Happy reading :)
***
Apparently,
as I would eventually come to learn, and despite the ongoing complications
surrounding pension plans there – or lack thereof – Italy is good to its senior
citizens. Or, at any rate, its senior citizens are good to themselves. In Pisa
and its surrounding boroughs, from June 1st to September 20th,
2013, at least, anyone over the age of 65 and earning less than 20,000 euro per
year – and three of their guests – were eligible for free admission and
equipment rental at thirty-five participating beaches. That doesn’t seem like
much of a benefit, but in a country that typically charges anywhere from eight
to thirty euro for an umbrella and/or (depending on the reputation and
classification of the beach – and more on that later) a lettino or sdraio, when you factor in the cost of gas,
parking and, eventually, lunch and snacks, it is, indeed, a good deal – and a
big deal in a long summer of 90+ degree weather.
When
beaching alone, I am always more likely to rough it on the sand in the spiaggia libera with only my (usually tiny)
beach towel (or hotel towel, more frequently), some sunscreen, and a few magazines.
But then, I am usually on a student budget. Umbrellas and lounge chairs are
superfluous to my survival.
Now
that I come to think about it, students have much more in common with senior
citizens than with any other demographic, excluding, perhaps, young children.
I
can only imagine that something similar was happening in Pesaro when I visited
for a day in June 2012. I should have known by the train ride over from
Florence; an eighty year-old woman, surrounded by a wimple of widows, told me
within minutes of sitting down to take my feet off the seat facing me and place
them on the floor where they should be. In my defense, they were only leaning
against that hard plastic place between the lip of the seat and the rubber
slope underneath it. Besides which, the train was empty, the number of vacant
spots far and away outnumbering the passengers present. Also: this woman was
seated two rows behind me. But I suppose or would assume that by the time you
hit eighty, your moral vision is much stronger than your prescription lenses,
and it behooves society to adhere to it, as an unspoken rule.
I
should also mention - and not to further aggravate the stereotype, but as point
of fact - that my train left at 5.20am from regional track 14 at Santa Maria
Novella, Florence’s central station. All the telltale signs were there.
Rain
was in the forecast that weekend, so I was surprised to notice, when planning,
a conspicuous lack of vacancy in many of Pesaro’s beachfront (or almost, as
mine ended up being) hotels and other accommodations.[1] Perhaps even more surprised than I was,
however, and judging by the look on her face at my arrival, was the hotel
receptionist. My room was ready, but was I a group leader, an animatrice, she asked? I told her I
wasn’t. Was anyone expecting me? I told her I was traveling alone, and we
reverted to commonplace observations on the weather, the ominous appearance of
the clouds overhead; she suggested a morning visit to the beach before the rain
rolled in. Good advice, I thought, still contemplating why she might mistake me
for a camp counselor of sorts. I saw no children anywhere.
Increasingly,
something became clear to me. On the staircase up toward my single-occupancy
double-room, I ran into an older couple prepared for a seaside stroll. A
snowy-haired and snowy-faced man smiled in his white T-shirt and light green
Bermuda shorts as he held a door open for me – and, eventually, some steps
behind me, who I can only assume to be his wife. She was a slight woman in an ambiguously
colored sundress, salty locks cropped short and tucked neatly behind tiny,
heart-shaped ears under a white visor.
They nodded at me as I strode past them easily. Later, I saw them
sharing piadine in the lurking shade,
and wetting their toes in the frigid water, hand in hand.
Looking
around me, I saw a number of others – of their age group and general
disposition – do the same. There were the double-daters, twin couples in
decaying one-piece swimsuits, worn and threadbare. There was the elderly mother,
accompanied by her middle-aged daughter, in Birkenstock flip flops, a
wide-brimmed hat, and, bravely, what looked to me like orthopedic toeless socks.
There was the woman who had brought her young grandchild, both in fresh,
flowery prints attesting to their mirrored internal ages. The beach was
practically deserted under the sky’s promise of prominent showers. But
dispersed throughout it were small pockets of likeminded, like-dressed seniors
wise enough to lather sun block on their shrunken shoulders despite the clouds overhead
– a notable difference from Italian youth. Near me were a few men probably my
age or a few years younger with music in their ears and sunglasses over their
eyes, less for protection from the sun than for the guarantee of anonymity. We
were the few and the minority in a salt-and-pepper sea.
I
was decidedly out of place.
I
never expected it. How could I? Some preliminary research on Pesaro had
described the city as a friendly, residential place, home to growing families,
one of the distinguishable handful left in an Italy that now welcomed fewer
than 8 or 9 per 1,000 new Italians per year, an Italy that relied on its older
citizens to define nearly a quarter of its (declining) population.[2]
Of course, what I saw on the beach and at my near beachside hotel wasn’t
entirely representative of the city itself. Leaving for dinner and a solitary
evening walk later that night, I noticed a group of fifty or so seniors
gathered in the hotel’s reception-area semi-enclosed terrace. But that was as
far as their influence spread for as long as I was out. The streets and piazze of Pesaro, increasingly as I came
closer to its core, appeared to me like those of any other Italian city:
vibrant, active, and festive from the cool hours of twilight to dawn. Of
course, age and vitality are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories. But
in my mind, the line was nearly drawn. The restaurant I eventually chose for my
evening meal, partially refreshing but in equal part jarring, was chock full of
younger teens sharing pizzas and copious two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola.
Children overran the historical center’s main plaza, easily and effortlessly clamoring
closer to the live performers at its far end and leaving a trail of parents
(none too concerned, but some flustered) in their wake. Perhaps most notable,
however, were the abundant bellies of expecting mothers: round, unmistakable,
traveling in packs, they were usually also accompanied by strollers carrying
recent family acquisitions. This was the Pesaro I’d researched and the Italy
I’d perhaps cluelessly and misguidedly come to imagine as genuine and universal.
I
was headed to Urbino the next morning – which, aside from the fight I’d had two
nights earlier with my boyfriend at the time, was the real reason for my
weekend trip. I both needed a moment’s reflection and had never been to one of
Italy’s – and Europe’s – major centers of Renaissance culture. As a Renaissance
scholar, the oversight was unforgivable. No train-line extended to Urbino:
Pesaro was the closest I could get, so I’d made the best of it and decided to
spend one day beachside, and the next indulging my academic whims. I’d made
sure to map out the route to Urbino from Pesaro, carefully tracing the way to
the bus stop and the number I was to take from there. But breakfast at the
hotel was included with my room, and because I generally preferred asking my
university to sponsor my transit expenses rather than my weekly caloric intake
(when submitting receipts for both proved too rich for the department’s blood),
I took advantage of the offer and headed to the dining room, dropping my bags
off at reception on the way – I’d be back for the train ride out.
A
waitress directed me to an entirely unpopulated cluster of tables and I was
told to make myself comfortable there and help myself to the (sparse)
continental breakfast buffet. I did, heaping a small assortment of sweet breads
and fruit onto my plate. I set it down on the table I’d chosen (also, as per
personal custom, closest to the exit) and headed next for the coffee, when
another waitress stopped me. I was in the wrong place, she said. The group
tables were across the hall, and I could order my coffee at the table or at the
bar, she’d bring it out to m ….. but wait. I wasn’t with the group, was I?
She
examined my face while I looked across the hall. I recognized my elderly
floor-mates as they made their entrance into the carefully and subtly decorated
ceremony and reception room. “The group” was a conglomerate of their people,
the people on the beach, the people gathered for dinner on the terrace the
night before, Italy’s golden population benefiting, as I learned, from a
groupon, or a special package, or a summer promotion, or something like that.
It wasn’t’ a retirement home’s field trip. Animators were welcome, but not
necessary. Participants weren’t always old, my waitress explained. These
promotions were open to families and younger people, and sometimes the crowds
were more varied. But at this time of year – mid-June – and this particular
year, more families stayed home, spent quiet weekends in their yards, and saved
their greatest expenses for their ferragosto
vacations. It was true, after all, that Italy’s welfare system mostly
excluded anyone under the age of 63, if male, or 58, if female, who had given
at least 40 years of his or her life to public service (the private sector
worked differently. But then, the public sector jeered at the private sector’s
assumed elitisim, despite its lack of hard and fast resources). It was also
true that close to 40% of its population, most of it between 18 and 35 yearsold, was unemployed, uneducated, or untrained. There was a time when the two
needn’t be mutually exclusive – a local beach weekend and a weeklong beach
vacation in another region with different customs, (only sometimes) different
waters, a dialect even a neighboring village might find strange or offensive.
But now, a beach weekend was mostly an occasion reserved for a more
sophisticated clientele, with private or publically subsidized funds, no fixed
responsibilities – by choice or by government restriction – and nowhere else to
be in the world.
Despite
my lack of commitment to anyone (minus my dog, whom I’d lovingly if hesitantly
left with my parents for the summer), I was not, indeed, with the group.
I
suppose I imagined most in that condition – in the condition of having nowhere
else to be in the world – would spend their time in the comfort of their homes,
as I might, as I had been known to do in the past. I tried to imagine myself
fifty or sixty years older; I couldn’t. I pictured wrinkled temples on a
spotted face anyone’s but mine – generic, imprecise. I saw loose, comfortable
clothing, imagined a perennially aching lower back, uncertain footsteps on dry
feet below swollen ankles – but none of these were mine or inspired emotions I
could understand or recognise. Yet the loneliness I imagined I might feel then
seemed more likely to predict adventure than an existence tethered to a
doorframe – or to a whole community of similarly progressing people. Quite
simply: I couldn’t imagine myself ever identifying as old or capable of
restricting myself, voluntarily or otherwise, to a congregation of people that
did. I was shocked neither at the age of my fellow beach-goers nor at their
engagement with walks of life I more frequently associated with youth and
vitality, but at their ability to do so surrounded constantly by so much age. I
suppose if no one felt himself a day over 40, it could work, it all made sense:
there is strength in numbers, especially among undervalued or overlooked
members of society. But my knowledge of what aging meant in my own
Italo-Canadian family, among relatives, natural and acquired, in other parts of
Italy, precluded that possibility. In my experience, aging was a slow descent
to death, one physical ailment and stale juridical lament at a time. Aging was
a return to the indoor sphere that ushered in life and prepared it for greater
things – only this time, on the way out, and beginning in time with the body’s
eventual decay. Aging was enslavement to routine and the overbearing need to
ensnare others in it, too. I was fortunate enough – and still am – to have
fabulous role models in my life, all over eighty years old, all distinctly
remarkable. And I was fortunate enough to see from their point of view from
time to time, that life goes on with or without your cooperation; living was a
choice, not a consequence of birth. Still, I’d always imagined that older life
throve best when surrounded by younger life. Seeing so much of it together all
at once, and me beside it and dangerously close to it so prematurely (I
thought) scared me.
Returning
from Urbino that evening, I decided to take one last walk along the Adriatic shore
before heading back to the train station. It was nearly sunset and the
crepuscular light sat low in the sky, hovering feet, it looked like, from
sea-level. The beach was lined with dark blue umbrellas and little else: some
people were enjoying the view from the end of a long stone pier, some mothers
bought household goods at stands located strategically meters from the beach
area’s entrance. I sat at a beachside bar and ordered a small coke, in a can –
no glass: just a straw. There was next to no one around me except the similarly-aged
bartender, either at this establishment or the others within eyeshot. An older
gentleman sat across the terrace and pulled out a cigarette as I neared the end
of my Coke can. In that moment of almost complete solitude for both of us, I
wondered which of us would be more comforted by the quietly imposing presence
of “the group.”
[1] Somehow, I
still haven’t learned my lesson and routinely forget to read the fine print in
hotel room descriptions. Usually, when they say “beachfront,” unless they also
make some mention of beach access discounts or extravagantly priced seaside
rooms, they mean a 700m walk, sometimes along a highway, from their urban
setting to the very entrance of the lido and boardwalk. When you factor in that
you’re traveling in Italy, where the accuracy of measurement, like most other
things, is relative as a rule, you can almost certainly expect 700m to look
more like a mile. What starts out in your mind as a five-minute walk from your
room to the beach in practice turns into a 20-minute hike under the sun and
over the boiling asphalt to the scorching sands another 500m away from the
nearest sliver of shore.
[2] Italy’s
birth rate has ranked 207 out of 221 countries surveyed for the past fifteen
years.
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