Two weeks ago, I sent an e-mail from Rome, where I had been enjoying a sabbatical semester of research and writing, to a Chinese friend who lives in one of those small cities of five or six million inhabitants, very far from Wuhan, the original epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic. In my note, I said that I was sure that she was safely distant from the current crisis, but that, all the same, I was thinking of her and beaming her my warmest wishes. She replied politely that she was happy that I was having such a lovely sabbatical. As for her, however, though she was in good health, her life and the lives of everyone around her were turned topsy-turvy. The streets in her city were empty; places of work were all closed; she and her family were confined at home; one of them per day might receive permission to go out, masked, to shop for food and supplies; everyone lived in fear. I was suitably embarrassed by my e-mail’s ridiculous insouciance, but at the time I did not fully grasp the extent of my stupidity.

I get it now, thanks to the unfolding events in Italy. The initial reports of an outbreak, in a few towns in the north of the country, were alarming enough, but it remained news coming from far away. With astonishing rapidity, the situation worsened: in quick succession, whole communities were quarantined; schools and churches closed their doors; museums, galleries, and palaces were shuttered; concerts were cancelled. If anyone hadn’t already taken in the gravity of the situation, two further occurrences made it overwhelmingly apparent: parts of Milan Fashion Week, the crown jewel of one of Italy’s greatest economic successes, were closed to the public, and, still more ominously, the soccer game between Inter Milan and a rival was played before an eerily empty stadium. As any Italian knows, soccer, far more than religion, is sacred; denying fans access to the match was an even more drastic signal than temporarily closing Milan Cathedral to tourists and the faithful.

In Rome, the virus had not yet surfaced, and there were very few signs of alarm, apart from a run on hand sanitizer. But, as the constant reports in the newspapers and on television accumulated, the mood altered. The news from the north, we began to say to one another, resembled the thud of artillery shells exploding in a battle somewhere across the mountains, out of sight but no longer so far distant as to be inaudible. And then steadily the enemy moved across Lombardy and Veneto and south into Tuscany and Umbria. Where were our defenders? If we were to continue the military metaphor, we had to concede that Venice was gravely threatened, then Bergamo, then Florence. Rome would fall soon.

But, as our conversations about the virus continued—and it was increasingly impossible to talk about anything else—the image of an approaching army gave way to other attempts to understand what was happening. Of course, even in the popular press, there was no end of epidemiological articles, often quite serious and detailed ones written by experts, along with the familiar lists of advice: wash your hands, don’t touch your face, clean all surfaces, keep washing your hands, move away from people who are coughing, avoid crowds, try to stay at least one metre away from everyone else. But, however informative all of this is—and we consumed a vast amount of it in only a few days—in situations of stress, it is, as usual, literature that offers the most powerful ways of grasping what is happening or may come to pass, not in the precise biological sense but in its narrative unfolding. So our conversations turned to Saramago’s “Blindness,” Camus’s “The Plague,” Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” Manzoni’s “The Betrothed,” and, above all—the greatest of these fictional depictions—the opening chapter of Boccaccio’s “Decameron.”

The problem is that, as brilliant as these accounts are, they depict cultures in the grip of epidemic disease as collapsing into chaos, violence, and the rupturing of social bonds. But this is not at all what we were reading about in the newspapers or experiencing for ourselves. In China, if the accounts are accurate, there is something like the opposite: an extraordinary intensification of social order, figured in the software with which the government tracks many citizens’ health and movement. In Italy, there has been no comparable intensification—quite apart from the technology, such control is quite alien to the national character—but instead the marked presence of the warmth and kindness that make ordinary life here so agreeable, notwithstanding the country’s notorious political dysfunction. It is as if people instinctively sense, even as their anxiety levels rise and their economy sinks, that their version of social order rests on good humor, patience, inventiveness, and flexibility. The mother and son who run the fruit and vegetable stand at the outdoor market, the local genius who concocts wildly implausible flavors of gelato, the clerk at the nearby gym who somehow remembered (or pretended to remember) that I had a temporary membership four years ago and waived the initiation fee—all seem, under the pressure of the crisis, somehow to hold onto their innate sweetness.

It is a different narrative—and a different literary model—that helps to explain why I am writing these paragraphs not in Rome but on a plane back to the United States. Living on the top of a high hill, in a neighborhood not frequented by tourists, at first I had not noticed anything strange, but then I walked through the historic center, and it hit me: in the past few weeks, as the virus spread, the city emptied out. The crowds lining up to enter the Colosseum or visit the Forum have thinned; the mobs throwing coins in the Trevi Fountain or climbing the Spanish Steps have all but vanished; restaurants and bars usually overflowing with patrons are almost vacant. It is customary, of course, to lament the phenomenon of mass tourism in Italy; even the tourists themselves grumble and dream (as I do) of how nice it would be to visit the Sistine Chapel in solitary splendor. But the actual effect of the emptying out, at least for the current reason, is terrifying. Three nights ago, going to a friend’s house for dinner at 8 P.M., we walked through the Piazza Navona, the most beautiful square in the world, and were completely alone.

The literary model here is not “Decameron,” with porters bearing planks piled high with corpses and survivors torn between secluding themselves in closed-up houses and indulging in riotous excess. Instead, it is Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” with the doomed hero, madly in love with the beautiful boy, failing to notice that all the other guests in the hotel have fled the cholera epidemic. Of course, the locals who run the hotel do not flee; it is their city, and they have no choice but to stay. But poor Aschenbach could have gone home. Perhaps the plague would have followed him there, but at least he would have reëntered his own world, as I am about to do when my plane lands.

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