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Italy is how America breaks.
By Roger Cohen
Opinion columnist
SANTA MARGHERITA, Italy – In Italy, there are seasons, and then there’s the season. Summer comes, the misfortunes of the country are set and, in the eternal chorus of “tutti al mare” (“All at sea”), the exodus to the comforting coast begins. Public debt fades between the sea and the stars.
This year is a little different. The mask hangs from the ears in the new carefree look or is tied around the elbows and then used for a greeting. The beach chairs are (anti) socially estranged. With outlets operating at limits of two at a time, the tail for focaccia is so long that other people read a full newspaper (and Italians still read it) in the meantime. The Americans are almost gone, as are the Russians. The talk of young people on the beach revolves around the virus that cancels everything, which brings new merit to tag games.
The difference is the coronavirus, which hides like the wisdom of last summer. Contents, almost defeated, but beyond the murmur of cicadas making a song, leaving the Italians in limbo between liberation and fear.
Among Western countries, Italy is the first to suffer the effects of the pandemic. The country has learned the loneliness of a new form of death. His doctors fought in extremis. He observed army trucks carrying coffins to cremation sites away from the crowded morgues of Bergamo.
Then, interestingly, after some initial missteps, Italy has done what has cost it the most work since the unification of the peninsula in 1861: it has joined in a country and brought a fierce national will on the virus. He went into a disciplined lockdown. He set aside, through a unified front, the old insults exchanged between north and south, the old bell spirit of the city-states with a longer history than the country in which they are located, the old decarning directed against his politics.
I am tempted to say that 2020, the year of the appearance of Italy, 159 years after the Piedmontist Massimo d’Azeglio said: “We made Italy. Now we have to make Italians. Maybe it’s an exaggeration, but not without its truth.” .
Italy has reduced its rate of new infections, now around 8, consisting of 100,000 inhabitants, to one of the lowest in Europe, even lower than Germany. It did so when the United States, which spent countless postwar treasures to keep Italy stable, opened its doors to the pandemic with a fracture without leaders. This, unlike Italy, is the season of American unwinding.
I talked about the hum of cicadas and their summer crescendo. In the Fable of Esopo, known in English as “The Ant and the Grasshopper”, but in Italian as “La Formica e los angeles Cicalos angeles” (“The Ant and the Cicada”), the industrious ant spends his summer refueling for the winter while the carefree cicada spends his time singing, or, as the Italians describe, the makeshift angels. When winter arrives, as it arrives, the hungry cicada begs the ant to feed. The ant, confirmed, tells him to dance in winter.
Writing the other day at the Corriere della Sera in Milan, Antonio Scurati asked, “Dear reader, are you a cicada or an ant?” His fear, he said, was that the Italians would take care of the cicada. The sun is shining, we live a little and that urgency has passed forever.
In this phase 2 of the virus, with a build-up in cases in countries such as Spain and France, it is a moment of ant or cicada in many societies. I confess to being a kind of cicada by inclination, in lazy tendencies I hope, but in the conviction that a life lived with obsessive concern and caution is to live with courage. How to balance the squeaky arousal of the cicada and the careful breeding of the ant, a short and satisfied life in the face of a long inhibition?
The answer is not obvious. As with the ultimate things in life, it’s a balance. It is equally difficult to say how moderate and important precautions that oppose the virus do not moderate, destroy employment, end schools and destroy life, even more complicated because endemic concern was a surprising feature of many societies before the virus. For Italy, the overriding question is how not to suffer a chaotic relapse due to the effectiveness of crisis-induced national unity.
There will be a new department and disappointments, but I don’t think anything can undo what Italy has revealed on its own. Italy had a smart war. To some extent in Donald Trump’s America, and beyond that of many Europeans, Italians have demonstrated what long history teaches: civic wisdom.
A summer fairy tale has taken over Italy. He focused on Atalanta, the small football club of Bergamo, the northern city that is the epicentre of the virus. Against all odds, Atalanta reached the quarter-finals of Europe’s first interclub competition, the Champions League, where, in an empty stadium, they faced Paris Saint-Germain, the wealthy Qatari club of the French capital. When Atalanta took the lead in the first half, a strong ovation spread across the Italian peninsula.
I watched this week with Antonio Colpani and Laura Vergani, both from Bergamo. Colpani told me about his mother’s close death and his own war with the virus. Vergani remembered the constant sirens and how one day they stopped because the streets were empty anyway and the local government had concluded that the sound was panicking.
“We beat him, ” said Colpani. “No mollare May.” Smile as you utter the phrase – Never give up – you live Bergamo. “Mola mia” in Bergamo dialect.
Atalanta, uncompromising, held a 1-0 lead until the last minute. Then Paris St-Germain scored, and a moment later he scored again to win 2-1.
It would have been glorious if the fairy tale continued, but perhaps for Italy the agonizing defeat was a useful control of the truth in that summer limbo, a grain of ant in the song of the cicada.
“It’s life, ” said Colpani, “anything can in a minute.”
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