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On Travelling in a Pandemic World, Overcoming Fears and the Future

If I go back to a few months ago, this Summer and all that came with it would seem rather impossible to accomplish.  In April or even May, the situation in Italy concerning the Covid-19 was quite bad and no one could have imagined discos and pubs to be open again in late June or people freely travelling not only around the country, but abroad too.  Nevertheless, from mid-June on the situation was getting safer and safer, hospitals were discharging more patients than they were admitting and less and less people were diagnosed with Covid. Everything went back to normal, and only the constant recalls of maintaining a safe distance from others and the mandatory face masks reminded us of what had happened only two months earlier.  The past weeks, with the slow but constant rising in Covid cases and new measures implemented by the government to stop it, proved us that the fight against Covid is not over yet, and that we must keep our guard up. On the other hand, we now know man...
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On Visiting Home After Living Through a Pandemic (And the Idea Of "Home" Itself)

If you happen to talk with an anthropologist and ask them how we can define the concept of "home", they will tell you that it depends on many different variables that are related to the culture, the family system, the idea itself of what a house should look like or be for.  The first six months of 2020 were quite intense for me - and they would have been despite a pandemic breaking out. At the beginning of this year I questioned myself on where I feel my roots are, and I wondered why I am so unattached to them.  When the pandemic broke out in Italy (early March) I didn't have much time to think about where I should've spent my lockdown - for a moment I considered going back to what I used to consider "home" before, but then I realized I was not drawn to it because I had now a new place to consider as such. It was a tough decision, but in the end - maybe for the first time in my life - I did what was best for me and not what others expected me of doing.  For ...

Diaries from the Quarantine - VIII, Chronicles of a Night Out in Times of a Pandemic

Life is slowly going back to normal.  Last weeks restaurants and shops opened again, we are allowed to move around our own region and most people are now back at work for good. It seems the virus has stopped spreading as fast as it used to do, less and less people are being admitted in the hospital everyday and less and less people are dying from COVID. Nevertheless, the risk of an increase in numbers  of contagions is still high and most of us are walking on egg shells when it comes to going back to a somewhat "normal life". In the past week I started hanging out with people again, had an aperitivo at the bar, went to the seaside, had dinner in a restaurant, took more than a walk in the city centre.  The weather is nice and Summer comes early in Rome, so the feeling most of us share is that we are on the first day of a holiday we wanted for a very long time.  The first time I saw people sitting down at a pub, drinking and chatting as if anything had happened - even ...

The Quarantine Diaries VII - Step after step

Since last Monday, in Italy we have been living in what we call "Phase 2".  We are enjoying our re-found freedom, walking in parks, getting a take-away meal from a bar or a restaurant, meeting up with friends and relatives.  Some of us - and I put myself in this group - are afraid this is just a break and soon we will be back to full-quarantine mode, or at least some parts of the country will. Others are more optimistic and are fully enjoying this new "Phase", sometimes recklessly.  Despite I could be meeting up with other people now, I am still refraining myself from doing it. I am aware I am way too careful and I should probably do something different from what I have been doing in the past two months, but I am a bit afraid I am not used to being with people anymore.  I mean, I was somewhat of an introvert, not-very-social person before and this situation simply heightned my natural traits; but I think living through a pandemic, on some levels, aw...

Diaries from the Quarantine - VI and The Fear of What Is to Come

It seems we are now entering a new phase of our fight against the COVID - 19.  The government and the task force, called to work on which measures and steps should be adopted to lead the country out of the crisis, called it "Phase 2".  As the country jokingly says, it's like Phase 1, but with short sleeves and more mosquitos around. It seems we will be allowed to queue out of more shops than we used to, and those of us living closeby their relatives and partners are allowed to visit them. So, for those of us - like me - who live far away from their family and at the moment don't have a partner, nothing changes. Thanks a lot, romance-normative and family-based society. Even though, considering that in the task force the only representatives of social sciences and humanities were, out of 17 members, only a social psychologist and a sociologist, I am not surprised they chose solutions that would fit 1960s' Italian society but not the 2020s' real country...

Diaries from the Quarantine V - A New Normality

Quarantine has been going on for six weeks. Now most of the world is living as we do, from Rome to New York, Bangkok to Berlin, we are all locked inside waiting for these hard times to pass.  The world as we knew it has gone, and who knows whether it will ever come back.  New meanings, structures and symbols are defining our lives. Something as easy as going to buy groceries is now a complex mission we undertake with precautions and worries; we meet with friends online, trying to do activities we bounded on in our past life - watching a movie, playing games - painfully aware that, in the end, we are always alone in front of a screen.  I like standing on the balcony, looking down on the street that is, day by day, going back to be busy as it used to be - this week some industries started working again in Italy, using the due precautions. I stare at people walking by, some are holding groceries, others are walking the dog; most of them are wearing a f...

The One with Thoughts and Memories (from the Quarantine. The situation hasn't changed yet).

I am sitting on the terrace, on a Sunday afternoon in April.  I live on one of the busiest roads of Rome, yet there are almost no cars around and the only noise is the eery blank sound of the Bank of Italy in front of us. At night, I can hear birds chirping and the silence is deafening. Up to a month ago, I used to wake up at 6 am every day because of the traffic noise.  If COVID hadn't happened, I would probably be out, enjoying the city with some friends, or maybe packing up for going back to Milan for Easter. Instead, this day looks just like the twenty before it, and at least the next ten will all be the same.  It is scary how much the days look alike - I remember very few things that happened over the last three weeks. Luckily, at times something funny happens, like the morning when my flatmate accidentally ate porridge with flour worms in it, or the time we decided to take the camera out and take silly pictures of us, with our eyebags and messy hair, fo...