A più di un anno dall’inizio dall’inizio di una delle crisi più complesse dai tempi della seconda guerra mondiale, la nostra risposta alla pandemia è sempre la stessa. In un periodo di tempo molto breve nei primi mesi del 2020, un certo tipo di risposta alla diffusione globale di un nuovo patogeno si è rapidamente imposto come quella che alcuni chiamano la “nuova normalità”.
School students, parents and teachers gather in front of Venezia’s central train station to call for the immediate re-opening of schools, which have recently been once again closed across most of Italy in a misguided response to an alarming rise in newly detected cases of Coronavirus.
In the only city in the world without cars, boats are the main mean of transportation. Since the early hours of the morning, the waters of Venice’s lagoon are crisscrossed by thousands of boats of all kinds: there are the famous gondole, the noisy tope used for transport, the elegant vaporetti, the oar-powered sandoli, and the sailing boats known as vela al terzo, a navigation system that is typical of the northern Adriatic sea.
Newspapers declare total alert over the rising number of SARS-CoV-2 cases, and also mention that newly impoverished hospitality workers are “knocking on the municipality’s door”. As we enter the third wave of the Coronavirus pandemic, authorities are closing schools and debating a total lockdown. In the meantime my flatmate, who left his village in Sicily one week after turning 18 to embark on a successful career as a chef here in Venice, is once again unemployed, and is still waiting for his unemployment money for May and June. While the country remain hypnotized by the evolution of the pandemic, every …
Its olive trees ravaged by the Xylella pandemic and its fields parched by drought, Salento is literally a tinderbox. Small fires break out all the time, and where once you would have seen crowds of people working frantically to save their family’s trees, today you see absolutely nothing, as trunks that stood for centuries burn and crumble into ashes, and nobody cares.