Today’s a big holiday in Italy. Ferragosto. It means that nearly everyone is going to the beach, making the most of what we’ve got for summer in the time of Coronavirus. 

For folks who remain the big cities, tolerating the canicola is a top preoccupation. It’s hot outside, so moving around The Eternal City on two legs is decidedly not the advisable thing to do right now…unless you’ve found a decent granita stop (please text me if you have!). And Rome is looking and sounding a lot as it did during lockdown; the only things missing are helicopters flying overhead and police driving around using loudspeakers, informing residents to stay at home. I really hope we don’t return to those days.

As for me, today I opted to do what most of the Romans did and I left town for Ferragosto.

I like to do things early in the morning. I say this not because I am a morning person but more because I am a quiet person. I’ll trade off sleep for a bit of a blank canvas, and on this Saturday my idea was no different. I drove out of the city just after 7 o’clock and I pointed north. I was deliberately moving away from the coastline where most of the humans and potential COVID carriers are currently baking by the Tyrrhenian Sea. 

It took about 80 minutes and one police control checkpoint (they looooove to stop me and check my documents) before I parked at the foot of Orvieto, a small town in Umbria perched up on an old volcanic butte. Some skeletal research the night previous had me keen to check out Pozzo di San Patrizio, a water well built back in the 1530s. I found that I could park for free below the town and hop a funicular train that would dump me at the well’s entrance. Easy.

And by arriving first thing, even on a touristy holiday, it did prove to be the right choice. Not only was the temperature bearable when I got to Orvieto, but there were very few of my fellow humans moving about with me. Fellow souls in masks, dying to be out and doing something resembling normal before the cooler weather comes and threatens to turn up the Scary Meter for COVID.

Saint Patrick’s Well was built for a pope who had fled to Orvieto during the Sack of Rome. Of course that guy died before his big idea was fully realized, but isn’t that the overarching theme of history? But I haven’t found a ton of stuff named after Saint Patrick here in Italy, and I smiled to learn that this it was named for Saint Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg, a place that a was once believe to have linked the world of the living to that of eternity.

I was one of the first people to be let into the well that morning, which made arriving 20 minutes early a big plus. There’s honestly not much to it, but the geometry is the feature I found to be the draw.  In descending the spiral stairs, you are given ample opportunities to peer over the windows to look either up or down. While the crowds had not yet arrived, I still found myself jockeying to keep my distanza di sicurezza with another couple who were poking around sans clue. They seemed to take turns in either blocking my descent past them or moving closer in order to share the same ledge as I did. 

I couldn’t exactly fault this oblivious couple. I mean, we humans are an amazing mess. We each have singular visions for how we want our experiences to go—and anyone else who seemingly violates this always comes off as incomprehensible. I’m sure that they were thinking the same thing about me as I unsuccessfully tried to open my distance from them. This, incidentally, is another reason why I believe that COVID has been so successful in its transmission around the globe. There are so many of us, and we can never manage to stay out of each other’s way. 

And Antonio da Sangallo, the guy who built the wall 500 years ago, was kind of accidentally prescient in the way he engineered it. The well has two spiral staircases that sort of stack on top of each other; this is done so that there is one way down and one way up. The well was built with these features so that the mules of yore could journey down for water without bumping into the mules coming back up. Under the ridiculous marquee that is 2020, Saint Patrick’s Well is in perfect conformity for the COVID-mandated separation of ingress and egress points. So that’s something.

More than ever, sightseeing no matter where you are living has taken on a new sense of urgency. Maybe it’s just me, but the worn-out battle cry of “carpe diem” now has a sharpened edge. The ability to move about— appreciating the fact that we are currently free of any COVID lockdown purgatory—is a precious thing. I don’t know what will be on tap for the fall, but I can’t imagine that the remaining holidays for this calendar year will be exactly as we once knew them. A larger sort of waiting period continues.