips. I nodded, applauded and there I saw his understanding.

I remember throwing myself on the bed, light, like those balloons that were now who knows where, flying over the city, towards the sea, or headed for America.

A deep and peaceful sleep enveloped me until dawn.

CHAPTER XII

A SENTIMENT “When you can’t do what you do you do what you can… they built a hospital on East Meadow in Central Park last night doctors, nurses, truckers, grocery store clerks manning the front lines” Bon Jovi

The desire to go to a concert was becoming overwhelming. I was not the only one. I felt it was a real collective need. Instead, such events were now part of the civilly erroneous and dangerous “gatherings.”

Dangerous the long waits in front of a stadium or a theater to attend a live performance, dangerous to stay under the scorching sun sipping a blonde beer next to thousands of fans who mention a song, dangerous to be in the midst of that roar of voices, smell of others, unity between complete strangers, dangerous to fill up with happiness.

How I missed those emotions: wearing the shoes of the metalhead, being dark, being metal. The nurse’s uniform was so sterile, colorless, so serious. And I’m so rock inside.

Indeed, I believe that one of the most rock things I’ve ever done in my life was choosing to leave my comfort zone in Gubbio to come to Milan in the eye of the storm.

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I find these are the choices that sing our feelings to the world. I say this on behalf of all the nurses who have not yet managed to express what they have experienced and which many are still experiencing. We are many.

Every day, I met new colleagues who were being moved from one department to another. People, like me, had hung up their shirts for some time but had felt the call of the ward to lend a hand to their country.

The best proof that the profession of nursing, once undertaken, never leaves you.

It becomes a way of being, a mindset.

In those months, we were ready for anything, a besieged army that every morning was preparing to respond to enemy fire with the last forces it had. 12-hour shifts without eating, without drinking, without going to the bathroom until the following dawn.

Our faces had streaked cheeks and our eyes were red from the lack of oxygen, or often because of a cry that suddenly seized us for a patient who was leaving, for a patient who was unexpectedly cured, for a thank you received from the sick, for a bouquet of flowers found at the hospital gates.

Every now and then the relatives of the patients were waiting for us at the exit with delicacies cooked especially for us. The desire for gratitude was such that one did not think about the risks involved in eating things made by the hands of others. I took what was given to me and carried it to the residence. I kept it there at the entrance for a few hours and then I was forced to throw it away.

When you’re away from home for months, receiving a homemade tart from a complete stranger has the power to double you over with emotion. It was more than just

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a thank you, it was the desire to make you feel part of a family, to treat you like a brother, a son, or a father.

When I telephoned my mother, I told her about the delicacies of the acquired Milanese mothers. I could hear her smile, sometimes she even cried, quickly composing herself so as not to make me sad.

“Luca, you can see that you make yourself loved. I’m proud of you. Here in Gubbio, everyone asks me how it goes there in Milan but I know so little, you don’t tell me everything, maybe you don’t want to worry me...”

“No mom, I don’t tell you everything because when I hear you I don’t want to talk about sick people or viruses, I want you to tell me about my Umbria. Of junipers, gorse, hawthorns. Can you still see that buzzard flying over the B&B? Are the rooms in order? Do you want to check that the dust does not accumulate? Did you get any calls from tourists for Christmas?”

My mother gave reassuring rather than concrete answers. She told me that everything was under control, that the garden was a riot of colors, and that the neighbors spent every morning keeping her company, chatting from the gate.

Everything was in perfect order except the whole world.

The nostalgia for my land probably oozed from all my pores, although I tried not to talk about it with any of my colleagues. But if the mouth is silent, the eyes speak.

One night at the end of the shift a new colleague approached. I had already glimpsed her...

You cannot allude to the fact that I had noticed her for aesthetic reasons, I will not allow you. We were all lots of white waxed sacks with a diving helmet on our heads.

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I had noticed her because a couple of times, exactly in moments of greatest despair, she had mentioned the importance of being a close-knit team, the power of the group to face a tragedy of this magnitude.

Simple but perfect syllables that went straight to my heart.

As the dawn broke through the windows of our department, cutting the floor into segments of light, she greeted me, asking if I would like to have a coffee downstairs at the bar.

“After having resumed human form, of course...”

Anna was a woman in her forties, I soon understood.

Her sweetness of manners matched perfectly with a face reminiscent of antiquity, with her peach complexion and hazel eyes. She resembled a lady from Leonardo’s portraits, or at least that was my first thought when I saw her come out of the elevator and towards me.

I was vaguely agitated; I had not interacted with female beings outside of work hours for several weeks, and for the first time in a long time we were both stripped of our cocoon.

Like me, she had left her homeland for the Covid emergency. She came from Rimini and possessed all the generosity and affability of those places, with that cheerful accent that I have always loved.

At home she had left her elderly father who was in excellent health; indeed, it was he who had given her the green light for her departure.

Milan, she said, was a little tight on her, even if a city could not be judged in such an anomalous situation. Judge who, then? Things? There was not a soul around.

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She was impressed by the efficiency of the hospitals, by the Carthusian organization and by the fact that it was stubbornly perfect even in misfortune. I agreed on everything. I called her the elegant lady, this city is never wrong, impossible to miss. She suffered but with dignity.

Exchanging a few words with a human being with features on their face was fantastic. I wished that coffee had lasted for hours. Instead, the coffees from the machines are compressed into a tiny glass. Cursed.

I sensed that she too was struggling to greet me. We were two shipwrecked survivors from endless days of solitude who had finally found a raft companion. Leaving was very sad.

“Why don’t we exchange schedules, so we can plan the next coffee?”

Anna was bright. Did I look the same to her? I felt like a rag. How long had I not cut my hair? Had I shaved that morning? Was I gaining weight, losing weight?

Suddenly I was interested in what I was wearing.

She seemed to hear the roar of my thoughts.

“Don’t worry, I also put on the first thing I found when I got up, I know I’m going to have to wear that horrible jumpsuit all day.”

It was June. A fabulous month. Because, yes, there was always the sun and there was Anna.

By puzzling out our scheduling, we were able to drink coffee almost every day, whether it was at six in the morning or at five in the afternoon.

The lockdown prevented us from going beyond a coffee drink from a distance. Or maybe not.

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At some point we stopped drinking coffee and started kissing.

Anna, a Madonna who came from far away to alleviate the pain, loneliness, and all the mourning that had become ours, too.

She smiled at me, asked me about Gubbio. She said she was amazed that a nurse had done so many things in life. A degree, a master’s degree, and then Rome and the B&B. And then what else?

She filled me with questions. She was hungry for novelty and lightness. I understood her perfectly.

Feeling her skin was amazing and phenomenal.

Caressing her face.

People’s skin is so soft. I never got tired of looking at her face.

How perspectives change. Being looked at and looking was a wonderful thing.

Look at me again, Anna.

They had assigned her an apartment not far from mine.

The islands of the two castaways were in the same atoll.

Ever since I had told her about the child with the balloons, to whom I told a story, writing it in large letters, sheet after sheet, she had been anxious to witness the miracle of that poetic friendship between the nurse and the baby.

And ever since she told me she would like to come to me, I was anxious to have her in my arms.

It was Wednesday. It was a Wednesday. God bless every Wednesday.

Day gave way to evening and the sun was already trapped between the buildings.

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I got home just in time to chill the wine and tidy up the rooms of the typical bachelor, with the aggravating circumstance that the bachelor was also a perpetually tired Covid nurse.

To give a touch of magic to the evening, I didn’t count on candles but on the baby with balloons. My candid hope was that he would show up exactly when I mentally called him.

Why couldn’t I warn him?

I almost felt like going out into the street and knocking on his door, which I had never imagined doing until then.

The bell rang and I was there to intercept the silhouette of the child on the balcony.

“Come in, how are you? I was afraid the carabinieri would stop you. Now we live in terror even to breathe...” “ No fear. In short, we are nurses, aren’t we? “ she replied, smiling.

“You are very beautiful.”

In that instant, two large dinosaurs appeared on the balcony of the opposite building.

“There he is! Come and see. It’s him.”

In my head I thanked my special friend for arriving just in time to greet my sweet Anna.

“You don’t know how beautiful it is, maybe you will also see it from there.” I had thought.

Anna waved excitedly like a child.

“Hello! Hello!”

The child was amazed to see me in company. It had never happened before. Instead of showing him a new piece of history, I wrote on the paper: “She is Anna. An angel sent from heaven to give me back all the smiles I lose every day in the hospital!”

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Because it was just like that: the smiles in there fell to the ground like pearls on a necklace that inexorably slipped off. As much as we all tried to keep them, they spilled onto the linoleum floor every day.

The child reappeared shortly after with his mother beside him. An unprecedented presence for me too. In the series, we played on equal terms. To each his own angel.

We greeted both of them while I closed the curtains with my left hand and kissed Anna’s hair with my mouth.

“I could stay awake just to hear you breathing, watch you smile while you are sleeping… I could spend my life in this sweet surrender. I could stay lost in this moment forever ... Don’t want to close my eyes. I don’t want to fall asleep.”

Aerosmith voiced my feelings. This is one of the most beautiful love songs I know, and although I was aware that in a few days you could not improvise a love, I was really happy to be able to dedicate those words to Anna.

Love is eternal or lives inside for a moment, as if enclosed in a drop of dew that does not need anything else but to slide free on the leaves.

It will fall to the ground, it is very likely that it will shatter, but no one will be able to deny how perfect it was.

The two castaways abandoned themselves in each other’s arms.

It was as if the salt could no longer scratch their skin, it was as if the waves could no longer scare them, as if the sharks in the water had turned into small tropical fish.

The meeting of their bodies was a hymn to life.

The alarm clock caught them in their sleep, cowardly enemy of lovers.

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It was 5 in the morning and I had to start the shift at 6.

I asked Anna to stay as she had the day off; it would have been wonderful to find her at home at the end of the shift.

Without even speaking, she put a coffee on the fire while she wrote the shopping list.

The mere idea of ​​finding a hot dish on my return melted me to tears as the elevator touched the ground floor.

I was crying without being able to restrain myself. How many weeks have I done this?

How difficult it was to face death every single day, to meet desperate relatives, to find words of comfort.

The nurses you saw on TV weren’t heroes, unfortunately. They were human beings.

Milan was deserted. Where are you Milanese? Where have you ended up?

The city of doing was annihilated. She had been asked to stop, to dismantle the stage.

The pandemic was everywhere in the world, even in Gubbio, but in Milan it looked uglier. A disfigurement to the vital dynamism that Boccioni, a futurist painter, had been able to portray so well in the early twentieth century.

Anna moved to live with me and the manager of the residence gladly accepted the new tenant. In the streets, I met only dogs with owners, shopping carts with elderly, children with parents. Our “pairing” seemed the best.

In those days, medical personnel enjoyed immense admiration. Suddenly they seemed to have noticed us.

And to say that we had always been there.

While I was starting the car, the phone rang: it was my friend from China, the one who first informed me about the seriousness of what was happening to the planet.

“Hey, how are you?”

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“Hi Luca, how are you? I see updates of Italy on the news. I know the figures are improving, both for deaths and hospitalizations. Here, finally, the state of emergency is about to end. It seems like a century has passed since we spoke. The worst is almost over, Luca. Courage! ...

I would like to book a room in your B&B. I carry Umbria in my heart. That’s where I want to leave for a nice vacation.”

I told her she would always have a place of honor at the B&B and then I told her about Milan. “You will see that everything will end soon, Luca.” were her last words before hanging up. “China is in a great recovery. I’m sending you a hug.”

“Thanks my friend, see you in Gubbio.”

Leaving the car in the parking lot, I counted the steps that separated me from the locker room and each subsequent stage: triage, temperature measurement, clogs, overshoes, overalls, cap, mask, visor, gloves.

Before Covid, the morning was the time dedicated to medications, after having served breakfast, taking those who cannot eat alone, administering the drugs, and checking the stats. We took care of the patients’ hygiene and made the beds. Maybe you had to take someone to do physiotherapy, x-rays, exams. And then there was the round of doctors, who move individually or in groups, it depends. Lunch arrived which, if everything went as it should go, left us a little respite or change of pace. The night was then devoted to reviewing medical records.

Data and data entered into the computer, before checking the machinery and the emergency trolley with the defibrillator. When the nights were quiet, the expirations of the drugs were also checked, and we were able to chat with colleagues.

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Covid eliminated the predictable.

We lived in a perpetual carousel ride that tugged us here and there.

Having a good head nurse was a great fortune for me.

Prepared, determined, but also able to remember that we were human beings.

That morning, after my first night with Anna, I thought I had double energy, double empathy, so much confidence in my body that I would give it both hands to those who were more unfortunate than me.

It was then that a new critical patient entered, and then another behind him, and another, yet another new emergency.

I turned to the head nurse to scrutinize her gaze and wait for her to signal. She had directed us once again as a conductor, with her back to the rest of the world and focusing solely on the strength of her staff and her patients.

In her, I saw all the efficiency of Milan. In me, a man who was falling in love.

The women I surrounded myself with in those days shone with a personality that illuminated everything.

Their presence was of great comfort.

Anna, among all, a comet to follow with the eyes and with the heart.

CHAPTER XIII

RAMBLIN ‘MAN “Keep on rockin’ in the free world keep on rockin ‘in the free world keep on rockin’ in the free world...”

Neil Young

Towards the beginning of July, Milan vibrated in the rising hot air from the asphalt.

Although the temperature did not encourage walking around the city, people were so hungry for normality that they left their homes with every possible excuse. It wasn’t important where to go but to go.

One could perceive a rediscovered joy not visible in the smiles, still hidden by the masks, but in the gay gait and in the luminous looks.

The confidence that the pandemic had been defeated also took place in the minds of the pessimists.

The best time was early in the morning, the temperature did not exceed 25 degrees and the sky was blue.

When Anna and I worked shifts at the same time, dawn seemed like the perfect stage for the two lovers who set out for their days in the ward.

The emergency was clearly loosening its tentacles and we avoided talking about it because we knew perfectly well that we would soon finish the service in Milan.

Just as we were old enough to understand that Gubbio was not so close to Rimini and that both of our elderly

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parents, now used to having us next to them, would have represented an obstacle.

If on the one hand everything is possible when you really want it, on the other we felt that our passion was the result of an unusual circumstance.

I’ll tell you more: Anna’s presence was a precious gift, a small daily miracle that blossomed in the ditches of the trenches, and at the same time I was aware that I would remember her forever.

But I don’t know if I can explain the duality of that feeling. It was a snare that pulled and held us together at the same time.

The shared weeks were steeped in pain, grief, fear.

Every day we went into the hospital full of energy, every evening we counted the dead at the table.

Meanwhile, the child with the colorful balloons had left town for summer vacation. They were missing from my window, I was missing that part of my childhood that I had never lived so lightly, I missed the child’s dinosaurs walking on the terrace ledge, their giant puppets that urged me to go back in time to recover flashes of lightness.

In the evening, I would sit in front of the window with a cold beer and chat in my mind with him, with myself.

I tried to remember the happiest episodes of childhood, then gradually adolescence, school. I had made a lot of steps and never imagined that I would find myself working as a nurse after the opening of the B&B. Even if I didn’t know I was stepping back, if anything, I was stepping forward.

My mandate expired in August, but it was evident that some of us nurses were starting to be made redundant.

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At that point they moved me to a rehabilitation ward, thank God, because Covid didn’t just die, they recovered or had to rehabilitate the bodies tested by the virus.

As far as I’m concerned it was like going from hell to purgatory. The patients lived in a kind of limbo, happy to have escaped death, but very tired, especially psychologically.

There were those who had looked death straight in the face but being alive was not enough for them as a “consolation,” those who lived in constant fear of being reinfected, there were those who had lost a family member and had only come to know it later. It was not uncommon for elderly spouses to take Covid and only one of the two to remain in the world.

Imagine the shock of learning that your life partner, unlike you, hadn’t made it.

A couple in their eighties had been hospitalized at the same time but, while the wife was healed quickly, the husband had been on a respirator for days. The general practitioner, however, looking at the general picture of the examinations made during the hospitalization, had discovered metastasis in the patient. As soon as she learned that his days were numbered, the wife wanted to visit her husband by staging her “long personal goodbye” made of smiles and unspoken before our eyes. Her looks said goodbye, see you soon, her heart was consumed by the idea of ​​their forever coming to an end. Yet she smiled at him fearlessly from the other side of the glass to spend more minutes in his company, to give him comfort, to help him morally. He, locked up for weeks in solitary confinement, fed on those smiles that lit up the room, even if something tells me that, having known her for 50 years,

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he too was playing his role for her. Something tells me that he too, having grasped that imperceptible discrepancy between truth and fiction, in his own way reciprocated his wife’s commitment by feigning enthusiasm and conviction where only the scent of the end lingered.

Behind the numbers pitted every night by the news there were stories like this, romance loves swept away with unprecedented cruelty.

Those who did not live the hospital reality were able to dwell on the statistics for only a few minutes a day, abstracting people into dots drawn on the graphs. We do not.

In a small room at the end of the ward there was also a young boy, who had come to rehabilitation from another facility. In times of Covid, the emergency had upset any differentiation between hospitals and wards. Those buildings had become a large container to be divided according to pressing needs. The sick were transported to where a bed was freed. And so that fifteen-year-old found himself in our RSA. He had arrived there following a bad infection that had weakened him to the point of extending his stay for many days. Being a minor, he was in the room with his mother. Adult inpatients, regardless of the clinical picture, could not receive any visits, but he could “enjoy” this luxury.

Mother and son lived in a symbiosis that took them back to the ancestral period in which one was inside the other, in the silent journey towards birth, wandering in a dimension without gravity, tied to her umbilical cord, free to dream of imaginary worlds and things that never

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existed. Always mother and child, whether he was one, ten, or a thousand years old.

The boy spent much of his time with earphones and watching Netflix, devoured on his cell phone. Shooting between monstrous alien figures distracted him from his worries and kept him hooked on the rituals of his generation.

Every hour, a nurse would break into his fantastic dimension to test his blood pressure, take a blood draw, or worse yet, teach him boring breathing exercises.

His mother was a writer, she wasn’t writing a novel about the pandemic on purpose.

In another circumstance, she would have been happy to acquire material for the book directly in the field, but today she would have paid gold to simply draw information from the internet.

The two lived their days in the seclusion of the room to avoid getting infected.

Hospitals have been the most suitable place for people to save themselves from Covid and also to contract it.

And if on the one hand we tried to advise people not to go to the emergency room at the first symptom, in the long run many people ended up doing self-tests that aggravated their health regardless of Covid.

In short, the pandemic has overturned the life and thinking of our entire society. It forced society to play an extreme game in which it was essential to stay clear and shrewd.

However, if you ask me, I will never hesitate to remember the hospitals, in those months, as a valiant stronghold to conquer the enemy, of the perennial Janus, the god of new beginnings, of passages, depicted with

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two faces, one that look to the past and the other to the future.

For each patient who is hospitalized there is a story that identifies them, and it is up to us to change the course, hoping that they will move towards a better destiny.

I have always been fascinated by the story of Janus, one of the oldest divinities worshiped by the Romans, whose statue was located right in the city of Rome. It was placed on an arch with two entrances which was later destroyed; and the arch must have been one of the doors that allowed access to the city, a symbol of good luck for those who entered.

The fifteen-year-old didn’t care much about the history of Italy. He had to stay several days in our facility and hardly disguised his discontent. When I was at the end of the shift, I would pass by to greet him and ask him to explain the dynamics of the games that kept him busy on his mobile for hours. The enthusiasm with which he was busy explaining them to me was not enough to understand what he was talking about. It is useless, the generational differences flash right in front of these things. At his age, I spent my time playing football and then I was overwhelmed by the fire of rock and the band that satisfied all my senses.

I didn’t feel the lack of anything, it was enough for me to play. Besides, the video games of our time were rudimentary.

However, after delivering the data to my colleagues for the next shift, I always came by to say hello. One day his mother, noticing my Umbrian accent, asked me if I lived in Milan and for how long. I saw she was moved when I explained the reasons that had brought me to the north.

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“You hear on television of nurses leaving their lives to help in the epicenters of the pandemic, but listening to one life makes you realize what kind of courage is really within humanity.”

That mother and that boy were lucky, they were able to keep each other company by escaping alienation in isolation.

If you have been hospitalized at least once, you will remember that bad feeling of feeling alien to everything, completely stripped of your roles as well as your clothes.

When you hang your clothes in the closet and put on your pajamas, you suddenly discolor, you are “one, no one, one hundred thousand.” You lose your name, you buy a room number. It becomes irrelevant if you are a beautiful person, cultured or stupid, even if you are rich or poor it does not matter. You are a patient. The characteristics that will be appreciated will be your triglycerides, platelets, urine color.

That said, know that we nurses are not indifferent to your education.

There are sick people who mistake the structure for a hotel. They ring the bell to get our attention and ask to be served even when they absolutely don’t need it. “Take this, move me that, change my glass.”

You don’t know how many times I’ve heard those requests.

And on the exact opposite, rest assured that it is always the sickest ones who regret disturbing, continually apologize.

There was a lady who had brought house plants, introduced one by one by a relative who masked them in large bags. He left them outside the ward to have them delivered. What looked like a harmless change of clothes turned

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into a cyclamen or a geranium. Less funny was when she started demanding that we have green thumbs.

“Wet the dirt well, cut the dry leaves, but what are you doing??? So you make it die! ...

Move it away from the window that gets too much light, no, bring it closer to the window that has no light. “ She was so bossy that we unwittingly bowed to her orders.

Among the patients she was the most feared. The food was overcooked, or cold, the pillow was low, not high. The medicines were bitter ...

“Do you have any sugar?”

One day, in her room, a head physician entered and she ordered him to water the flowers. She hadn’t noticed the different smock or maybe, thinking about it, she must have thought that even a head physician could lend himself to her convenience.

He glared at her.

“Madam is not at your house, but at our house. Here we make the rules, and the commitment is not to keep the plants alive but the patients, so stop wasting time with your stupid flowers and let the nurses take care of emergencies. “ It was a moment of retailiation for all of us.

One evening on my way home from work, I found Anna packing her bags.

I looked at her astonished, I didn’t understand why.

She hadn’t finished her ward days yet.

She looked at me sadly and spilled the beans: “Luca, my time in Milan ends here. I spoke to the head nurse to find out if my presence is still of vital importance and she said no, that I can leave if I wish.”

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I told her: “What about us? We had decided that we would go all the way together. Why did you change your mind? “ “I haven’t changed my mind, Luca. It’s just that I can’t really take it anymore. These months have destroyed me. Dried up. Day after day, drop by drop. I left to serve without even thinking about it and I’m proud of what I’ve done, but now I feel like an empty sack. I’m very tired, and sad.”

“I understand you Anna...”

Who could understand her more and better than me?

When I heard on the news that they wanted to give us a prize of a few tens of euros, anger rose to my temples.

No one will ever understand what happened to us there, no one but we who lived through it.

“But being together was fundamental for me...”

“I know Luca, it was fundamental, but it is no longer enough... I have had my fill of pain. I no longer even remember the number of relatives to whom I had to communicate that a loved one had died. I can no longer hold up those looks of those who are suffocating and beg for help... and I already know that I can no longer do anything for them.”

She was right. She had every right to leave. To leave me there alone. To give up. To turn the page and make a turn, on Milan and on me.

“Anna, do you know what I would like to do?” I replied - “I would like to close the front door, throw away the key, hug you for days, leaving the world out. But I know that I have to let you go... ” Basically, we knew that having met in the hell of Covid distorted every emotion. The risk was there, and I was paying for it at that moment, in a single installment.

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In the meantime, she had finished putting her things in the suitcase and had closed it.

The sound of that zip tore me apart like a sudden tear.

In an automated habit, which by now belonged to us, I looked out the window hoping that the baby of the balloons would appear. Who knows where he is now. Maybe off to swim, happy in the waves. And we were there, locked up, in that drop of eternity that inexorably slid to the ground and shattered.

“Come and visit me in Rimini as soon as you finish here. Let’s try to spend a few days together away from Milan. Without a shirt, in a bathing suit.”

“Okay, I’ll think about it,” - I managed to tell her “after all we deserve it, right?”

You can’t imagine what it was like to see her leave and find myself alone in that damned two-room apartment.

It was like being thrown into the middle of the sea, alone again, shipwrecked again in the stormy waves.

Those four walls without a woman’s clothes were so cold. Just a myriad of new masks along with the old ones to throw away. These damn masks.

In the fridge the leftovers from the day before.

Everything spoke to me about her. The strawberries left half in a bowl, we should have finished them that evening.

My life has always been like this: a continuous ending of things and an eternal starting over. I was so tired. It is not true that we nurses are heroes, I do not know how many times I have already told you.

I was sick of hearing all that redundant praise on TV. Plastic medals to be attached to the chest of an army of zombies who were still gritting their teeth, with the image

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in their eyes of people dying in their arms and the sound of sirens whistling in their ears.

I looked for the child in the building opposite, I only found the child I was, reflected in the glass.

“Getting older every day by two, drawing pictures of innocent time ... sure it would change my perspective, take me somewhere.”

The In Flames song appeared to me written on the bedroom walls.

Take me with you Anna, why did you leave me here alone to fight?

The next morning the war machine was already operational. Repair those two cracks in the heart, I was already in the car to the hospital to find the smile of my colleagues. It was the best cure.

I did not recognize the value of nurses so much in myself but in others, I discovered and rediscovered it in the self-denial of others, in the gestures of others.

And then the days began to pass slowly, all the same as drops of water falling from a tap, inexorably.

I hadn’t heard from Anna again. Some sort of refusal prevented me from calling her phone number. Then, when the head nurse informed me that I could return to Gubbio, I called her straight away.

“Hi, it’s me, how are you? With today, I’m also closing on Milan...

Listen, I have rethought your proposal... If you have not changed your mind, I would gladly go to Rimini.

I thought it would be nice to take long walks by the sea and have an aperitif while watching the sunset.”

She hadn’t called me because she feared I was angry with her, but she hadn’t changed her mind.

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“I am waiting for you with open arms. And don’t waste time buying a bathing suit. We will buy it as soon as you arrive. “ Her enthusiasm moved me. It made me remember the first days we met.

I left the next morning. If I didn’t find traffic, I could be there by lunchtime.

And so here I am on the Milan-Bologna, towards Rimini.

The last time I took a motorway it was to come to Milan in the middle of the pandemic.

That concrete strip was completely deserted as well as the motorway restaurants where I stopped to rest. If winter had crushed my sky on the asphalt, squeezing my throat with fear, summer now ruffled my hair with sadness, pushing me to be happy.

In front of a small restaurant on the sea, there was Anna waiting for me. Seen from a distance, she looked younger. We hugged each other in a tangle of emotions and it wasn’t easy to start saying something.

It was strange to be in civilian clothes, immersed in a holiday landscape, with the echo of the seagulls and the waves that gently slid on the shore in Romagna.

She was tanned. I looked like a corpse compared to her.

In a tacit agreement we had told ourselves not to address the issue of “after.” We knew it would bring arguments or at best bitterness.

She had booked me a room in a small, unpretentious but nice hotel.

It would be our nest in the days to follow.

In the morning we went to the sea, then a sandwich on the beach and when the sun bent its rays horizontally, we

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took romantic walks. I felt like I went from hell to heaven without even going through purgatory. I was so used to psychological, climatic, geographical darkness that now everything intoxicated me. A child at the amusement park, trying to take advantage of every moment.

If the day was an amusement park, the night was the breath of love. The bodies moved in a passionate dance and the looks were intense as in a tango that cries out desire but is a slave to tormented feelings.

We were on the top of our Everest. Climbing companions, veterans of a dangerous journey, tied by double rope. The weeks shared in Milan had been my oxygen tank and now we were there, on the roof of the world, exhausted but satisfied.

We could have said happy, we could have said it. But we weren’t completely.

The exact same mourning notes clumsily pressed the keys of our harmony, suddenly, without warning. The out of tune notes came and ruined everything.

The hospital experience during the emergency had changed us forever.

In retrospect, today, I can tell you that it enriched me, made me stronger, but it took a long time before I was able to wash my soul from the oppression I absorbed in Milan.

The week with Anna was drawing to a close and my mother phoned me every day to find out when we would meet again. Friends clogged up my cell phone with messages asking me what happened to me.

I had ended up as I wanted: in Anna’s arms.

Our novel already had the epilogue written.

Both aware, I can say today that we lived it with great dignity.

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After paying the hotel bill, we gave each other a gentle kiss on the lips and left.

I drew the strength not to cry from the desire to return to my Gubbio, to my origins.

I missed everything from that land. The color of the hills, the scent of the fields, the taste of home cooking, the dialect of the elderly, the breathtaking steep streets, the bells that rang at mass.

I was missing myself.

A sense of necessity, almost urgency, drove me home.

“Lord, I was born a rambling ‘man. Tryin ‘to make a livin’ and doin the best I can. When it’s time for leavin ‘I hope you understand that I was born a ramblin’ man.”

Did the Allman Brothers Band write this song for me?

Ramblin ‘man. This I was: a wanderer.

Leaving Gubbio had signaled the beginning of an incredible adventure, returning was the same.

After six months, I took over the management of the B&B and I felt like I had forgotten everything.

There was no time to rest, summer had already begun, and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to host the many tourists who chose Italy as their holiday destination.

A new adventure was beginning again.

My mother was waiting for me at the gate of the house.

I don’t even want to imagine how many hours she had been there. Watering the plants and stroking the cats that brushed her skirt.

“Here I am.”

The mother’s embrace of the soldier, the manager, the student, the director of the tourist facility, the son, the man, the titan, and the frightened cub. How many returns

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I had experienced and each of them wearing new lives.

But it was still me. Rock Nurse.

And it doesn’t matter if I’ll never wear the smock again; I’m not talking about uniforms, I’m talking about nature.

The crushed clothes in the suitcase all ended up in the washing machine, the gift for my mother in her hands, me under a shower hot and long enough to wash off the thought of Anna.

A cluster of neighbors had formed in front of the B&B. They were curious but above all happy to find me.

I greeted them from the bedroom window and chatted with them.

They kept asking me questions about Milan, about the structure in which I worked, about the house, how it was, if I had made friends, if I had managed to cook pasta alla norcina, if I had found good wine from our area.

Although I was overwhelmed with exhaustion, I was sorry to shut the window in their faces.

A lady had sent me a friccò all’eugubina, a kind of meat stew whose preparation requires a lot of time and skill.

The summer temperature did not entice me to taste it, but it had been so long since I had eaten it that I devoured it that same evening.

When my mother went to sleep, I started walking around all the rooms in the B&B. Tears filled my eyes. How long had I been looking for the right moment to melt into tears? How many days did I had to be strong? In front of whom and what did I have to resist?

Sometimes it is thought that avoiding being seen crying is a way to protect our loved ones from despair,

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but we probably protect ourselves from the fear of thinking we are weak.

Only, the tears don’t go away. They cling to the wall of the heart waiting for someone to release them. And the heart weighs, it weighs more and more. We risk suffocating it.

So, I finally cried.

I had forgotten how much I cared about the tourist hospitality project. The undertaking that I had faced together with a thousand fears on the advice of Uncle Raimondo.

I was fond of every single piece of furniture, the furnishings, the breakfast cups, the sheets, the guest book, the road maps that I shared with customers.

I was eager to start over. Luckily, I already had several reservations.

Summer was the much desired freedom, it was the space between hell and the future. There was an incredible desire for lightness and to visit the wonderful villages of the peninsula.

Finally, the Italians noticed Italy.

I say it, then, that I am madly in love with America.

Yet, in these months of pandemic, we have had the great opportunity not to take either us or our land for granted.

But do you realize that we live in the country with the largest number of Unesco heritage sites? If we have 58 in Italy, Umbria holds a good 7. Assisi the Basilica of San Francesco, Gubbio the Palazzo dei Consoli and the other Franciscan sites, and then all the areas where the Lombards passed, leaving architectural and cultural traces between 500 and 700.

The next morning, I already had check-in to attend.

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A couple from Milan. She seemed to be a few years older than him, who was French.

I was delighted with their arrival. Milan the pandemic, but also Milan the metropolis. Milan is a piece of my life.

She had a distinctly Lombard accent while he laboriously spoke Italian.

When I told them that I had been in her hometown a few days earlier, the woman had bombarded me with questions. She was a nice woman, Milanese in her ways, down to the bone. Her companion diluted that informal elegance that only the Milanese are able to wear with nonchalance.

He was originally from Brittany, always in love with Italy - could that be why he ended up falling in love with an Italian?

Within a few hours, all the rooms were full.

Don Gnocchi seemed a distant memory by now. I was still going up and down stairs, but it was to tidy up the garden; and when I ran, I ran to buy the necessities for breakfast.

LETTER TO THE READERS The story of an incredible experience that I wanted to share closes here, retracing the drama of the pandemic from Covid-19 and bringing a different point of view, that of a nurse but also of an entrepreneur who has chosen to leave his business to face the change and not suffer it.

The studies to wear the white coat accompanied my youth while the university and its following insights trained me as a manager.

I have been able to treasure both experiences, professionally and humanly.

I have never turned my back on sacrifices, I have never been afraid of the new, but above all I have never looked in just one direction. This is the advice I would like to give to young people and to all those who find themselves facing an apparently insurmountable obstacle.

No wall will ever be so high as not to find a way to climb over it.

You just have to learn to look at it from different perspectives.

The experience of Milan, when the pandemic was scariest, could have paralyzed me or I could have avoided it, but a nurse who deeply feels the value of the profession must be there when there is necessity.

Now that I have returned to the management of the B & B, I feel even richer and more humanly complete.

The manager has happily returned to the base, full of experience and energy.

Life holds incredible surprises.

Opportunities, not obstacles.

This is the meaning of the book.

This is the wish I offer to all of you.

ISBN 979-12-81048-00-3