A Young Anthropologist's Notebook

It's day 23. Or at least I believe so, I am not sure. It is difficult to day how much time has passed, sometimes it seems like it was a year, sometimes like it was just two days. They say that the quarantine will probably go on until after Easter (so mid-April), and even then a lot of restrictions will still be in order. Life is slowly passing by, and sometimes, in the quietness of the apartment, it is easy to forget what is going on outside. Building a routine definetely helped me in balancing my mental health and making these empty days productive. I wake up, do yoga, clean up the house, eat, attend some online classes to which I applied to   put something new on   my curriculum, do some more yoga, eat again and go to sleep. I also watch a lot of movies and tv shows, and I gave myself the goal to learn something new everyday. It seems I can live through the apocalypse in a much better way than I usually live my day-by-day life. We all need some sort of glue to keep ...

In recent history, one might think that Italy has always been divided into two sides.  North and south. Fascists and communists. Artists and criminals. I could go on and on about this. Despite being true that Italy has always had two parts fighting each other, it is also true that they are parted by one big grey area in between. At the end of WWII, partisans fought against fascists for our freedom; we rightfully remember these brave men and women, and the sacrifices they made for us. One might mistankenly believe that the whole country was, suddenly, either red or black, a supporter of Mussolini or an allies' sympathizer, a slave to the system or a warrior for freedom. The reality is that most of the population was neither a partisan nor a fascist - they were just trying to survive. In the same way, most Italians are neither an artist nor a criminal, but a creative mix of the two. The spheres of legality and illegality are often overlapping for us - most of us won't e...

Just like any other human process, being in quarantine is a cycle. You go through all the classic phases of grievance: denial, acceptance, sadness, anger, resolution. Not necessarily in this order.  I have been in denial for a bit, believing the epidemic would not turn this bad in Italy. Then I accepted that the only way to slow the contagion down was isolating and making some sacrifices, and this led me to the sadness phase - which is still there, especially at night. I am now going through anger as well.  I am not even sure what I am angry about. Can I be angry at something that is barely alive? At something that is so small we can't see it, yet it is disrupting our lives so tragically? Can I be angry at a virus? Maybe I am angry at all those who fled from Milan almost two weeks ago, potentially spreading the disease all over the country; or maybe I am angry at people queueing up outside supermarkets, afraid of unlikely food shortages. It seems they are not ...

This is the eight day of quarantine for me. Exactly one week ago, on Monday 9th of March, as everybody knows by now, the whole country of Italy was declared a red zone. This extraordinary measure was taken only two days after the centre of the epidemic, the northern region of Lombardy, had been closed down in the same way. In the following day more restricting measures were adopted to stop the virus from spreading as fast. In less than a month, our country was completely taken by the disease and our day-by-day life disrupted. When the first patient (patient 1) was taken ill to the hospital and the diagnosis of COVID-19 was confirmed, panic slowly started to creep into our mind. As always in our recent history, Italians started a witch hunt. Those who were blamed (or still are) were, in order: individuals seemingly not following the government instructions to self-quarantine when coming back from China, then scientists who kept sending alarming messages to the country, then ...

Just in case anyone is keeping track, I recently moved to yet an other place where people don't believe in heating up the house during Wintertime: Rome. Villa Borghese. Tempietto di Esculapio. Don't get me wrong, I love Rome. It's one of my top three cities in the world (sharing the podium with Lisbon and Sydney), but people should understand that WINTERS ARE COLD HERE TOO WHY DO YOU NOT USE THE HEATING AAAAH Anyway, up to six weeks ago, I had no idea this was the direction my life would take. As all good things in life, this transfer was unexpected and sudden. 2020 - and the new decade - has just begun and I am already accomplishing one of my goals. Piazza Navona In my life, I realized, things either move very fast or are still for ages. And yet, when I think of everything that happened over the past five years, I can barely make sense of it. In five years I got two degrees, lived in four different cities (weeeeelll a village and three cities) and in five...