Letter from an Englishwoman near Alessandria, Italy

Alessandria from above, next to the river Tanaro and the Cittadella, with Piazza della Libertà in the middle

This week there was an article on the BBC website about the Dutch putting flower boxes on the railings of the bridges over the canals in Amsterdam. They say that hundreds of bicycles chained against the bridge ruin the aspect for the tourists and their Instagram moments.

I sent a link to Tim Leese. He lives in Amsterdam for a part of the year and he replied with a selection of comments that included this: “In Amsterdam some people think that they can put a bicycle any old place, as if it were still 1950, but as with so much in cities these days the sheer numbers of people have made all these sort of initiatives necessary.”

I have been teaching a lesson entitled “The Death of Alessandria”. For those of you unfamiliar with our local city it is quite small. Do not think Milan, think much smaller. It has an inner ring road called locally, Lo Spalto. Everything inside this circular tree lined road is the original city of narrow streets, piazze and hundreds of small shops. In its heyday, the shoppers of Alessandria would visit 4 or 5 shops each morning for their bread, vegetables and meat. Now, nearly all of the commerce of Alessandria is outside the Spalto, where large shopping centres and supermarkets have been built.

When asked, all of my students, without exception, no longer shop inside the city. Their families all visit the supermarkets and malls where they can park without charge or time restrictions and potter around in the dry and the warm (or cool in summer). The object of the lesson is to discuss how to save Alessandria when no one wants to go there. We work out (in English) that if there are 5,000 parking spaces in the city at €3 an hour and, if they are only occupied for 50% of the day, 6 days a week, 52 weeks a year, then the council is raking in €30 million a year from parking. So, which comes first. Get rid of the charges (and all the social services they pay for) and pray the people return or reinvent the city centre.

The students umm and ahh for a bit and then admit, that they no longer go to the cinema (they have Netflix), they no longer use the shops (they use on-line), they didn’t have to go there for school for much of this year (they did distance learning), and they cannot imagine what it will take to reanimate the capital city of their province.

I told Ettore, that if he and his friends took the initiative to create a plan to save their city, it would be his generation that would benefit from it. By the time it came to fruition he would be in his 20’s and he would enjoy it. He replied he hoped to be long gone from here by then.

Where is he to go? If the city centres are dying (for all the same reasons as Alessandria) and if Amsterdam is struggling to cope with the population explosion, where will the next generation think of as home?

After COVID managed to lock people in their tiny 5th floor apartments without balconies or a garden, there has been a lot of interest in moving out of the cities into the countryside. A house with a garden in Felizzano has suddenly become desirable for those who never want to repeat the last 8 months. But even Felizzano is losing what made it so attractive. Our bank closed last month (we do everything on-line these days), the high street is peppered with shuttered shops where you can’t park because the council put in very pretty planters to dissuade us from nipping to this shop or that. The camera shop has gone (we all have digital), the shoe shop is closing (we buy shoes in out of town malls), one of the fruit shops has not reopened after the virus (we can park outside Costa Poco but we can’t park outside Angela’s). Ennio told me that they closed one of the infant’s schools and moved it up to the piazza because there are not enough children to fill a classroom.

There is upheaval afoot.

I believe everything is up in the air, and we do not yet know where it will land. Covid is accelerating this like a major cultural shift, similar to the revolutions of the past centuries.

This morning I was listening to Times Radio. They were going over the news in a fairly matter of fact manner. They covered the increasing cases of COVID and how the new UK government measures may lead to a digital Christmas. People face-timing instead of getting together.

The next item on their list was a piece from The Lancet (a respected medical journal). This went into extensive research that demonstrates that lockdown in family groups does nothing to stop the spread of the virus! No wonder the public are confused. The government gives them rules and then the scientists say it is futile to obey them!

Then, the next item went on to explain that up to £3.5bn furlough claims are fraudulent or paid in error (are most recipients of the errors sending the money back?). Are the people doing this the same people who went to the beach when lockdown started? Are these those who do not feel the need to wear a mask applies to them? Who are those people fighting in the streets of Liverpool, or those dancing in the raves of Manchester?

Are these the same people who drive at 35 in a 30mph zone? The same who use food banks designed for the needy, but take their chances to get a free shop or meal?

Who are these people? Are they always the same ones? Or are most of us up for opportunism when offered the chance? If so, then we all need to get in touch with reality.

Irrespective of your cause, being black, poor, gay, victimised or whatever your beef is: — are you beyond reproach? Are you one of those diddling the system in some way or other?

Generation Alexa

I call us Generation Alexa. We are all tuned in, waiting for our wake word, whatever that word may be. We are angry and waiting for anything anyone says to justify our rage. We are defensive and resentful. The young believe that now the privileged classes have been subdued, they can do or be anything they want in this world. Only to find that there is a limit on the influencers, singers, actors or footballers who can make it to the top. That making money is much harder than they think, and they look at a nice, safe, steady job as a statement of failure. By a certain age they are depressed, lost and disillusioned.

My personal gripe is the media (most of you know that), others are angry about being discriminated about for living in the north, or the south, in a city or the country. Some are angry that the party they voted for did not get in, others rant about climate or pollution or this or that. We are all right and everyone else is wrong if they view life differently to us.

I am not sure a flower box on the railings will sort this one out. Well, not a flower box supplied by your local florist. They went out of business some 8 months ago!

The author is Jennifer de Sanchez, an Italian-to-English translator and teacher of EFL living in Italy, next to where I grew up. I find her views apply to many other towns and villages, not just Alessandria. To get in touch, you can e-mail her at casadotty@gmail.com.