A Young Anthropologist's Notebook

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...