Sleepless in Perugia

Step aside, New York City, and let me introduce Italy, the country that never sleeps

Musical events like this one, right outside my windows during daylight hours, are fab. The ones that keep me awake at night—not so much. Photo mine.

Cari amici,

You’ve all heard the nickname—New York is “The City That Never Sleeps,” right? So sang Frank Sinatra in the theme song from the film New York, New York, and the nickname stuck. But as an Italian American, Frank should have known better—unless he never spent any time in the historic center of an Italian town, especially a university town, especially on a sweltering summer night when open windows are the only way to stave off death. Because as far as I can tell, Italians don’t sleep. I’m trying to get with the program, but clearly my Italian blood is defective. It’s missing the “sleep? what’s that?” gene, with tragic results.

Before I continue, let me say that I’m super noise sensitive, to the point that loud noises can be painful. Maybe you’re normal. I hope so. Please, don’t let me keep you from booking that charming little hotel on the lively little piazza in one of Italy’s thousands of über-quaint little towns. Though I will say that earplugs are never a bad idea.

Also, Italy isn’t entirely to blame for my sleeplessness; there’s my dog, too. Her twice-daily medication schedule requires me to get up at 6:30am, and even if I go back to bed for an hour, that’s the most I can hope for, because her bladder and bowels are, shall we say, demanding. (Trust me on this.)

Anyway, that’s my problem, and it’s only part of the reason there are days when my eyes feel heavy and my brain slogs along. The other parts are these: concerts, foghorn-voiced people who are out at all hours, partying students, the vacation rental that has unfortunately opened for business across the street, things built of stone (that means everything), and a usual dinnertime of 8 or 9pm, which, if you’re eating out or with friends, often ends at 11-ish or later. Add some post-dinner time to get home and do whatever needs doing and/or unwind enough to fall asleep, and that window for sleep, for early risers, shrinks to insufficient. It’s something that Italians seem to handle with ease. I curse them.

Who doesn’t love a university town?

University towns are great—they’re lively, full of youthful high-spiritedness, and they often host interesting events. Unfortunately students like to party, and they have an admirable ability to do so for an astonishing number of consecutive hours. They also like to hang out in public spaces, laughing and talking until the wee hours. One of those public spaces, complete with a bench to encourage lingering, is the piazzetta under my bedroom window.

Who doesn’t love a charming medieval town?

Let me explain: medieval = stone. And by that I mean stone everywhere—streets, piazzas, walls, buildings of all kinds. The noise problem isn’t just that lingerers and passersby talk loudly at 2, 3, and 4am, which of course they do, it’s that when everything is made of stone, sound is amplified. It reverberates. And that’s why I can’t do what you were about to suggest—solve my noise problem by sleeping in a room that’s not right on the street. Trust me, I’ve tried it. When I first moved into this house I slept in the room farthest from the street, thinking it would be quieter. Wrong. Street noises shoot into the church courtyard (essentially my “yard”) and fling themselves around the encircling stone walls and through the window straight into my ears. Shortly after I’d moved in, I was in the back room one day when I heard a voice, so close that I almost screamed. And by close I mean as if someone had leaned over my shoulder and spoken into my ear. Except they didn’t. That voice belonged to someone passing by in the street, a good 15 or so yards away.

This is to say that there are some things you just can’t know about a house until you’ve lived in it for a while. Still, I love my house, imperfections and all.

Who doesn’t love music?

This summer brought torture in the form of blasting, bone-jarring music from a variety of sources. It’s rare that I can hear the Umbria Jazz concerts held in the main piazza, up the hill from my house (the wind has to be just right), but the eight concerts held in a small piazza near my house, from 9pm to 1am, might as well happen in my living room. To make things worse, the music is usually a kind of new-agey vibey shit with a persistent bass that could be used to extract state secrets from traitors. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good bass line—just not at 1am, unless I’m out dancing.

Aside from those concerts, for about a week this summer I lay awake every night listening to music being broadcast from a house over the crest of my hill and down the other side a bit, which first I heard when I took my dog out to fare i bisogni (do her business) for the last time that night. The sound faded as I walked home, to my relief—but once I was in the house, there the music was, as loud as ever. It seems my house is positioned perfectly to receive it, channeled straight into my bedroom, because my neighbors closer to the source didn’t hear a thing. Maybe it has something to do with their twelve-foot garden wall. Hmmm.

Fortunately, this music was up my alley—plenty of classic rock and funky/bluesy/jazzy stuff—and I think I might not have minded it too much except for one strange thing: the music went from loud to soft in a regular rotation, as if someone had put the speakers on a turntable. Which meant I’d lie there, tense with anticipation, waiting for the next cycle from soft to loud, which was about every 30 seconds. I must have a hyperactive nervous system or something. Aren’t you glad you’re not me?

Who doesn’t love—oh, never mind. It’s me. I don’t.

I’m talking about that vacation rental I mentioned, which from the glimpses I get of the interior, had better be dirt cheap. Fortunately, not all of the guests have been intolerable. Sure, the occasional woman perches in the open window and screams into her cellphone for an hour, and the occasional infant shrieks for hours on end. (I’m not unsympathetic to those parents.) But window perchers and furious babies are nothing compared to the family that took departing in the wee hours of morning to a spectacular level of loud. I don’t recall hearing much from them while they were there, so maybe they decided to make up for lost time.

Let’s set the scene: It's 5am. You’re peacefully slumbering A car door slams, seemingly next to your head. Then the voices start, at a conversational level—if that conversation were held in a packed bar with live heavy metal music blasting. Okay, you think, fine, they’re leaving, it’ll be over in a minute. Except it’s not. Because—and to this day I regret not dragging myself out of bed to see what in the hell they were doing—for the next 10 or 15 minutes they punctuated their conversation with exuberant car-door slamming. Twenty times. I’m not exaggerating. After the third slam, I was so awake and incredulous that I actually counted.

Twenty freaking times. At 5am.

Who doesn’t love, dream of, fantasize about closing windows even though they desperately need to have fresh air in the house at all times? (Yeah, me again.)

Thanks to my mother, I inherited a visceral need to have the windows open whenever possible, though compared to her I’m next-level “gotta have air,” one of those weirdos who drives with the AC on and the windows open. This need comes at a price, sure, but I want you to know that I can adapt. Take, for example, the once-weekly, spectacularly hair-raising shattering of glass as bins of bottles and jars are hurled into the metal bed of the recycling truck at around midnight. Even in the summer, with all the windows open, I can (sometimes) sleep through that. Also, I have been known, on occasion, to note the passing of the almost-nightly recycling truck—which rattles, engine gunning, up the hill only feet from my windows—and go right back to sleep. I mean, I’ve got some skills.

Yes, I know the desire for peace and quiet is why some people choose to live in the country, but I actually like city life. (Bonus: we don’t have hunters traipsing around us here.) Yes, I’ve tried earplugs (they drive me nuts, so a pillow over my head is preferable), but nothing is as effective as closing the windows. And often that’s not an option. Call me strange, but I choose sleeplessness over being slowly roasted to death.

The obvious solution is to learn to nap. I try, and mostly fail. There’s so much I want and need to do, and the days are already too short to fit everything in, so my brain often won’t cooperate. I’m grateful for the days when my body refuses to take no for an answer and muscles my stubborn brain out of the way as if it were a cranky toddler.

Instead of autumn this year, we’re having some glorious summer weather, the kind we would have killed for during the inferno that was our actual summer. But even if winter follows suit and behaves more like fall, surely the temperatures will drop enough that we can close our windows at night. And then (twisting Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s words in “The Sound of Silence” just a little bit) I’ll go to bed whispering, “Hello quiet, my old friend.”  

Alla prossima,

Cheryl

© 2023 Cheryl A. Ossola

---

Book of the week (a childhood favorite):

• Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book by (you guessed it) Dr. Seuss

P.S. My book! Which you can buy here or on the usual sites, or, better yet, order if from you local bookstore. Another fab option is to ask your library to stock it. If you read it and like it, please tell your friends and/or leave a few lines of praise on any bookish site. You’d be surprised how much a rating or review helps authors. Baci!