The Balcony that Wasn’t – the Pandemic that Still Is

 

A year already – we are still in the grips of the coronavirus at every corner of the world.

Those of us, who will make it through, will be the raconteurs of a time when the planet got confused in the midst of all the advances in medicine and public health. Poets will write words to inspire, journalists stories from here and there, and cinematographers will give free flight to their imagination by patchworking stories till the end of time.

But for each one of us, there will be a special moment we will keep in us till our last breath. Perhaps it is the moment our loved one entered the hospital and never came out again. Perhaps it is how all relationships suddenly became virtual and deprived us of a touch or a kiss. Or perhaps it is how we celebrated the end of 2020, alone or with one other person, reading the pandemic statistics on the TV screen.

Yes, there are a million ways to letting 2020 and the pandemic permanently scar our memories.

… For me, it is the soo Italian behavior in Rome after the mayor Virginia Raggi invited city residents in lockdown to open their windows or step out onto their balconies for a singsong, at 18.00 every evening!

I had tears in my eyes every day following that first “balcony outing” when news from Italy showed the national anthem sang first from windows, balconies and rooftops in a Rome with empty streets and no traffic. There also were violin serenades, opera arias, or the clanging of pots and pans to demonstrate that coronavirus cannot stop the celebration of dolce vita. But that rather it can enhance the national gratitude, as throughout the country, people in windows, upon balconies or on rooftops every evening applauded medical professionals for their fight and dedication.

For me, that is what I will hang on to support my optimism in human nature and collective destiny.

… In many ways, 2020 has been a tug-and-pull between what we want and what the new situation tells us to accept. Namely that what we need to minimize or eliminate is exposure: to the virus and carriers, to unfounded opinions about how we can evade a pandemic, and to our own fears about helplessness.

Interestingly, when I followed the “balcony outings” in Italy a few synapses were made with my previous life as an epidemiologist.  Indeed, I recalled that as a student learning cancer epidemiology, I was most interested in the work of Bernadino Ramazzini who in 1713 identified the risk of breast cancer in women to nulliparity. He reported that women who had no children had higher odds for developing breast cancer than women who were single and nuns. He stated that parity and risk of breast cancer establishes “this marvelous sympathy of the breasts and uterus, those two sources of desire.”

It took almost a century for the Italian surgeon Domenico Rigoni-Stern in 1842 to analyse mortality data from death registers in Verona to confirm Ramazzini’s proposed association between parity and breast cancer, but in the process discovers an inverse relationship between uterine cancer and parity. That is, breast cancer patients had lower odds for uterine cancer i.e., nuns and unmarried women had lower risk of dying from uterine cancer.

If parity (or marriage and children) are the “exposure” that would provide protection against the odds of breast cancer.  But that there may be another cause for uterine cancer – hence the early suggestion of infectious diseases.

For me, the challenge of 2020 was convincing people that there are exposures that can be minimized or eliminated to win the fight against an infectious causative agent. The challenge remains.

My second synaptic cleft in between the balconies of Rome and the pandemic came after thinking about Verona and Domenico Rigoni-Stern. This time it sounded like:

          O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?

Strange, no?

Well, the reason why I thought about this has to do with Juliette’s balcony from where these immortal words were spoken.

But now, in the year 2020, this balcony was a symbol of unfounded and untrue “knowledge” that I believed we needed to minimize exposing ourselves to during this pandemic.

Why?

Well, Shakespeare never described a balcony. Rather he wrote that Juliet “appears in a window above”.

Hmm, so why do we think that Juliet was on a balcony? Well, because on via Cappello in Verona, there is a 13^th century house called “Casa di Giulietta”.  And it has a balcony that is not original.

So where did the balcony come from?

This is where Hollywood enters the scene. In 1935, George Cukor initiated the production of the first Romeo and Juliet movie starring Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer in the title roles.  The MGM  scenographers were sent to Verona to design the set for the film.

Well, there was no “Juliet house” in Verona nor her tomb as Shakespeare had described! So, Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and minister for press and propaganda, helped MGM recreate a balcony on that 13^th century house in the heart of Verona in 1937.

And that is what people believe Shakespeare wrote.

So, the entire story about the house is untrue – Juliet never lived there! But more importantly, Juliet is a fictional character – she never existed. Shakespeare wrote his famous play based on a 1562 poem entitled” The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” by the English poet Arthur Brooke, who in turn is said to have been influenced from a tale written by the Italian monk Matteo Bandello in 1554….

There we have it – millions of tourist flock to Verona to visit la Casa di Giulietta and touch the bronze statue of hers in the yard.  Even if it is all fiction and Hollywood!

… It is 2021 already. We do need to believe in Romeos and Juliets because it makes the challenges we have easier to cope with.

But we also need to realize that balconies, even when real, are part of a building.

January 18, 2021

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2021