In early August of 2018 I was lounging in a rocking chair on the front porch of a ski chalet in the most Northeast corner of Italy, gazing out on the expanse of the Dolomite mountain range. I shared the cabin, a refurbished farmhouse in the shadow of my host family’s home, with a Canadian girl who worked for the same English teaching program that I did. The midnight air was crisp, and in that town called Amaro on the front porch of my temporary home I had never seen the Milky Way so clearly.
Amaro is a town so small that not only does everyone know everyone, but everyone has some familial relation to each other. My host mom’s elderly uncle who we nicknamed Zio Vino (Wine Uncle) arrived at family dinner every night with two bottles of homemade Friuli red wine, his farmdog named Perla, and sometimes a caravan of other family members who all lived within a mile radius of one another. My host family lived on top of the village, the town below us had only one bar, a small grocery store, and a pharmacy. All that spanned above was jagged pastoral land owned by Zio Vino that eventually faded into the Dolomites.
Today is April 22nd of 2020. I am perched in an adirondack on my back porch in Southeast Pennsylvania, gazing out on the expanse of dark wilderness and the moon and stars above. I have not been to Italy – the nation that I once called home – since 2018.
According to Johns Hopkins Worldometer, there are 2,637,653 known cases of Coronavirus in the world today. My home nation, the United States, leads the world in cases at 848,994 and Italy follows in third place with 187,327 cases. The United States just recently surpassed Italy in the death toll with 47,676 deaths; Italy has 25,085 fatalities. On April 4th, a top health official in Italy, however, stated his belief that between asymptomatic carriers and people who never reported their symptoms the actual number of cases in Italy is between 5 million and 20 million people of their population of 60.36 million. The Italian Prime Minister declared that this was the worst crisis that Italy has experienced since World War II.
In June of 2018, I was teaching in a city only a half hour from Venice called Treviso. The program that I worked for moved us teachers around every two or three weeks, and I was in Italy for the full duration that my work visa allowed. I lived in an apartment beneath my host family’s penthouse with a balcony above the rust colored roofs of Treviso. Every night, myself, my two roommates from the United Kingdom, and my host family ate dinner on their rooftop terrace as the sun set over Treviso. I came to learn that dining in Italy was a full experience. Our dinners lasted two hours. We’d start with drinks with our host mom. Sometimes our seventeen year old host sister would slip wine into her glass; her mother disapproved but turned a blind eye. We’d eat pasta first as you did in Italy, il primo piatto. Il secondo was different for each family that I stayed with. In Amaro, a town high in the mountains it was often red meat and a salad. Here it was often a cheese board with formaggi that my host mom had curated from France paired with honey or melon wrapped in prosciutto. Dessert was sorbet, gelato, or fresh fruit with hand whipped cream. By the time we finished it was completely dark out.
One night our host dad decided to give us the history of Treviso. I was the only one in my family who was fluent in both English and Italian, so I translated for my English roommates. “In World War II,” he started, “Treviso was heavily bombed by the allies. Hardly any of the buildings made it. They never really bombed the important cultural cities like Roma and Firenze because they knew they’d be destroying priceless art and architecture. Treviso was an important Northern city, but not in that way. Everything was destroyed. Much of what you see is recreations of old architecture, reconstructed with money from the Americani.”
I vaguely remember learning about the Marshall Plan in 11th grade AP European History, but this was the first time I had ever really considered what the world would look like without it. For one, I would not be sitting on a terrace in Treviso right now.
“No one cares about Treviso, it’s a boring city,” said my host sister, who was always disinterested in what my host parents had to say. “No one cared then, no one cares now.”
On March 9th of 2020, the Italian Prime Minister implemented a national quarantine of Italy. My first thought was to reach out to my host families and coworkers who were there to see how they were doing. My host sister from Treviso sent me a picture from that balcony, showing that the streets were completely empty. It’s a far different tragedy from the one Treviso experienced during World War II. The streets and piazze and buildings are still intact, but they are deserted. It is like a silent apocalypse. Confined to their homes, it looks like a new world entirely.
Back in late February when Italy had only a few cases one of my American coworkers asked in an old group chat of ours how our Italian counterparts were doing. I thought she was crazy, Italy only had a handful of reported cases. Our old boss shared my sentiment.
“The situation is not as bad as the media wants us to believe,” she said in English, “They closed the schools as a preventative measure but no one in my town has been infected. In Italy there are only 400 infected and 12 dead, all of them were elderly or sick people. We just have to contain the infection and lead a normal life!”
Italy was still exactly two weeks from quarantine when I received that message. “We are safe and we will be,” my boss said in another message, “it’s no apocalypse, just over-dramatic Italians.” Honestly I was starting to worry for Italy in late February, but my old boss reassured me that everything was fine, and would be fine. Needless to say we were both wrong.
My boss came from a small town only a half hour from Treviso called Castelfranco. I remember Castelfranco best from characteristics that I wouldn’t necessarily consider Italian. I stayed with a host family on the outskirts of town. The skyline there wasn’t classic baroque buildings, but modern shopping malls, sprawling boulevards, and a sushi restaurant that my eleven year old host brother insisted we eat at one night.
On my first weekend in Castelfranco, my host family took me on a road trip. I sat in the middle front seat and watched the country roads go by. I was amazed by how similar they looked to the roads at home in Pennsylvania. As we drove, my host dad popped in the CD James Taylor’s Greatest Hits and the song “Carolina in My Mind” began to come through the speakers.
“I’m named after this song,” I said in Italian, “My middle name is Carolina.”
“It is our family road trip CD,” replied my host sister.
Simple things like this always amazed me about Italy. It wasn’t the sprawling vineyards of Toscana or the paths along Cinque Terre, but the moments that made me feel like home wasn’t so far away after all. Much like in Treviso, these roads are probably silent today due to Coronavirus.
One of my old students from Amaro messaged me on Whatsapp the other day. I had kept in contact with a handful of my older students. They ask me how I’m doing sporadically to practice their English and learn what life’s like in America. Many of my students had never before left Italy.
I knew that my former student was in distress when she sent me a screenshotted message from a translation app instead of practicing English as she normally would with me. One of the tenants of the submersion English classes I taught was that my students couldn’t know that I spoke Italian, or they’d simply speak it with me instead of English. “Italy is having a bad time,” said my former student, “everyone is very worried. They don’t even let us leave the house. Here the situation is serious. I can no longer go out with my friends, I can no longer go shopping. I hope the situation is better in America.” With a simple message, my heart was broken. If Coronavirus could reach the tiny town of Amaro, it was impacting the entire nation that I love.
Italy is far more severely locked down than the United States right now. Although Italy has slowly started lifting restrictions, they are not even allowed outside for socially distant physical activity. Meanwhile, this has been my solace during Pennsylvanian quarantine. Every day I am outside running trails and roads. In the month of March I racked more than 50 miles running, mileage higher than I ever had reached before. However, people are still getting stir crazy.
In Italy, the mafia is making a not so quiet resurgence in the South. Although funerals have been banned since early March, a well known Mafioso head had a largely attended funeral procession. Italians are worried that they may have a larger presence post-quarantine than they have in years. In America there have been protests against lockdowns and quarantine. Over the weekend the capital of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, had a widely attended protest on the capitol building lawn. No one wants to be in lockdown, but right now seeing a group of hundreds of people pressed shoulder to shoulder is terrifying. Some wore face masks and bandanas, still afraid of Coronavirus while out actively disobeying protective measures. Some held guns. Many held posters. “Re-Open Pennslvania [sic]” read one held by a beaming lady wearing an American flag bandana over her nose. I scoffed at the misspelling of Pennsylvania and the pure stupidity of some, but what was the most unsettling was the quote below that read “give me liberty or give me death.” For some, death very well may be the consequence of the liberty that is being asked for.
Governors are caving, politicians are slowly opening things back up all over the world. I crave being allowed to do mundane things like go out to eat and congregate so deeply, and yet I worry that some places are opening back up too soon. I have also noticed scapegoating – blaming certain groups of people for heavily spreading the disease. I recently deleted Facebook, but before I did I got a notification from the West Grove Area Message Board, a group designed for my hometown. One lady proudly posted “I believe I know why Italians are getting so fucked by coronavirus, they like to kiss each other on the cheeks and always sit so close together in restaurants, if they stopped that they’d be fine.” She got many comments supporting this theory, but blaming a culture and proposing that it must change holds no less negative connotation than blaming a race, as President Trump often does by coining COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus.”
I decided to turn to another social media to dig for answers – my Instagram platform. I posed the question, “why did the virus spread so severely in Italy?” to the Italians and expats who follow me. An American travel agent living in Sicily at the moment, gave me her input.
“Italians are extremely social people and very family oriented,” she started, “When they greet they kiss on each cheek and every Sunday is a dedicated day for family gatherings. There is a huge emphasis on showing your affection for someone by touching in the Italian culture. Unfortunately, this is how the virus spreads [close contact].” She reiterated that this culture of affection isn’t negative, in fact it is part of what makes Italy such a special place.
She is right, of course. Italians are social, they are affectionate, and as she noted they have been this way for over 500 years. This isn’t Italy’s first time being struck with pandemic. The term quarantine even originated in Venice, as during the bubonic plague sailors were kept at sea for 40 (quaranta) days to assure that they weren’t bringing the plague with them. This isolation evolved to be coined “quarantino.”
Italy taught me to cherish the people who you’re with. I was supposed to teach in Italy again this Summer, COVID-19 has ruined that plan but someday I will return to Italy. When I do, the culture I believe will still be just as strong as I left it. Italians are resilient, our world is resilient.
As I sit on my back porch in Pennsylvania I am reminded of one night in Treviso where I sat out on my small Juliet balcony reading the Dan Brown book Inferno. My English roommates were already asleep, and I could clearly see the moon as mosquitoes chomped at my exposed arms and legs. If Treviso, a city that was flattened into rubble during World War II could come back stronger than before, so can we. As a society, we have been through worse. And although this may be the worst disaster that Italy has had since World War II, it’s not World War II. We are fighting a virus, together as one world, not each other.
I gaze up at the moon tonight in Southeastern Pennsylvania and feel more connected to my home across the Atlantic than I have in a long time. Italy has started lifting restrictions, and we will too, but when the time is right. Turning back to Instagram, I scroll through one of my favorite accounts, @ig_italia. Although I originally followed them for gorgeous Italian panoramas, during COVID-19 they presented a lot of reporting on the crisis in Italy. For a month, they ended every lengthy text post by stating “Non dimenticatelo, noi non molliamo. L’Italia non molla. Restate a casa.” This roughly translates to: “don’t forget, we don’t give up. Italy doesn’t quit. Stay home.”
See more of my content on Italy here.
Subscribe to my newsletter