One of the more pleasant phenomena of heavy snow is its ability to erase evidence of the present and return the countryside to something approaching what it was like in the Middle Ages. It is a sort of time travel.
Force in the snow
This is particularly true of Italy, where in so many regions the landscapes evoke the past anyway. I sometimes think that what I’m looking at out of my window each morning is a background in a painting by Piero della Francesca or one of the Crivellis. Admittedly for most of the year it takes a bit of imagination and mental self censoring to ignore the pylons and metalled roads and the gleaming Ariston factory tucked into a valley. After a heavy snow, however, the work is done for you: the roads have disappeared, the icicles hanging from the thick packed snow on the roof of the ugliest concrete building give it the look of a ginger bread house, pylons in the white mist merge with the leafless trees, even the ultra trendy and very modern young humans dress in thick padded clothing not so far removed from peasant wrappings worn in the time of Boccaccio.
Please click on thumbnails below to scroll through the gallery:
And this last week the snow could not have been heavier. The villagers say it is the worst fall for 27 years – at least a quarter of this very rural community have never seen anything like it in the whole of their lives. There are arguments whether the crystalline cover that has silently filled every hollow and turned every vehicle into a sort of white funeral barrow is one meter deep or half a meter deep: the answer is it is both depending on the lie of the land and the force of the wind. It’s not over either. Until the end of the month, the generally reliable weather bulletins tell us, there will be blizzards of various densities and force every day.
The unexpected sunshine that greeted us this morning caused a fury of road scraping, digging and clearing balconies and roofs, but one can’t help feeling it is a little futile: an attempt to reassert normal life when Nature has decided, for this month at least, that the modern world is to hibernate for a while.
For a historical novelist, come here to be a hermit for a few weeks in order to write a novel set in the 11th Century, it could not be more conducive to the imagination – except that my story takes place in the rather hotter deserts of the Levant and Egypt!.
Even so, to get to the past one needs only in this weather to step out of the front door.
9th February 2012
Force, Le Marche, in the foothills of the Sibillini Mountains, Central Italy
Postscript: Sure enough, it snowed all night, and this morning woke up to find the village swirled in now familiar freezing fog, the roads are inches deep despite yesterday’s frenzied ice removing activities, scraped paths and nicely cleaned cars are covered over and snow is hanging heavy on the cleared roofs and balconies: after a day’s break Nature has wrested us back to the past again!
AW 10th February 2012
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