(Director’s Note: Seeing Covid-19 hit Italy early, and hard, I wrote to a colleague in the Department of Languages, Roberto Risso, for his sense of the situation, below. Dr. Risso was born and raised in Turin, Italy, where he lived
until eleven years ago. After relocating to the US, he has lived
in Wisconsin, Maine, and South Carolina. He now lives in the Clemson area,
where he loves gardening and reading. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Clemson University. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
The planetary dimension of the catastrophe became clear to the Belpaese quite early, when a European citizen was said to have brought to Italy COVID 19, a virus originated in China and was spreading fast. Italy has a special bond with China, a mutual fascination that dates back to Marco Polo’s travel and to his famous book. The so-called new Silk Road has a relevance that should never be underestimated in today’s world. Billion of Euros’ worth of commerce and almost half million of Chinese people living in Italy reinforce this bond. And yet anti-Chinese xenophobia hit Italy at the beginning of the pandemic in February 2020: hard-to-watch videos surfaced of Chinese people being insulted and beaten on the streets. Italians were scared, angry, unhappy, very unprepared, but mostly had the decency to admit it from day one.
The virus hit Italy hard from the very beginning: a densely populated territory with areas that are among the most polluted in Europe, by March and April the North of Italy was a hotspot and multiple hundred of victims died daily, especially in the Lombardy region, the economic capital of the country. The harrowing images of the military trucks transporting coffins out of the Lombard city of Bergamo became iconic of the disaster that was taking place under the Tuscan (and Lombard) sun. As a result, new emergency laws were introduced and reinforced: total lockdown for more than a month and after that compulsory masks everywhere. Italians obeyed and thank God they did. And it worked, indeed. By end of April and May the situation was better: from hundred of deaths daily to a few dozen, then few people, a dozen less. But with relaxation of the attention a new wave came, mid-June, and the threat of a new Nation-wide lockdown convinced people to be more careful.
Is it possible to conceive Italy with no tourists? No, of course not. But without planes, and with borders sealed, no tourists came and the only visitors were the boatloads of refugees who came by sea. Singing from balconies, memes, online feuds, political chaos were nothing but distractions; from the beginning of the Second Republic on, politicians have been clowns all along. Since Italy has always been a divided and diverse country, the pandemic did not unite it; Italians did not became any better. Contrary to what it was said during the lock-down–“Ne usciremo migliori e più forti”, or ‘we will get out of this stronger and better’–did not really happen, unfortunately. What really happened is that, due to the internal immigration of the past, at the beginning of the pandemic many southerners living in the North fled the closing cities and brought the virus with them. Italy has also the oldest population in Europe, second oldest in the world after Japan: the “nonni”, grandpas and grandmas, died like flies, especially in the nursing homes, where, the suspicion is, that nothing was done to avoid contagion. On the contrary, people say (and please remember, vox populi, vox Dei) that the virus was used to get rid of many of them. It is so atrocious that it can be true in a country no stranger to atrocities.
As of July 4th 2020 the contagion index is anything but uniform: it has increased from June but many central and southern regions are free from Covid 19, and not for lack of testing. Lombardy, where the virus has claimed so many lives in the past, has a level of 0.89 index, which is good, although the nation’s cases as of the beginning of July 2020 are 241,419 which is scary. In four months, twenty thousand jobs have been lost for good.
As of July 1st citizens from USA, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, Turkey, India, Saudi Arabia and Mexico have been blocked from entering the Country. Chinese nationals have not been blocked yet. With these conditions it is very hard to foresee the damage to the tourist industry. We will see what the European Union will do about it, since its priorities usually seem to be the well being of German Banks and not the hardships of citizens. What I know for sure, despite all the terrible news and the scary data, is that Italians will move forward despite the ten thousand babies that will not be born in 2021. In a Country that is already at a level zero birthrate.
Moving forward and rebuilding after catastrophes is what Italians do best.