From the DolomitiBelluno archive — original text by Cristina Da Rold, published in Italian on 2 August 2017. Translated by the editorial staff.
It is not easy to explain the why behind a choice like living in the provinces without slipping into rhetoric and without exposing too much of one’s private life. It is far simpler to describe the “how” than the “why” of the fact that I work all over Italy, sometimes outside Italy too, while proudly living in Belluno. To tell the truth, this is the first time I have set about putting my thoughts in order in black and white, and I thank the great Michele Sacchet, who threw down this challenge, as well as being the person who helped me find the home I wanted right here in Belluno — the one from which I work, precisely, from the mountains, and from whose balcony I am writing now, looking out at the Nevegal.
To cut a long story short, I am a journalist and I deal mainly with health, healthcare and the environment. That is what I say when I want to keep it brief, which is almost always, since describing my work is not simple: when I say I am a journalist, people picture the bohemian image of the reporter who spends her days hunting for news that she jots down in crumpled notebooks and who writes through the night. And the reaction is: “but how do you do that from Belluno, sorry?” In reality my work is something else entirely. I am a freelancer who, among other things, writes journalistic articles for scientific and non-scientific magazines, mostly online, but who also offers press-office services, social media management and consultancy for communication projects of various kinds, always in the health field, for public bodies (local health authorities, scientific congresses, university projects) or private ones (scientific publishers, communication agencies).
Although I was based first in Longarone and now in Belluno, so far I have never worked with organisations from the Belluno area, though I hope it will happen sooner or later. I work with newspapers and magazines based elsewhere — in Milan, Rome, Trieste, Perugia, Turin, Venice, Pisa — and the same goes for the rest of the activities I carry out and the projects I am involved in. (More details here)
The central point is the possibility of working remotely, which is made possible by the internet, which provides free platforms such as Slack – to name just one – that allow you to collaborate with colleagues who are physically in other parts of Italy or the world. We have Skype to talk face to face, free of charge, anywhere in the world and to interview experts (and even to have aperitifs, spritz in hand, with friends on the other side of the globe!), Google Drive and Dropbox to share documents and work on them with four or more hands as if we were at the same table. And above all we have the net, which lets us, even from our own homes, access documents, information and databases as if I were in any city office.
Then, if the need arises to be on the spot for whatever reason, fortunately all it takes is a train or a plane. My personal compromise was to choose a home in a quiet, green place, but one from which I could walk to the railway station, since I take quite a lot of trains.
Of course, not every job lends itself to this way of working, but I believe that most so-called “intellectual” jobs allow it today. And I believe – and this is the heart of this small contribution of mine – that all this can bring tangible benefits both to our personal dimension and to life in the provinces, and more generally to spreading the culture of “counter-urbanisation”, in the sense that forced urbanisation is not a necessity.
You will forgive the long preamble in which I had to ramble on about what I do, but otherwise what follows would have seemed a little obscure. And you will forgive me if this post now becomes, at times, even more personal. In me, the “how” and the “why” mentioned at the start necessarily go hand in hand. In these few years since I started working, I have tried to adapt my image of what work should be to an idea of life that I felt was more right for me. Obviously the heart of the matter is that this is how I am made: I like nature, calm, uncrowded places. I like having plants and flowers around me, and I like being able to say no and to devote my time as much as possible to things that really interest me. I don’t like tower blocks or traffic, and I don’t like people who believe they are living “in the world” just because they have a lot of people around them. I grew up in Longarone in a green setting, and that is my starting point, and my point of arrival too.
Just yesterday I read “The Eight Mountains” by Paolo Cognetti. Wonderful; my eyes welled up at more than one passage. Another one, though, made me smile: “They didn’t exactly choose it – he said. If someone goes to live high up, it’s because down below they won’t leave him in peace” – “And who is down below?” – “Bosses. Armies. Priests. Department heads. It depends.”
Perhaps for me being here also has a therapeutic effect, to balance the fact that my job means being connected all day, interacting constantly with people, especially through social media, where there is little discussion and a great deal of quarrelling. And where the worst of us comes out.
Solitude: it cannot go unmentioned. I even used it in the title. I will add nothing to what Fabrizio De André said about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-RiRuCmZlQ) during one of his concerts, introducing the album “Anime Salve” — the one with “Dolcenera”, just so we understand each other.
“Anime salve means solitary spirits. It is a kind of praise of solitude. As we know, not everyone can afford it: the old cannot afford it, the sick cannot afford it. The politician cannot afford it: a solitary politician is usually a politician who is done for.
But essentially, when you can remain alone with yourself, I believe you manage more easily to make contact with what surrounds you, and what surrounds you is not made up only of our fellow human beings; I would say it is made up of the whole universe, from the leaf that sprouts at night in a field up to the stars. And you manage to attune yourself better to these surroundings, you manage to think better about your own problems, I even believe you manage to find better solutions, and, since we are similar to our fellow beings, I believe solutions can be found for others too.
By this I do not mean to make any panegyric of the anchorite’s life or of the hermit’s; it is not about becoming hermits or anchorites: it is that I have observed through my experience of life, and it has been a life (it is not by my identity card that I show my age), I believe I have lived it; I have realised that a man alone has never frightened me, whereas organised man has always frightened me a great deal.”
Enough. End of the personal aside, and on to the “political”. Rethinking work is a fundamental step towards staying in balance between what we are and what we want to be. So as not to tip towards a drifting away from our ambitions or – worse – from our nature. We are living through an enormous ambivalence, with an ever more pressing process of urbanisation that forces us to think about what the United Nations, and governments with them, call Healthy Cities, resilient cities. To design the changes needed to make our metropolises no longer bunkers but liveable places. And thank goodness this is happening, of course. Even though there would be plenty to discuss about the way urban greenery is built, too.
In smaller cities rents are lower, and a 30-year-old can afford a decent home of their own, managing to support themselves independently. Getting around costs less too, above all in terms of time. The air is better (not everywhere, but in Belluno it certainly is).
Of course, there are not 27 cinemas and 84 theatres, summer courses for children on anything and everything, 10 different judo schools and so on, but as someone very well known used to say, all that is superstructure. In a way dear Miss Jane Marple says the same (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_morte_nel_villaggio) when she explains to her nephew Raymond that “after all, life is essentially the same everywhere” in the things that matter.
At the same time, those who live in the city feel the pressing need to escape at the weekend and take refuge in more solitary places. And the result is Sunday afternoons of long queues of cars on the roads between our villages (two Sundays ago they estimated 33,000 cars on the SS51 Alemagna!), of people who, as a dear friend of mine, an anthropologist who studies the dark mechanisms of tourism, likes to say, “pass through places like zombies”. I cannot help thinking, looking at this humanity, that we have still understood too little about the difference between the necessary and the unnecessary. It seems we are there pushing the wheel that is chasing us and from which we are running away.
In the end, I knew it: I have not managed to keep the personal, the temperamental, separate from the social.
On the other hand, to quote a slogan of the feminist struggle (always worth quoting), “the personal is political”. The choices that concern our personal lives, which sometimes stem from not having really understood ourselves, become political facts, in the sense of the polis, of the community. But also: what concerns our own person has the importance of a community fact. Very banal, but I agree with it.
Coming back to the focus that good Michele asked of me, I believe that today the net offers us the possibility of continuing to live in rural settings while interacting with realities outside them. Contamination is necessary, and positive, as long as the genius loci is not lost. As long as we make an effort not to all become creatures that build grey dens with identical “office” plants, perhaps with a registered trademark. (Things I have seen, mind you!)
The good thing is that in Belluno I am seeing this positive ferment. My generation (those born between the ’80s and ’90s) is acting. I see volcanic digital communication agencies, which make the area flourish by picking up what is positive in the rest of the world, thanks to the net. A lovely attempt at coworking right in the centre called Distretto Creativo, not to mention the Dolomiti Contemporanee project, which needs no introduction. In fact I am saying nothing new: we are talking about the concept of the hyperlocal, on which, if you are interested, there is plenty of good literature.
These are signs that we are evolving. Signs that there is an alternative to the all too often touted pairing: I want more and so I leave / I stay but give up that “more” I could have elsewhere.
I hope you will not mind if I end on an even more general note. I believe – and here I borrow the thought from Noam Chomsky – that in this digital evolution there is fertile ground for a new libertarian thinking, one that uses technology to uphold above all an ethic of work, to try to break free from the logic of necessarily having to live in the city, with sky-high rents that force us to work a great deal but above all to accept jobs that in reality we would not want, because otherwise we would not manage to maintain the status quo we have set for ourselves.
Just in the last few days I read a very interesting text (http://www.eleuthera.it/scheda_libro.php?idlib=351) in which two contemporary thinkers, two sociologists, Manuel Castells and Tomás Ibañez, discuss freedom in the digital age.
“This is not about taking up the usual dispute between those who believe that the new information and communication technologies are leading us towards an apocalyptic future and those who instead believe they are leading us towards an idyllic one,” the two intellectuals stress.
“It is rather a matter of observing whether these opposing effects, which occur simultaneously in present experience, are part of a dynamic of joint development, whether this ambivalence can be thought about and analysed in terms of some kind of interaction between the elements that make it up. […] It is a matter of reflecting on the contradiction, the ambivalence, the conflict, the interweavings, the tensions that mark the present moment. I am not suggesting we develop a forecast of what the future will be like, but that we concentrate on the coexistence of these two opposing dynamics.”
In the end I think the net offers a great opportunity not only to small cities and villages but to society as a whole, to try to follow other paths towards greater autonomy and greater faithfulness to ourselves. And I also believe that companies, especially large ones, have a fundamental role in all this. It is certainly no discredit to go off to the city to look for a job that cannot be found here. I think the evolution we are beginning to breathe would draw a deep breath from a strong shift by companies towards a logic of dispersal, and towards a use of the net and of technologies that finally dismantles one of the most dishonest illusions of modernity: that of old-style teleworking, which is a long way from a logic of autonomy and of valuing the individual. Working on the net is not teleworking; it is above all creating relationships.
[Disclaimer – I was born in Belluno, but I have lived in cities: at 18 I went to live elsewhere for university for six years: three years in Venice, two in Florence and one in Trieste. I came back at 25, having finished my master’s, when I started working and registered as self-employed]
