Quaranta Giorni – Forty Days

As reported in my last journal entry, after nearly three weeks of staying at home in Cortona, Mary Pat and I are now staying at home in Wisconsin. The view out the windows has changed, and the things we can do each day can happen in a couple more rooms, but, with a few small variations, quarantine is quarantine, regardless of the locale.

The practice of quarantine began in 14th century Venice in an effort to protect that important port city from plague epidemics. Ships arriving in Venice from infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing. Forty days in Italian is quaranta giorni, but in the Venetian dialect it became quarantena or anglicized, quarantine. The goal, of course, was to make sure that anyone carrying disease would manifest the symptoms before bringing them ashore with them and infecting others.

Like thousands of my education colleagues around the country, I am meeting with my University of Georgia Studies Abroad students via video conferencing. It’s a poor substitute for meeting with them live and in person, but they are moving forward and learning some of the essential elements of the medium of photography. A challenge has been to move their thinking from the “exotic” subject matter they found outside their doorstep in Cortona to what they consider to be the more mundane subjects that they find in their homes and their hometowns.

But their quarantine – and mine – have given all of us a chance to think about where we are, how we live, what what we value. A portrait assignment, which in Cortona would have been of people they had met in that town, now becomes portraits of their immediate family. How many of us would relish a carefully considered portrait that we ourselves made of our parents or our siblings? I’m hoping that they will come to see these images as being even more rich in content than what they might have photographed in Italy.

As the virus continues to change the lives of people all around the world, those of us who are healthy and following the recommendations of being apart from our regular world can use this time to take stock of what we do in our everyday lives. Whether it’s 14 days or 40 – we have some time; what will we do with it?