The alarm on my mobile rings to wake us at 7 A.M., the same hour at which we awake during the week under normal circumstances. This was the first decision my wife and I made when the quarantine began: we would not forfeit our schedules. With my ten-year-old son suddenly out of school, and our jobs conducted entirely from home, it would have been easy to lose any sense of rhythm. I am a novelist, and my wife is a game designer; we usually work from home anyway. We thought, in the beginning, that we could stand this new way of life more easily than others. We were horribly wrong.

My son’s school assured us that lessons would be given online, and that it needed “a couple of days” to get the system running. As of this writing, fifteen days have passed, filled with homework my son is expected to complete, but without a single online lesson. (The reason for the delay is absurdly simple: many Italian teachers, and most principals, are old and never learned to use a computer properly, thinking that it would never become necessary.) So my son’s lessons are instead given analogically, throughout the days, by my wife and me, with a plethora of mistakes and uncertainties that are rapidly eroding any trust our son used to have in us. Probably, when all this is over, he will ask to be adopted. Probably, we will not object.

There is only one supermarket in my town, Vecchiano, which sits in the countryside outside Pisa, in the center of the country; at this moment, it is against the law to cross the borders of one’s own municipality, and, if you live in a rural area, as I do, your options for shopping are extremely limited. But once you’re in the store things look better: the shelves are full; there is fresh dairy and fruit and meat; there is no longer the sense of being at a Soviet market as there is outside, waiting in the long queue that forms by the door. The line is due to safety precautions: only four customers are allowed into the store simultaneously. And waiting outside is not that bad, after five days at home. Even rain can become a distraction.

I must have tried a dozen times before I managed to produce a working self-made mask, made from sterile tissue, rubber bands, and Scotch tape, following an Internet tutorial. The first problem was that I’m an “intellectual,” as I say to justify the fact that I’m clumsy. The second problem is that, when the mask is on, my eyeglasses grow foggy, and I’ve stopped wearing contact lenses out of fear of touching my eyes. So I have to decide: Do I want to see, or do I want to breathe? There’s been a severe shortage of masks since the very first days of the emergency in Italy. At the supermarket, you see people wearing every kind of creative protection over their faces. A guy in Brescia found a way to turn a snorkeling mask into a ventilator by inserting a 3-D-printed valve.

During one week in March alone, more than forty thousand people were charged by the Italian police for violating the national or regional mobility laws, out of seven hundred thousand routine checks. That’s about five per cent, not too far from the mortality rate of COVID-19. Since the outbreak, much has been made of the fact that Italians like to demonstrate creativity in skirting authority. (There’s a saying among Tuscans: le regole sono per quell’altri—“the rules are for other people.”) These days, to move about in Italy, one has to bring along a “self-declaration” document, explaining one’s motivation for strolling outside the home. The motivation must be a mandatory or usual activity, something that cannot be postponed: a man in Florence was charged after writing “I’m looking for a pusher” and trying to persuade the police that it was something that actually could not be postponed.

I weighed eighty-four kilograms before the quarantine. Now, three weeks in, I weigh ninety-three. As I said, the shelves of the supermarket are full. And there are not many other things that you can do at home besides cook. I now have time for the sorts of time-consuming dishes that I haven’t prepared since my university days, like zuppe made from dried beans instead of the precooked kind. I check my weight every evening (it’s an activity, after all), and I’ve noticed that its increase is almost as steep as the curve describing the number of infected people over time. A sigmoid curve: a slight enhancement in the beginning, then an explosion. And then, mathematics tells us, a stabilization. The problem is that no stabilization can be foreseen at the moment. Not for my weight, nor for the spread of the virus.

The spreading of a virus is not dissimilar to the spreading of political extremism. Many Italians have a way of living and thinking that under normal circumstances seems harmless: we are rather certain that we are safe, until the day when we wake up and see Mussolini standing on a balcony surrounded by a crew of adoring people. You don’t realize it until it happens, and, when it does happen, it will often take a war to get rid of it. We started off sending jokes about the coronavirus, and now here we are, with the Italian Army transporting caskets across the country because crematoria in the worst-hit areas are overwhelmed.

Each evening, at six o’clock, the Protezione Civile, the official branch in charge of the public health and safety of citizens during times of crisis, issues an official statement. Quietly, we listen as Angelo Borrelli, the chief of the P.C., soberly delivers the numbers on television: as of this writing, a hundred and ten thousand, five hundred and seventy-four infections and 13,155 dead. This is probably the most significant change in habit that this coronavirus mess has brought among Italians. We listen to facts now, not to opinions. We listen to people who have something meaningful to say. There is less room for the proud ignorance of those who believe that what they already know is all they need to understand. In Italy, these are usually a noisy bunch of people, almost impossible to ignore. Now we listen to those who are yelling things that we urgently need to hear, like the governor of Campania, who warned his constituency, in a press release, “To all people wishing to organize a party for their graduation: we will join the party. With flamethrowers.”

When the pandemic first began to take its toll in Italy, other European countries mocked us for the failures of our medical system—one of the few things of which Italians are proud. Now, weeks later, governments around the world are facing similar challenges in confronting the virus and enforcing the same rules. This week, officials announced that the number of infections in Italy’s northern hot spots have begun to plateau. But one of our great fears is that the outbreak, which has been concentrated in Northern Italy, will make its way to the South, where hospitals are even less prepared to take care of hundreds of patients. (Italy is a country with a gradient: as you move farther south, some things get better and others get worse.) Tuscany, where I live, is a holiday destination for wealthy people—and wealthy people come from the North, and particularly from Lombardy, the country’s first coronavirus hot spot. When the crisis began, many people fled to their holiday houses, bringing the virus with them. Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, the region next door, have reliable medical systems; together, they cut across the country’s middle like a belt, or a dam. We have to prevent the disease from flooding further downstream.