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 though the face mask they wore around their neck was quite a testimony of what we have been through - I felt a little bit moved. Nevertheless, being among large crowds of people, visiting shops or even consuming a meal out feel weird and risky.
Despite being very few cases in Rome (we have an average of 5-10 new cases per day, which is nothing compared to the size of the city), being out and about is stressful because we always feel the potential danger around us. We don't greet each other with handshakes or hugs - even though we need to remember not to, since, for us, it is such a natural gesture to do so - and leaving home requires a long and complex ritual of wearing face masks, putting on gloves, bringing hand-sanitizing gel with us and using it at least three times during this process.
I went out for dinner with some friends and we chose a restaurant that didn't have many customers and let us sit on an open-air terrace. Dining out is now a different experience from what it used to be.
As soon as we walked in we were asked to leave a name and a number, as the law requires. In case anyone will report being ill and visiting the restaurant on the same day as we did - or in case someone working at the restaurant does - they will alert us so that we can get tested or choose to go into voluntary quarantine.
Then we proceeded to be sat down by the waiter, and here it gets complicated. By law, waiters now have to ask which kind of relationship you have with the other person(s) you are with: if you live together, you can sit next to each other; if you don't, you have to sit on the opposite sides of the table and if you are a group of three or more you need to sit on different tables. Our waiter, a young guy with nice eyes and an excellent knowledge of local wines, was already quite tired of this, and it was only the second day of reopening.
Employees in restaurants and shops must wear masks and gloves all the time, whereas customers who are eating or drinking can remove the mask but it must be worn again when you move around the room, like for example when you visit the toilette. It's only May and the night air is chilly, but I could see the waiters already sweating and having troubles breathing.
Then the moment to consult the menu comes. In some places they ask you to download an app or visit the website, so that you don't have to touch anything, but in the restaurant we were at they still had an old plastic menu. Even the gesture of touching it made us a bit anxious, because you can't be sure of whom touched it before you. The hand-sanitizing gel was our best friend of the night and had dinner with us on the table.
"I feel so weird eating something that doesn't come from my fridge", said one of my friends, and I share her feeling - I hadn't been out eating in almost three months and I am not used anymore to someone bringing me food.
At one point you have to shut down your brain and stop thinking about all the potential infected things you are touching, if you don't want to turn mad. One needs to find a balance between being obsessive about it but not loosing your guard down, like for example keeping the distance from other people or wearing your face mask when you are out.
An other friend of mine told me that when she took her mother grocery shopping for the first time in months, her mother was like a fish out of the bowl: she didn't know where to grab hand-sanityzing gel, where to queue, how to keep the proper distance from other customers. She was a foreigner in her own country. It took us a very short time to get used to these new habits and build a new sub-culture that will stay with us for a long time.
The feeling I get by walking around the city is that time was frozen for almost three months. You can see Winter collections in clothes shops and billboards still have theatre shows or movies advertised for March or even February. In the meanwhile, Spring came and went, Summer is almost here, and we spent these months home, letting time go by.
I wonder how we will look at this time period in a year time, or two, or a decade. It will be hard for sure to believe that in just two months our lives changed forever. My life - as well as many others - had a completely different direction before the pandemic broke out and it is hard to foresee even the near future. For once, we are forced to live in the present and try to build the best possibile world for the times to come.
Sunset by the seaside in Ostia, 19/05/2020
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