Orderly, dour, cowed: how my beloved Italy is changed by coronavirus
Holed up with his family in their Parma flat, our writer tells of the eerie atmosphere in a country usually known for sociability, chaos and fun
by Tobias Jones
Since the whole of Italy was put in quarantine last Monday, it has been surreal here in the northern city of Parma. When you wander around the alleys and squares, you begin to feel like the protagonist of a post-apocalyptic film, constantly asking yourself, “Where is everyone?”
If you do see a solitary human, their reaction is diffidence, if not alarm: they adjust their face mask and move away. The habitual warmth of Italians has been replaced by self-preserving coolness. A very touchy-feely country is now obsessed by personal space.
That eerie sense of living in the end times only increases when you watch the news. Prison riots erupted across the country last week. There was a mass break-out in Foggia (six inmates are still at large). At Milan’s San Vittore prison, black smoke was seen gushing from the windows, and seven inmates died in violence in Modena. The police patrols and blockades only make things feel more ominous.
Free movement within a borderless Europe already seems like a distant memory: there were 90km queues on the Brenner pass (into Austria) last week, and Slovenia has blocked its roads with Italy. It is understandable that Italy, the country with the highest rate of coronavirus infections outside China, should be isolated, but to Italians it feels as if the country is being left to rot. Italy has received more aid from China than from the US or the EU.
Every day the numbers of Italy’s infections and deaths leap by 20% or 30%. Parma is in the Emilia-Romagna region, where so far more than 2,000 people have tested positive and more than 200 have died. In the province of Parma there have been more than 518 cases. One of those, Giovanna, is a close family friend. It feels as if the darkness just keeps getting closer.
The intensive care units are now all full. Hospital wards are spilling out into corridors, tents, car parks, gardens and commercial warehouses. We are hearing words – like “triage” – which are usually associated with warfare. Medics and nurses are having to make decisions on which patients to prioritise. Some doctors have died, and others have compared the numbers of admissions to dealing with “an earthquake every day”.
Part of the weirdness comes from that fact that you can’t go anywhere. Museums, gyms, schools, cinemas and libraries are all closed. Your instinct is to hunker down with the wider family, but all the advice is to stay away from the older generation, who are the most vulnerable to infection. You can’t gather round those who, like Giovanna, are ill. Not even her ailing husband is allowed close to her. You can’t go to church because they, too, are now closed. I would like to head to my mother-in-law’s house in the hills, but we’re not allowed out of the city.
It’s amazing how quickly you become used to new habits: not getting in the lift with other people or standing well apart in a queue (normally we’re bunched tight to foil the queue-bargers). When you ask a shopkeeper for a loaf of bread, they put it on the counter then step away. You pick it up, pay and step away. They put your change out and move back as you move forward. You feel like repelling magnets.
Some friends are fretful, washing their hands every half-hour or putting on surgical gloves to open doors. It’s hard not to begin to doubt your own sanity and wonder whether it’s rational to be following all these restrictions and rituals.
Then, last Wednesday night, another emergency decree ramped up the restrictions: all shops, except chemists and food stores, were ordered to remain closed. If you want to leave the house, you now have to print off a document to explain to police your timing, destination and motive.
In some ways it feels a little as you might imagine the Middle Ages. It’s as if we’re inside a city with metaphorical walls where rumours abound: that a friend, Marco, has a rasping cough; that politician Silvio Berlusconi has tested positive; that our kids will have to attend school throughout Italy’s baking summer. And Parma feels medieval because it is so quiet. I’ve never known it so safe to cycle around an Italian city. It’s as if the cars, as well as the humans, are keeping their distance.
So everything feels softer somehow. I never knew there was someone in the next block of flats who played the guitar. You can hear them strumming late at night. The natural world – all the turtle doves and cherry blossom – seems brighter or emboldened. That quietness extends to the football. Watching Juventus v Inter Milan the other night (before Serie A, too, was suspended) you could hear, in the absence of the crowds, almost everything from the actual game: the laces on leather, the players’ groans, shouts and insults. It made them seem mortal, like Sunday league players. Now, of course, several players – Juventus’s Daniele Rugani and the former Southampton (now Sampdoria) striker Manolo Gabbiadini – have tested positive.
What’s intriguing is that all the adjectives you might normally use to describe Italy (sociable, excitable, chaotic, undisciplined, polemical, fun and – despite all its troubles – somehow optimistic) have become redundant. It feels completely the opposite: isolated, calm, orderly, obedient, cowed, dour and pessimistic. It’s as if the country has suddenly discovered a different, maybe deeper, side. It’s a sterner, more serious place.
It’s sombre, of course, because there have now been more than 1,200 deaths from Covid-19 in Italy. There’s bafflement at the fact that the mortality rate here is (at time of writing) 7.17% compared with 0.05% in Sweden and 0.2% in Germany. We don’t understand why we’ve got it so bad, whether it’s related to hospital capacity, superbugs, a very aged population, a high proportion of smokers or something else entirely. Nor do we understand why the contagion has spread so fast in Italy: the cases per million of the population is, at 250, far higher than anywhere else in the world: Iran stands at 120, China at 56.
There are also well-founded fears about the Italian economy, which was in deep trouble even before this crisis. The Milan stock market plunged 11% last Monday, then plummeted another 17% on the Thursday. With shops and businesses at a standstill, the government has promised a moratorium on mortgage payments, childcare vouchers for working parents and a suspension of tax payments. The costs of unemployment benefit (the country’s cassa integrazione) is likely to spike. Those measures will cost the treasury an estimated €25bn.
Part 1
