Kate Langbroek on bringing her family home from Italy amid COVID

Kate Langbroek recalls a year like no other that her family spent living in Italy and the emotional toll that came with being in the centre of the pandemic.

Bells would chime outside my window. They were church bells ringing, of course, to mark the time. We were surrounded by churches, with half-a-dozen within walking distance, so their tolling had become the musical soundscape to our life.

We lived in Italy, you see.

“We’d brought nothing with us but our four children and a dream.” (Picture: Paul Stuart)

That short sentence contains a big story. And it seems almost laughable now that we went there in search of “adventure”.

In January 2019, my husband Peter and I arrived in the northern Italian city of Bologna – La Rossa (The Red), as it’s sometimes known. We’d brought nothing with us but our four children, our suitcases, some jars of Vegemite, and a dream to live a different life for a year.

In our holiday meanderings around this boot-shaped treasure-chest, we were constantly confronted by what would be clichés if it weren’t for the fact it was real life: tumbling pots of eye-bright flowers; humble kitchens exalted by the cooking of an ancient nonna; waiters pinching the cheeks of our young boys; crazy driving; glorious, golden light filtered through shuttered windows; the Romanesque blue of night skies illuminated by a glittering moon.

All of this was magnificent.

“We etched out a new life and made friends, and it was hard and frustrating and exhausting.” (Picture: Paul Stuart)

Yet there was something else we yearned for – something we didn’t know we were missing until we bore witness to it in Italy. Freedom. Freedom to jaywalk. To drive fast. To ride a bike without a helmet. To take your dog into a restaurant or up the escalators of a department store.

To go to Amsterdam for a weekend. To share a cup of wine on the steps of a church. To jump off cliffs into an aquamarine sea.

So we found our feet, and an apartment; we hung up what few clothes we had, and the children started school. We leased a car and a parking spot, and slowly, slowly (piano, piano, as the Italians say), learnt enough of the language to get by.

“Like the rest of the world, Italy doesn’t know what the future holds.” (Picture: Cameron Grayson)

We etched out a new life and made friends, and it was hard and frustrating and exhausting. It was also so good that we decided to stay for a second year.

This year. 2020. The year of COVID.

That meant four months confined to our apartment; home-schooling, cooking, cleaning and caring for six people. It was, of course, the opposite of freedom.

And yet, come June, we were released into an Italian summer that felt welcome and free and hard-won. It was as though the dragon-virus had been vanquished. We went south, to Puglia, to seaside towns where people rarely even wore masks.

We swam and basked in the sun, and ate fried calamari and left invisible footprints on the centuries-worn stone of villages and towns. At summer’s end, in September, our children went back to school for the first time since March.

Then the dragon returned, breathing fire. Lockdown again loomed, just as it lifted in our home state of Victoria. Like the rest of the world, Italy doesn’t know what the future holds.

Kate Langbroek features in this Sunday’s Stellar.

And still the church bells chime – they counted down our final days in Italy, before our return to Australia this month. They ring out for history, past and present. And ring our way, ultimately, towards freedom.

They’re the sound of faith.

Long may they toll.

Kate Langbroek will return to air in January as co-host of the 3PM Pick Up, weekdays on the KIIS Network.

MORE STELLAR

Carrie Bickmore pays tribute to her surprising 2020 hero

David Campbell faces his toughest interview yet