SOLO IN ITALIA!

Only in Italy! 

View of Lago Trasimeno from Tuoro

Yesterday was the first global climate crisis demonstration.  There would be demonstrations all over the world and we wanted to take part.  Steve had contacted the 350.org website for the demonstration nearest to us in Tuscany.  A message came back with an address in Tuoro sul Lago, a small hill town overlooking Lago Trasimeno, the largest freshwater lake south of the Po River in Italy, less than an hour from our house.  We had expected to be directed to Arezzo, a larger town in Tuscany and closer than Tuoro, but never mind.  We had found a place where we could make our voices heard, and we had an address for the navigator. 

Castiglion Fiorentino

We got up very early (for us) on Friday, limited our breakfast at home to cappuccino, and headed out under a clear blue sky to the event.  We stopped in Castiglion Fiorentino, the town within which our borgo is incorporated, for cornetti (Italian croissants) and another cappuccino.  We mentioned to the bar owner that we were going to the climate demo in Tuoro and did she know about it.  She looked at us quizzically and said no.  That seemed as odd as the location of our nearest demo, but we figured 350.org knew what it was doing.  We pressed on.

Tuoro Hillside

Back in the car, our navigator took us on a beautiful road that we’d never traveled before, avoiding the state highway, and arrived in Tuoro about an hour after 9 a.m., the start time, according to the email confirmation Steve had received from 350.org.  The address was a post office, whose empty parking lot was closed off and there was no one to be seen.  Were we too late?  In Italy?  Hardly.   Thinking that maybe the demo was down by the lake, we headed there.  Again:  nessuno e niente, no one and nothing.  So we decided to turn around and drive back up into Tuoro and find the main square.  Maybe we’d simply missed the meeting point.

Tuoro Municipio

We found parking in front of a bar, next to the main square, and I went in to inquire where the demo was.  The barman was putting cornetti into his oven and said he’d heard about the climate strike but didn’t know of any participation in Tuoro.  He suggested I ask the police in the municipio (town hall) next door.  Thanking him for his excellent suggestion, I entered the municipio.  Two policemen in perfectly pressed blue uniforms, each sitting on opposite sides of the high-ceilinged room, looked up from their desks.  In my best Italian, I asked if there was a climate demo in town today.  They looked at each other, raised eyebrows, and shrugged as only Italians can.  Meaning:  Not that they knew of, and if there had been one, they would surely know, because they would have issued the permit and blocked off the march route. 

 

So, who had it wrong?  350.org or the local climate activist group in Tuoro who told 350.org that the group would participate?  Choosing not to dwell on an unanswerable question, we decided to make lemonade out of this lemon.  We pointed ourselves toward a sign for the local history museum.

Gaius Flaminius Nepos

The museum was devoted to the Battle of Lake Trasimeno, the definitive battle of the Second Punic War.  The antagonists were the Roman general and consul Gaius Flaminius Nepos (born 265 BC), who built the Via Flaminia (which still exists) to connect Rome with Rimini on the Adriatic, and the Carthaginian general Annibale Barca (born 247 BC).  You know him as Hannibal, one of the greatest generals of the ancient world, right up there with Alexander the Great.  At that time, 217 BC, Rome and Carthage shared the western Mediterranean in a relatively peaceful period following the end of the First Punic War.  Carthage had control of the Iberian Peninsula south of the Ebro River and Rome held the area to the north.

Annibale Barca

Then Rome upset the balance of power in 219 BC by striking an alliance with Seguntum, a town south of the Ebro.  Wanting to reinstate equilibrium, Carthage decided to show Rome a thing or two.  Hannibal gathered his troops in Carthage, traversed the Mediterranean, raced up the Iberian Peninsula, crossed the Pyrenees and then the Alps with a contingent of Carthaginian, Gallic, Celtic, and North African soldiers on horseback and driving elephants, no less, to meet his Roman foe first in Lombardia and then in Tuscany/Umbria.   (We lived in Pavia, a university town in Lombardia, and I remember first hearing about Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps on elephants and that mastodon bones had been found in the Ticino River that runs through Pavia.  I’ve also crossed the Pyrenees--on foot, not elephant—and can attest that this was no mean feat on the part of Hannibal’s army.)  

The two-room local history museum was tricked out with a cool diorama, that reminded me of New York's Natural History Museum, showing the staging of the battlefield.  There were also some high tech SONY touch screens that laid out the various theories of how Hannibal outsmarted Flaminius on the shores of Lake Trasimeno.   It’s an inspiring tale.  Remember, these armies were fighting without maps and were new to the terrain.  Hannibal had never set foot in the area.  In the case of Flaminius, Rome had only recently established itself mid-peninsula, but Flaminius was unfamiliar with the environs.  How did they know where they were going, who was camped where, and what lay in between?

To hear the museum guide talk about the strategy, the battle unfolded like this.  Hannibal arrived west of Tuoro, near what is now a stop in the Milano-Napoli main train line.  He sent out some scouts to reconnoiter the countryside.  They found high ground above the lake from which they could see a natural trap:  a very narrow pass between the hills and the lake shore.  Hannibal determined to lure the Romans into the narrow pass and onto the plain below Tuoro by positioning a small number of soldiers on the far side of the plain and sending the rest of his men into hiding in the surrounding woods.  Once the Romans entered the plain, Hannibal blocked their retreat by cutting them off at the proverbial pass.  

It worked.  15,000 Roman soldiers lost their lives that day, while between 1,500 and 2,500 Carthaginians, Celts, Gauls, and North Africans lost theirs.  Hannibal returned to Carthage victorious, but Flaminius was felled by a lance and beheaded.  Still, the political victory belonged to the dead Roman.  The inhabitants of the Italian peninsula trod by Hannibal declined to rally behind Carthage and remained loyal to Rome, preventing any restoration of shared hegemony in the western Mediterranean.

We, too, having been lured to Tuoro by either 350.org or the local Tuoro climate activists, were vanquished at Lago Trasimeno.  Our diesel engine car left a nice, big, fat carbon footprint in close to 2.5 hours of driving from our house to Tuoro, down to the lake, back to Tuoro, and then home.  So much for our attempt to save the planet!  

Later that afternoon I went for a walk.  A few months ago, the county had mowed the grass alongside the road that winds through our hills, something they haven’t done for several years.  In the space of two kilometers (about a mile), I counted 128 pieces of mowed-down, shredded-up plastic bottles (some post-mow and intact), soft drink and beer cans, crushed aluminum foil, a video cassette, cellophane packaging, tubes of denture adhesive (whaaaaat?!), and empty cigarette packs.   

 

And that’s not counting the discarded paper and cardboard.  Mind you, there are only two buildings on this stretch of road. One of them is an abandoned stone house and the other is currently vacant, being a vacation residence.  That means that all the trash along the side of the road was jettisoned out of the windows of passing vehicles, into a pristine, wild landscape that has remained unchanged for millennia.  Nice.  I must say, I felt vanquished for the second time yesterday.  I don’t understand how anyone could be immersed in such natural beauty and choose to defile it.  We need more than a climate demonstration.  We need to respect our Mother.

Keep it real!

Marilyn