ROME — When her middle-aged son got sick, Ruffina Pompei did what she had done for decades, bringing vegetable soup and freshly squeezed orange juice to his room. She slept in an armchair outside his room and changed his clothes. She told her husband, 89, to steer clear.

But the coronavirus tore through the apartment.

Her son died in a hospital in the region of Abruzzo on March 29. Her husband died the next day in the same hospital. Ms. Pompei, 82, was also diagnosed with the virus.

“I could not leave him alone,” she said of her son.

Before everyone else in the West, Italians received and largely obeyed an order to stay at home. “I’m staying home” became a hashtag, then the name of a national ordinance and then a motto hung from balconies and windows. But while staying home has worked, reducing the rate of infections, bringing down the daily toll of the dead and creating breathing room for hospitals, home has become a dangerous place for many Italians.

Italian households represent “the biggest reservoir of infections,” said Massimo Galli, the director of the infectious diseases department at Luigi Sacco University Hospital in Milan. He called the cases “the possible restarting point of the epidemic in case of a reopening.”