It looks like Davide and Gabriella are sitting on the same chair when they answer my Skype call. Their bodies are so closely pressed, it must be the same chair. He probably has his arm around her. Their cheeks hover close enough to touch. They can feel each other’s breath. They answer each others’ sentences. Davide would pause and turn his head almost imperceptibly, and she would rush in with the correct English translation. They’d gotten to know each others’ rhythms after two months of isolation.
Davide and Gabriella live in Brentonico, a town in Northeastern Italy with a population of 4,000 people. But now they are in a tiny vacation village high in the mountains that is practically empty now. They came to their vacation cabin because two months was enough of living with their parents. The weather was bad, but improving, so now they can hike up in the Dolomites.
In March, the local authorities informed them that their university would be closed for one week, but after that they would be able to restart school. (Davide and Gabriella both go to the University of Trento. Davide is Studying mechanical engineering, and Gabriella is studying to become a nurse.) So, Davide and Gabriella treated quarantine like a vacation. They went hiking and began practicing sports, but soon after the initial announcement was made, it was reversed: Schools would close indefinitely, along with all other nonessential businesses.
“We started to realize the coronavirus is not a fluke, but is more serious,” Davide says. “We thought it was so far from here, but it was here,” Gabriella adds.
Gabriella and Davide spent the first few weeks of lockdown studying and taking online classes. They felt like little had changed, save for the fact that they didn’t have to take a 30 kilometer commute by train from their home in Brentonico to Trento anymore. It all seemed temporary. By April 1st, everything was set to open up again, but instead (April Fools!) they kept everything closed for another month.
This decision was particularly difficult for Gabriella, she told me, because she was separated from her sister, and couldn’t see her for two months. Davide chimes in. “The primary feel is loneliness.” It felt like an “invisible monster” was on their doorstep, waiting to capture them, the moment he or his family stepped outside.
The invisible monster caught them at the end of March. His mother is a nurse, so she caught it first. Fortunately, her only symptoms were a fever and a headache. A week later, Davide got sick. “When my fever got high,” he said, “I was a little bit scared, but I say, I can’t do nothing, so I just [have to] keep home by myself and keep quiet.”
In early April, things began to shift for Davide and his family. The elusive, faraway creature was now not just a part of their community, but it was a part of them, first, as a virus, and then as antibodies. The invisible monster was real, and, for them at least, conquerable, but it was there to stay. Once they had recovered, Davide tells me, “we are sunny. We are good.” It was time, they realized, to learn to live with the virus, instead of living in spite of it.
They began to meet each other out of the window. Every evening they would clap their hands for the healthcare workers. “As events evolve,” Davide tells me, “we start to play music, not only for the healthcare workers, but to support ourselves, and the family around us, and the people who had, who has…” he looks over at Gabriella. “Coronavirus,” she says to finish his thought.
People with the big stereos began to haul their contraptions out to their balcony. “And it was really, really beautiful — all the people go on their balcony and start singing.” Italy doesn’t usually feel like a united place to Davide. In the United States, he says, we have the American anthem. “Here in Italy, there aren’t things like that.” They have an Italian anthem, “but we don’t sing it all morning, so we aren’t so united like you. And these events, this music on the balcony unites us, and makes us feel not that we are alone, but that we are a team.”
They sang all sorts of songs from the balcony. They would sing pop, classic songs, and sometimes, they would even sing the Italian anthem. Their favorites were the Italian pop songs, the ones that remind them of past, sunnier days. Rino Gaetano’s hit, Ma Il Cielo è Sempre Più Blu, (but the sky is always bluer), and Domenico Modugno’s Volare (to fly) comes to mind.
“And then this famous singer, the famous Italian singer, started to [sing] on their Instagram account and on their balcony,” Stefano says. He and all of his friends came together virtually to listen to this man sing on instagram…. and this was another way,”
“To feel, um” Gabriella adds.
“The unity.” Stefano finishes.
Others began offering up voluntary services. “Like when an old man needs some food or medicines,” volunteers began going to the grocery store to buy and deliver groceries and medicine to those in need. Children began making posters to hang on their balconies, all with the same lettering: “Andrà tutto bene” (Everything will be okay.) Chiara Ferrani, a famous Italian Influencer who lives in Milan, raised four million euros to fund a new field hospital in Lombardy. And my personal favorite: the pizzerias. “The pizzerias start to cook, make food for the hospital because it is a kind of support that they do…” Davide begins. “A way to say thank you to the doctors and the nurses,” finishes Gabriella.
***
Every weekday, Davide and Chiara spend one hour by train on their way to the University of Trento, and one hour riding back. “So these two hours are two hours I can use for other things,” Davide says. Both still have to take online classes, but without their commute, they can devote their time to other activities. Davide leaves the Skype frame and Gabrilella tells me what she has been doing with her free time. “I love paint, in general,” she says. “I started to paint with watercolors. And I try to read more, cook, sleep, cook a bit more.”
Davide returns with two square canvases in his hands. They’re big for watercolors — probably about one square foot each. On each canvas was a mushroom, the most intricately detailed, beautiful mushroom I have ever seen. The mushroom cap yawned open, red-brown and white. Small, grass-shoots grew at the base. Gabriella smiled bashfully.
“Oh, wow!” I say. “That’s so beautiful. Oh my goodness! Oh, wow! You must love mushrooms. Wow, that’s so beautiful.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“Did you ever want to be an artist when you grew up?” I ask.
I don’t know if my question got lost in translation, or if it was too ridiculous for her to take seriously. Either way, she laughed, and didn’t respond.
“For me,” Davide chimes in, “It is different for me because I love to practice sports and activities outside. So for this, spiritually, is a bit different.” he says with a smile.
Fortunately, Davide keeps bees. He has a set of bee-hives near his house, and during quarantine he tended them.
“I love to do that,” he says. “Without my bees, I’m not good…. I need to practice that because,”
“You don’t feel so good,” Gabriella adds.
“I don’t feel so good without that.”
***
On June 1st, Davide and Gabriella will be able to go outside without any major restrictions. For now, restrictions are light. They can see their friends outside, as long as everyone is wearing a face mask and complying to social distancing measures. They can only see a few people at once, though, which is difficult for Davide because his group of friends numbers at over twenty.
“But when you stay home for two months, and then you can only go out for a walk or to…”
“Breathe,” Gabriella adds.
“Yeah! Only to go out is really incredible, and it is really really good, because you can say, ‘Oh, wow!’ we can finally go out and breathe air like before. But when you go out, you see, you don’t see people, because everybody is in their home, and if you see them you see with a face mask, so it is a strange feeling, you… think you are in an apocalypse film. But you say, ‘Oh, wow, this is really life for now… this will be normality for some months. But I mean it is good only to go out from home and breathe new air.”
“It must be really nice to be up in the mountains now so you can go on hikes,” I say.
“Yeah,” Stefano replies, “I always lived in the mountain country, so the mountains for me are really important. When I go on flat lands, I can’t orient myself, because I usually say “mountain, north is there.” He points to one side. “I have to go there.” He moves his fingers over. And when I go into a flat land I go, I walk around and say, where I have to go? It’s a strange feeling, but I need mountains to live.”
“Yeah, I really like going on hikes, too,” I say. “I love being in the mountains, but sadly I don’t live in them.”
“Where do you live? In which part of America?” Stefano asks.
I live in Texas, so it’s the big… yeah, yeah. Um, so, it’s pretty flat here. I live in the center of Texas, it’s the capitol, um, and it’s a cool town. There’s lots of great music. It’s a really fun place to be. Really good food, but yeah, there are no mountains sadly.”
“Are you worried about the situation?” Gabriella asks.
“I’m not very worried,” I say. “It’s more, I guess, trying to figure out how worried I should be. I’m trying to figure out what to do this summer, and a lot of friends are going to be living together in New Hampshire, but I don’t think it’s wise to leave my house right now. So I’ve been staying home mostly… it’s nice to be home.”
“Yeah,” says Stefano. “Sometimes we need to stay home with our parents and I think that this situation can help us to think [about] a lot of things, and select the more important things because often we practice, or we see some people, that we don’t…”
“That we don’t really love,” says Gabriella.
“In this situation you can understand which are really the things that you need, because you feel the… mancanza? The miss, the missing. You see, you can feel the missed with them.”