Abstract
When on 8 March 2020 lockdown was declared in Lombardy, I had a national flag in a drawer waiting for 17 March - the birthday of unified Italy - to be hung down from my balcony just for one single day. Suddenly it seemed to me very natural to begin the ritual early, fixing it carefully and looking at it while it was moving softly in the mild evening breeze, amidst the surreal silence of the neighbourhood riven only by so many, too many ambulance sirens: a suspended time, a time of fear and resistance that I was sharing physically with my fellow citizens, and virtually, with my relatives, friends and colleagues living far away.
Highlights
Being a commuter, based in Milan and working at the University of Pavia, I had quickly realized I was stuck in one of the most dangerous areas of the country, a very short distance from the Codogno-Lodi red zone where Italy’s first patient came from, while un mondo alla rovescia, an upside-down world, was coming to life: northerners were becoming the undesirables in the eyes of authorities of Southern municipalities, while at Milan railway stations the assault on trains headed South offered an unprecedented scenario
My feelings as a citizen and as a professional historian in the past months will serve here as a kind of road map to follow the impact of the pandemic in Italy, at least from a Northern perspective
A citizen in the Lombardy trench ‘How are you doing in the Lombardy trench?’ soon became the common question of attentive friends ‘horrified’ by images such as those from the Bergamo area
Summary
When on 8 March 2020 lockdown was declared in Lombardy, I had a national flag in a drawer waiting for 17 March – the birthday of unified Italy – to be hung down from my balcony just for one single day. Quite an ‘anti-historic’ snapshot: in the first days/ weeks of the emergency, media and social media offered the image of a peninsula split in two, the developed and cosmopolitan North brought to its knees versus a still uncontaminated, safe Centre-South, almost separated by a new version of World War Two’s Gothic Line It seemed, at the micro level of the urban environment I was used to – one energized by the 2015 EXPO experience and more recently by the award as host of the 2026 Winter Olympic Games – I was witnessing another phenomenon which went against the flow of the last decades: the re-emergence of a walkingdistance self-sufficient world where those same little grocers and greengrocers stifled and overshadowed by the mushrooming commercial centres were the safest hub for the socially diverse human beings silently lining up along the pavement. ‘Why is it happening right here?’: a shared sense of relentless aggression against the ‘never sleeping’ leading city of the country and its surrounding areas soon emerged and unified citizens from very different social backgrounds and occupations
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