Shutters

by Gene Shelburne

Far north in Italy lies the Alpine village of Sappada, a storybook place, nestled between towering crags of the southern Alps known as the Dolomites. Its shops and houses are scrunched along a highway that threads the valleys of the high country.

In an out-of-the-way place like that we felt safe, much as we do in rural America, away from the violence and petty street crime of the big cities.

It was dark when we drove into Sappada that night. The next morning as I reconnoitered our new surroundings, the first thing that caught my eye were the shutters on our neighbor’s condo. They weren’t just decorations. These were heavy wooden coverings that latched from the inside and covered the doors and windows totally.

Winter must be fierce here, I thought, to require protection like that. But I had guessed wrong.

The first time all of us decided to leave the condo together, my son (who now has lived in Italy more than a year) began closing and latching shutters.

“We wouldn’t dream of leaving our house unshuttered,” he explained. “Even if we go to the corner store for 10 minutes, we close and lock every shutter.” Otherwise, he told us, thieves climb the security fences, break in through the windows, and help themselves to whatever’s inside.

“In the streets of Naples,” Jon informed us, “you never leave anything inside a car.” The first week his little family lived there, in broad daylight thieves bashed in a window of the car they had just purchased.

Our kids moved to Italy from Okinawa. On that Japanese island where 90 percent of the people are active Buddhists, petty thievery is unheard of. In Italy where 90 percent of the citizens are lapsed Christians (and therefore basically non-religious), nothing you own is safe.

America’s ardent anti-religionists, so intent on eradicating the influence of faith in the public venues of our land, would do well to take note of what sort of country they will have if they succeed.