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 13th 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 13th
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
