Claudio Lavanga, NBC News’ correspondent in Rome, reported on a wide variety of stories. Recently, he helped document the terrible toll of the pandemic in Italy, where more than 104,000 died and nearly 3.5 million became ill. As the country goes through a third Covid-19 wave, he describes how his family became part of the story.
ROME – Since Italy became the center of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe, I kept track of the number of people testing positive every day. It quickly reached a cold daily toll of tens of thousands, a war bulletin in a battle against an invisible enemy.
Then, on January 23, the number hit the house.
Of 1,331 people in Italy who tested positive that day, my mother, Antonia, was one of those who knew her as Antonietta.
After a year of staying away due to Covid-19, I realized it was time to move back to the two-story white house I grew up in on the outskirts of Milan. It was time for me to see my mother – even from afar.
Antonietta greeted me from an appendix above our family home, where she isolates her father and my sister Maria, who earlier this year decided to quarantine with my mother and finally got the virus.
When I was a boy, my mother was a small benevolent dictator and ordered our children out of the house.
Now, separated from the world in a tiny apartment and through ash blocks by my father, she could barely utter an audible ‘Ciao’.
Covid-19 not only made her voice shrink.
When she stood in a window, she looked even slimmer and slimmer, and the fact that I could not get close, let alone embracing her, made clear the collateral damage caused by the virus: this disease is not only deadly, it has also turned houses around. of safe havens in danger zones, and loved ones in Trojan horses.
Test positive
Antonietta caught Covid-19 in another place that should have been a safe zone: a so-called Covid-free hospital. She has cancer and has been admitted for a series of tests in the oncology department.
The day after she checked in, I called to ask if she had slept well, and she said to me, ‘No, a lady in my room coughed all night.’
Two days later, the roommate tested positive, and my mother was moved to isolation until the result of her own test came back.
The hospital was not equipped to handle coronavirus patients, and frightened staff rarely entered her room. They left the food outside the door, as in a prison. To my mother, Covid-19 feels like a life sentence.
Three days later, she tested positive.
That this virus sneaked into a hospital that was supposed to be free of it is a metaphor for Italy.
This land, especially in the affluent north, where my parents moved to when they were newlyweds, was devastated by the coronavirus. Money and abundant public services did not prevent the virus from tearing through cities and towns, hospitals and retirement homes.
My parents are part of a decisive generation of Italians who were attracted from the south by the promise of security, stability and prosperity.
The two first saw each other across the table 50 years ago during a family dinner in the town of Scampitella. She was 18 and my father Natalino, ten years older than her. They were soon married. Our family was carried away on a wave that lifted Italy out of its post-war destruction to become one of the richest countries in the world. And that was it.
They worked tirelessly to make a living.
My father worked day and night at various jobs in neighboring Switzerland, but mostly as a truck driver and as a wine dealer. On weekends he returns to Milan to finish the house. The second floor was a separate apartment that was meant to lure one of our children back to live with them after they retired. None of us did, and it has been languishing for years as a symbol of our ingratitude.
The apartment is now my mother’s prison.
Face to mask
On a recent evening, with my mother and sister captured by the virus, my father and I sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of Primitivo – a red wine from the south of Italy where he and my mother were born . Sharing a glass of wine was something I wanted to do with my dad long before I legally drank.
The oldest photo I have with my dad is of me as a toddler trying to grab a glass of wine he is holding in his hand. These days I pour it for him.
He told how he met my mother during a family dinner during a visit to the house.
“We looked at each other: we knew,” he said.
What he is most proud of, he said, is that he does not have to kidnap her to marry my mother. In those days in small towns in the south, regular marriages were still common and couples often had to resort to ‘kidnapping’ to marry their true love.
Not so my parents. In their case, there was no need for kidnapping or a gunfight.
Natalino is not a man who is easy with intimacy, so I was surprised when he blurted out: ‘She still looks beautiful. She has always been. ”
They are in the same house, but he still misses her, and may be afraid that he will miss the opportunity to tell it himself.
She misses him too.
One night around 4am – after a month in isolation on the top floor – my mother got up, got dressed, rolled her oxygen cart to the door and opened it. The steep staircase had to look like the descent of the Himalayas: Because of its mobility problems, every step is a slippery slope to a deadly fall.
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She drops the oxygen, grabs the handrail and steps down. She arrives at the apartment downstairs, opens the door and the alarm goes off. It was intended to prevent intruders from breaking in. And in a way, that’s what my mother became because of Covid-19: a refugee who broke out of the exclusion, the Trojan horse in her own house.
My dad wakes up, startled by the deafening sound, jumps out of bed and rushes to the door. And there they are, Mary tells me, face to mask, numb and confused, unable to remember the code to deactivate the door alarm.
It was a perfect metaphor for the situation in which the virus put them: getting close to each other sounded alarm, and they did not quite know how to defuse the danger.