In October last year Jonathan and I moved to Cuglieri full of renovation plans in the late summer of 2020. Little did we know.
Something happened. The year 2020 will forever be the year of the coronavirus, at least here in Italy. Now, five months since we came, it is not even possible for Italians to travel here. You need a special permit from the regional administration to come whether by ferry or aeroplane. All non-essential works are stopped, so our (private) house renovation has come to a complete standstill. And Casa Orosei which was fairly pre-booked for the summer gets nothing but cancellations. Of course.
So, how is Cuglieri doing in these difficult times? Rather well actually, under the circumstances. There are no confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the village and only 10 cases in the province capital, Oristano. Nevertheless, life has changed completely, as the village is included in the general Italian lockdown. One is only allowed to leave home to buy food locally or walk the dog. Cars are stopped by police who ask to see a written self-declaration of the trip's purpose. Sometimes they even ask to see this when you are standing waiting outside one of the local shops You can’t enter shops without gloves and a mask, and only one person at a time. The other night even the streets of the village were disinfected.
Never has the village been so peaceful. As there are virtually no cars going around you can hear the flies. Dogs bark in the distance. Hens cackle. Donkeys bray. Birdsong. The young lambs that were separated from their mothers a few days ago bleat, but not as heart-breaking anymore. They have moved on to grazing. If one looks at the village from a little distance you can easily believe that you are in medieval times, or at least two-hundred years ago. The only human-induced sounds are the church bells ringing for mass, although all masses have been cancelled. Jonathan claims that there is a correlation between churches and bars in rural Europe. To prove his point there are seven churches and seven bars in Cuglieri with a permanent population of around 2000. And a small convent, but that is not part of his homegrown statistics.
What do people here say about the situation? Not so much. They shake their heads but adhere to the rules put down and do their part of the social distancing. Nobody hoards food or toilet paper. There are no shortages of almost anything. I am sensitive to gluten, so I miss baking my own bread made from spelt, farina di farro, which I cannot find locally, so I must buy gluten free flour from the pharmacy. But it works. It works well. And as most are not allowed to work there is a surge of growing your own vegetables.
The people of Cuglieri are used to hard times. The area has not had much economic growth for 50 years and many have left to get work in Italy and the rest of Europe. The people remaining have become good at surviving on limited means. Most families have a plot in or just outside the village - an orto - where they cultivate their own olives, many types of vegetables, fruit and even vines. The village butchers sell mainly meat and eggs from their own farms. Our favourite butcher, at Piazza Amsicora, even has a special protected cow, Bue Rosso, on his farm. Bue Rosso grazes the year round and the calves are never separated from their mothers, so they are suckling calves, something very alien to industrial milk and meat production in the rest of the world. It is very local, very sustainable, very ecological, without being certified. Very few here have the resources and inclination to certify as ecological, as it costs money and is seen as something you do in the big world. In normal times many Culgierati nevertheless go occasionally to bigger supermarkets in nearby Bosa or Oristano. But not now. Now it is all extremely local. And I hope and believe this is something for the future. Most places can’t obviously be as sustainable as here, but there is something very rewarding about eating local food which is in season, not just anything which has travelled all over the world to end up in the supermarkets, with less taste and contributing to a waste of resources and global warming.
And soon, hopefully next summer, when this terrible crisis has subsided, we hope that many more will come to beautiful Cuglieri to get a taste of this local way of living, at least for a holiday.
Lena Clyne
留言