MILAN — A table of old men were shooting the breeze next to the bocce ball courts in a Milan recreation center on Wednesday, talking, like seemingly everyone else in northern Italy, about the coronavirus outbreak that had shut down towns, closed all of Italy’s schools and claimed the lives of more than 100 people, almost all of them elderly.

The men, mostly in their 70s and 80s, joked that their wives gave them a hard time for leaving the house (“not even the coronavirus can keep this guy home”), that life’s finish line was too close to get worked up about a contagion, that they had faith in northern Italy’s vaunted health care system.

But the bravado also disguised real concern.

“It’s normal that I’m a little worried,” Antonio Di Furia, the club’s owner, 67, said. “I have heart problems.”

Italy’s mortality rate in the outbreak, about 3.5 percent, is not much above the global average of 3.4 percent reported by the World Health Organization. But the virus is taking a disproportionate toll on the elderly in Italy, which has the oldest population in Europe, and the second-oldest in the world after Japan.