September 24, 2020 83
with mortality, and thereby mo-
rality, because mortality can make
you a more moral person. Death
has been just a five- letter word
in Italy for so long, while Berlus-
coni got hair transplants, found a
younger and younger girlfriend,
as though he’d live forever. Unex-
pectedly, death reminds us who we
really are. Covid made the invisi-
ble visible.Genna’s forthcoming novel, Reality, is
made of “glimpses into that different,
mad reality of Covid, which was not a
show,” he explained. “It was for real.”
The Italians, said Ceccarelli, “are
complex people. The comportment
was for the most part correct and dis-
ciplined. Italy was deprived of its three
central pillars: the evening stroll, the
spectacle—including soccer—and the
church. Things without which Italy isn’t
Italy. But people kept their optimism.”
He showed me a video of a man called
Fabio, who became an Internet star,
shouting “c’e la faremo!” (“We can do
it!”) from his balcony.
Yet what happened to Fabio? Like
all the commissions and reforms,
he’s last week’s news. Now sci-
entists are angry with politicians
again, and vice versa. The Berga-
maschi hate the Neapolitans again,
and vice versa. A lot has happened,
some good, some bad; some that
makes you laugh, some that makes
you cry.But for all this, something was al-
ready stirring in Milan by the time
Covid approached. Apart from Rome,
its ancient imperial and national capi-
tal, Italy has two poles: Milan, dubbed
the “moral capital” of the nation forged
between 1848 and 1871, and Naples,
then the country’s largest city, which
lost its preponderance to the North.
Milan was terribly stricken by the
virus, Naples far less.
Every Italian schoolchild knows I
Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) by
Alessandro Manzoni. Set in Milan and
Lombardy under Spanish occupation
during the early seventeenth century,
it is a love story and an astute critique
of the abuse of law and power—and the
caprice of the masses—with few equals
in literature. It takes place across a
landscape not only of foreign domina-
tion but plague. The Venetian writer
Andrea di Robilant told me: “North-
ern Italy is steeped in Manzoni’s book
and in the experience of plague. I am
just now researching letters by Vene-
tian diplomats and travelers heading
for Genoa, and always this news: we
have to bypass Brescia because of pes-
tilence, or another town because of
plague. Plague is in northern Italy’s
DNA, perhaps more than anywhere else
in the world.” Codogno, where the first
Italian coronavirus case was registered,
suffered a plague in 1527–1528 that
obliterated two thirds of its population.
The word “quarantine” comes from the
forty days a ship’s crew was obliged to
remain aboard after docking at Venice
during the medieval Black Death. The
Venetian island of Lazzaretto Vecchio
was designated to isolate those suffer-
ing from plague during the seventeenth
century, and most Northern Italian
communities, including Milan and Ber-
gamo, built their own lazarettos.
“Just as we have experienced the
plagues of old,” said Dr. Lorini in
Bergamo, “the plague of Covid will
from now on be in our genes.” Bruno
Bozzetto, the creator of Italy’s beloved
cartoon character Signor Rossi—an
ordinary citizen with dreams—lives in
Bergamo and agreed:Manzoni and fear of pestilence
are always there, subliminally.
I was trying to imagine how the
lazaretto in Bergamo was in that
period; I can hear Manzoni re-
cording those times, and here they
are, back again.It is no accident that in Italy, more
than in other Western countries, most
people wear masks, social distance
is largely observed, trains are metic-
ulously arranged for social distanc-
ing, and safety kits are distributed to
passengers.
Since unification, Milan has been
Italy’s financial and industrial, if not
always “moral,” capital. Mussolini
made it the engine of fascism, and
there the left built a fortress of the or-
ganized working class. In what he calls
a “micro- history” of the city since the
1960s, John Foot refers to the “hyper-
mobility” that operates across Milan
and its satellite towns.^4 First, during
the 1950s, immigrants arrived in Milan
from rural Lombardy and the Italian
South. Then, beginning in the 1980s,
came a second wave, of non- Italians
mainly from North Africa.
Italian but not Mediterranean, Milan
prospered. The elegant Pirelli tower
rose above the skyline, Italy’s news-
paper and publishing industries made
Milan their headquarters, and when
heavy industry went into decline, Milan
reinvented itself as a center for service
industries and high fashion, with its net-
work of related expertise. The phrase
Milano da bere was coined to describe
the city—Milan good enough to drink.
But tangentopoli exposed sleaze be-
hind the “miracle”; when written with a
capital T, Tangentopoli referred not to
a system but a place—Milan. In 2007,
Luigi Offeddu and Ferruccio Sansa
wrote Milano da Morire (Milan to Die
For), about a city “that on one hand is
the gateway to Europe, on the other:
decadence, a sickness, and loss of any
definitive identity.”
Eight years later, however, in the tra-
dition of its famous trade fairs, Milan
hosted a universal exposition, Expo- The following year, Expo’s chief
executive, Giuseppe Sala, was elected
mayor. In Milano e il secolo delle città
(Milan and the Century of Cities,
2018), he described Expo 2015 as “a
spasm of awareness... a mission to give
voice to those wanting to create a world
more equal and just.”
Sala calls Milan a Città- Mondo—a
world city. He initiated and presides
over a “Recovery Task Force” estab-
lished in the aftermath of Covid by the
C40 global network of cities, under the
direction of Los Angeles mayor Eric
Garcetti, to draw up an agenda for
“equitable and sustainable” civic pol-
itics. (The C40 network was founded
in London in 2005, initially to address
pollution, climate change, and common
themes of urban government.) Much of
Sala’s thinking is contained in his lat-
est book, Società: per azioni (2020)—
perhaps best translated as “Shares
in Society”—based on what he calls
“pragmatism and a certain idealism
to achieve common objectives.” The
most far- thinking chapter discusses
what Sala dares call “a spiritual left,”
meditating on a graffito in Milan’s poor
periphery: “Their reality ends where
yours begins.” “If the left is to revive,”
he writes, “it must speak about the
soul.... Politics that restricts itself to
worldly things is insufficient.”
Speaking with me at Milan’s city
hall, Sala reflected:I’d like to think that on the eve of
Covid, Milan—for all the prob-
lems we face—had affirmed some
of its better values. Our history is
that of an international city; we’re
at our best when we assert our
openness to Europe and the world.
I want to think of Milan as one in
a network of cities ready to learn
from one another, and from the
pandemic, trying to understand
how we can energize our potential
and channel it.Sala has no debts to either the old
Communist Party or to what Bill Clin-
ton and Tony Blair called the “Third
Way.” “I have no ideological baggage,”
he insisted, “nor do I feel nostalgia for
some lost Milan or Italy.” I asked about
socialism. “The disgrace of Bettino
Craxi [the Socialist Party leader con-
victed during tangentopoli] banished
the word ‘socialism’ from this city,” re-
plied Sala,thus creating space for Berlusconi’s
Forza Italia and the Lega. Now
we want to bring that word back
together with Catholicism into a
system of values; to do politics in
a deep way, as well as environmen-
talist urban management. I want a
new left, politically liberal, credi-
ble, based on solidarity, judged on
its results.The lazzaretto in Bergamo is near
the stadium of the city’s soccer team,
Atalanta, which in the year of Berga-
mo’s tribulation played its best season
ever, reaching the final rounds of the
European Champions League. It was a
fairy tale—Atalanta is not one of the
big clubs—though the game that got it
there, played on February 19 in Milan
against Valencia before a crowd of over
45,000 (some 40,000 of them from Ber-
gamo) is blamed for having catastroph-
ically spread the coronavirus. Most
of Italy wished the young team well,
though to judge from the graffitied
walls of the lazaretto, the team’s hard-
core fans do not reciprocate the general
goodwill. There, among insults to all ri-
vals, is one especially ironic message to
Naples: “Napoli colera”—a cruel jeer
at the cholera epidemics there in 1884–
1911 and another in 1973.
Northern deprecation of the South
and southern antipathy toward the
North are part of Italy’s identity. Now,
North and South, there is a fear that the
divergent experiences of coronavirus—
deaths in Campania, of which Naples is
the capital, have so far totaled 443, as
opposed to 16,857 in Lombardy—will
widen rather than narrow the breach.
Naples is the world’s last pagan city. It
exists on a fault line and in the shadow
of a volcano, in close proximity to the
cults of death and afterlife, replete withwhat atheists and Northern Europeans
call superstition. “You don’t know what
you missed,” read graffiti on a ceme-
tery wall after the Napoli soccer team
won its second championship in 1990.
“How do you know we missed it?”
came a retort. Family shrines adorn
corners and courtyards. The canyon
streets of peeling stucco around Spac-
canapoli, Quartieri Spagnoli, and
Sanità neighborhoods are lined with
wart- faced marionettes, masks, and
pulcinelle harlequins. Even the frayed
suburbs, among the poorest in Europe,
are folkloric: Neapolitans read cards in
earnest and interpret dreams with nu-
meric systems and the smorfia—from
Morpheus, god of dreams—a table of
numbers that correlate to body parts
and other symbols.
Guido Piovene, in his book Viaggio
in Italia (1957), for which he toured
almost every Italian province during
the 1950s to “understand who we are,”
acknowledged Naples’s “wavering be-
tween mystic, mythic, and magic.” But
he also wrote, “Do not forget, listen-
ing to them, that profound inclination
of southerners, above all in Naples,
which is rational, almost rationalist.”
It is partly this deep- rooted rational-
ism that explains Naples’s discipline
in dealing with the coronavirus, and
partly the interventions of the one fig-
ure to emerge from the pandemic as a
superstar, YouTube cult figure, and po-
litical leader: Vincenzo De Luca, the
governor of Campania.
This seventy- one- year- old son of the
old Communist Party became known
as Mr. Lockdown, and his videotaped
addresses were obligatory viewing
across the nation. He twisted irony’s
blade to afford everyone except him-
self a hollow laugh. In one broadcast,
De Luca warned students planning to
celebrate graduation that if they did so
he would “send in the Carabinieri with
flame- throwers.”
In conversation in late June, De Luca
was reflective. “We in Campania knew
that if Covid arrived here like it arrived
in Milan, there’d be a catastrophe,” he
explained:Because of the way people live,
because we are among the most
densely populated cities in Europe,
households with several people
in a single room. We had to take
firm decisions, fast. As soon as the
virus was traced in fifteen com-
munities in Campania, we isolated
them. The national government
was formulating policy, but we as-
sumed responsibility for ourselves,
locked down completely, and peo-
ple collaborated. There was no re-
sentment—people knew what the
consequences of any other course
of action would be.He told me, “We’ve all learned that
what can kill your neighbor can also
kill you. We need national unity; I’ll
not hear any bickering between South
and North. We must respond as a na-
tion.” But De Luca wants Naples to
draw lessons from its experience of
Covid- 19: “The city learned that when
life is endangered, you need discipline.
Generally, I like to think there was an
assertion of human values, above ma-
terial considerations. But I also want
people here to stop equating author-
ity with authoritarianism, to see that
adherence to the rules can work for the
common good.” He added: “I cannot(^4) Milan Since the Miracle: City, Culture
and Identity (Berg, 2001), pp. 6, 37.