A Young Anthropologist's Notebook

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...

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...

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...