In December 2019, I visited Florence to celebrate Christmas with my family. My wife, daughter and baby granddaughter lived in Southern Italy while I still lived in New York City. This was before we all wore masks in the supermarket and washed our hands religiously and kept 6 feet away from one another.
Everything was going right. Nothing could possibly go wrong. But then everything went wrong. And that was the last time I would see my family in the flesh for 18 months.
Our holiday in Florence went like a dream. We rented an apartment together, all three generations of us, directly across from the Duomo. We strolled along narrow cobbled streets, the lampposts festooned with brilliant Christmas lights. Natives and tourists alike were in a festive mood. Every place drew crowds — the restaurants, the Uffizi, the statue of Michelangelo’s David. The vast piazza just below our windows hosted a concert on New Year’s Eve until 3 in the morning. With fireworks blasting away, we raised our glasses of prosecco to toast the arrival of 2020.
We had no clue what was coming only two months later. No inkling that life worldwide would suddenly turn apocalyptic. No glimmering that the next year would bring infections, hospitalizations and deaths by the millions, that we would quarantine in our homes rather than go out and risk inhaling droplets from a stranger’s lungs.
Lucia was then only 15 months old. We wheeled her around Florence in her stroller. She liked getting out and about, looking around at everything happening around her, the handsome shops, the scooters buzzing along, the churches, the passersby casting admiring glances at her. I played peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek with her. I spooned cereal into her mouth as she made baby sounds. I practiced walking with her, and she took her first step the day before I left to go home.
This was still before it all happened, before we hunkered down behind our walls and heard the scream of sirens as ambulances sped past and watched the scoreboards on cable TV that showed the death toll spiking ever higher. None of us vacationing in the cradle of the Renaissance suspected that in just a matter of weeks, our lives would be turned upside-down. That would all come later.
For now, life was all blue skies and Lucia giggling and wine unlike wine anywhere else. Beauty was everywhere — in the faces, the food, the clothing, the buildings. Here was the Monument to Dante Alighieri, there was a shop devoted to truffles. We gazed at the soaring campanile bell tower and a Medici palace. On Christmas Eve, we crossed the Ponte Vecchio, the little shops glistening in the moonlight.
The plan was that I would visit Italy again in six months, following the same schedule I had for the last three years. And then, before Christmas rolled around again and just as we had always planned, I would move here and our family would all be reunited for good.
But by early March, the pandemic had struck, with Italy as an early epicenter and New York City another. The virus spread and victims died without a chance to say goodbye to those they loved. Nightmares about the pestilence stalked our sleep. We obsessed over the desperate need for vaccines that might save us from the dawning disaster.
In an eerie premonition, I wrote the following in my journal on New Year’s Day: “Never in my life have I so wanted to get through a year. But 2020, just begun today, is an exception. This is the year I move to Italy. That’s the plan anyway. But we all know what can happen to plans. They have this habit of going awry.”
Indeed. The pandemic would prevent me from visiting Italy that summer. It would also stop me from moving there by Christmas 2020. The risks ran too high. So we all sheltered in place. I communicated with my family through a screen on my phone. In our video conversations, my wife and daughter frequently dissolved into tears. Lucia would press her lips against the camera to send me a kiss.
In the process, I remembered that Florence was no stranger to pandemics. The Black Death, also known as the bubonic plague, rampaged across Europe in the late 1340s and early 1350s, killing as much as half of its population. Florence became a hot spot, and no one was safe. A near lockdown forced inns and workshops to close. Corpses rotted in the streets, and mass graves riddled the cityscape. Jews were scapegoated as the culprits behind the scourge and sometimes killed. Florence would lose between one-third and one-half of its residents.
Just months earlier, we had walked the same streets without the least reason to feel spooked. Now Florence would be forever emblematic as the place where the world as we knew it officially came to an end.
This past July, I finally relocated to Italy. I now live with my wife in a house in Puglia, by happy coincidence the very name of the restaurant in New York’s Little Italy where she and I went on our first date 45 years ago. We’re right around the corner from our daughter and granddaughter. All of us still struggle to recover from the trauma that jolted everyone on the planet.
But signs of growth abound. Lucia, now 3, has grown fiercely independent. She proudly feeds herself in her high chair. She walks, runs and jumps. She talks in complete sentences a mile a minute. She no longer has to wonder why she had to stay at home for so long.
Italy is hanging tough, too, even with the omicron variant on the loose. We’re still feeling optimistic. We even decided, in our ongoing effort to get our lives back, to do something special for the holidays
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We returned to Florence.
Bob Brody, a consultant and essayist in Italy, is author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”
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