Nicholas Farrell Nicholas Farrell

Italian Notebook

<em>A notebook from Ravenna</em>

 Lido di Dante, Ravenna

When the earthquake struck in the dead of night at 3.36 a.m. — the Devil’s Hour — I was in front of my computer in what used to be the cow shed. This is the only time of day when my six boisterous children and their high-voltage Italian mother are not around. The insects, attracted by the light, are worse at night but they can be killed if necessary. As for the toads (we have biblical numbers that emerge from the underworld at night via the open glass doors), I quite like them. Even though there are three on the coat of arms of the Devil himself, I just sweep out with a broom any toad I notice hopping across the floor. The silence is so intense that I can hear the horse and the donkey munching hay in the stable 100 yards away. Occasionally an owl screeches, but not even that bothers me any more. I began to sway about on my seat, looked up from the computer, scared, and thought: there must be something wrong with me. But the swaying stopped after a minute or so, and I was still conscious. So I returned to what I was doing on the computer. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was. We live on the coast near Ravenna and are roughly 200 miles away from where the 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck last week, killing nearly 300 people. Two thirds of them died in the hilltop town of Amatrice, which is where spaghetti all’Amatriciana (tomato, pork jowl and pecorino) was invented.

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