Dwelling in Times of Quarantine
Sunday, March 29. It is a beautiful sunny spring day. To our surprise, the mail courier rang our doorbell midday to deliver some toys for our son, L. When we relayed our joy and surprise, the courier smiled sarcastically and raised his shoulders. “Every day is the same by now,” he added, and hurried to the next house to deliver another package like a Santa Claus working off-season.
Today we finished our fifth week of quarantine. All the spaces and the rituals that mark the passage of time have been transformed. By now, days roll into the next without event. Our present feeling of monotony is simultaneously accompanied by the imperative to change our daily routine, with such intensity that it is difficult to remember the conditions of life even from the day before. We have woken up to a new normal at least seven times the past month because of the changing rules of the quarantine. Yet, we have also become numb to change. By now, the only secure space left is within the walls of our home—a space which we try to reinvent and keep lively. How did we get here? What is the world we inhabit now?
Dwelling, whether in our homes, in public, in virtual and all of the interstitial spaces, is a political act, as many have reflected upon in the weeks of quarantine. But the spaces we inhabit are biopolitical more fundamental and intimate than has been addressed in theoretical analyses of governance by many scholars: they provide boundaries for agency and they set up opportunities to reflect and redefine social and personal identities. During the past five weeks, our family has been forced to reconceive the spaces we inhabit, to let some of them go and to reimagine others, to then inhabit them anew.
What follows is a chronological account of spatial experiences since the lockdown began in Italy, on February 21, that charts the changing boundaries of the quarantine and the attempt of one family—ours—to reorient itself in a familiar space. Because of the quarantine’s conditions, we were not able to take many photographs and those that we could are furtively taken, as we risk a penal fine from the police patrols. Like in a war zone, every person under quarantine has a version of this story. Challenges, perspectives, issues grow by the day and within the walls of each house and each mind. From what we read and gather from phone or video conversations, far more challenging and adventurous stories are out there. In the absence of public spaces such as squares, cafes, and town centers, which are central to Italian society, the virtual space has probably never felt so necessary as now. But, this space comes with no sense of dwelling.
The Airport (Wednesday, January 29 – Thursday, January 31)
We flew New York for two days for A Night of Philosophy and Ideas, organized by the French consulate. At that moment, our mobility, traversing six time zones and an ocean to a different continent seemed unrelated to COVID-19, news of which was only just penetrating Italy. At the airport in Rome, workers were wearing masks but they were complaining about it, and the flying public behaved in that familiar alienated and atomized way that the non-place of airports engender. We still hadn’t realized that the virus was as mobile as our bodies were.
Only on our return did we experience the virus’s first effect, when Min was unexpectedly ordered to change her seat from the front of the plane to the back. Walking down the aisle to the rear, she registered that she was the only visibly Asian passenger.
ORDINANCE #1
Friday, February 21 – Saturday, February 22
The Ministry of Health issued a general ordinance of a mandatory quarantine for fourteen days for those who had been exposed to COVID-19 and an obligation to report your condition to local health authorities. This same day, the Minister of Health, Roberto Speranza, and the President of Lombardy, suspended all public events and gatherings, and closed schools in Codogno, Castiglione d’Adda, Casalpusterlengo, Fombio, Maleo, Somaglio, Bertonico, Terranova dei Passerini, Castelgerundo and San Fiorano. The following day, a new decree was announced that in order to contain the virus a strict sanitary cordon would enclose eleven municipalities in Northern Italy, including the complete isolation of Lodi and Vo in the province of Padua. All public and private events were forbidden, all schools and cultural institutions were shut down, and businesses excluding groceries and pharmacies were required to close. Even rail service and the train stations of Codogno, Maleio and Casalpusterlengo were blocked.
Autostrada (Friday, February 21, 9:00 pm)
Exhausted from a week of parenting, teaching, workshops, and meetings at the University of Milan, we headed with L to retrieve our car from our rented space outside the center of the city. Our destination was Viareggio, on the coast of Tuscany, to spend a weekend with family and celebrate the local Carnival. To get to the car, we walked through our neighborhood, Lazzaretto, passing the streets Settala and Casati to the subway, jammed with people returning home from work. L, like all toddlers, was fussy, and grabbing the bars, pressing his face against the windows. Andrea glanced at the traffic and news on the phone. Exiting the metro, Andrea, looking puzzled, reported that “there were some cases of COVID-19 outside the city center in Codogno.” At that precise moment, a masked woman crossed the street in front us: the first person we saw with a mask in Milan.
Figure 1. The route via the autostrada from Milan to Viareggio. The area just before the town of Piacenza was where the first outbreaks of COVID-19 were reported. Courtesy Google, 2020.
We drove to Tuscany on the autostrada. The highway between Milan and Parma is straight and flat with three generous lanes in each direction—large for Italy. The traffic is usually dense and drivers are aggressive, constantly pushing from behind. As we passed the areas of Lodi, Codogno, towards Piacenza, we noted blue emergency lights flashing in the area. Surely, this would be contained, we thought.
We arrived at Viareggio, a coastal town in Tuscany later that evening, and our mind was focused on celebrating Carnival and preparing our coordinated family costumes. The town, relatively new compared to most Italian cities, is most famous for the eight-story papier-mâché floats that are paraded through the town. This event is a major tourist spectacle, and we were hosting some friends from Holland who flew in for the experience.
But the COVID-19 news moved fast. By Saturday night, all universities in Milan were closed. The government dispatched the military to create a blockade around the quarantined municipalities, and imposed criminal penalties for violating quarantine ordinances. On Sunday evening, our daycare called to confirm that they too were closed. We had to pick a place to stay: Viareggio with family or home in Milan. We decided not to take the autostrada that evening and to stay so that L could play with his little cousin and his grandparents could help care for him.
Carnival continued with mixed feelings from authorities until Fat Tuesday. In all of our naïveté, we joined the thousands gathered in the town’s public spaces to watch the last of the fireworks fall into the dark sea on Tuesday, February 25.
ORDINANCE #2
Tuesday, February 25
The quarantine was extended to include the regions of Emilia-Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont and Liguria. All schools, museums, courts, and public gatherings were closed.
ORDINANCE #3
Sunday, March 1
A new decree extends the previous measures and also creates uniformity through the national territory. The “zona rossa” is designated around the eleven municipalities at the epicenter of the epidemic, and the quarantine now includes, Pesaro-Urbino and Savona, Piacenza and Cremona.
ORDINANCE #4
Wednesday, March 4
The government announced measures valid throughout the entire national territory with the suspension of all educational activities at all levels and universities.
ORDINANCE #5
Sunday, March 8
At 2:00 am, Prime Minister Conti announced a new decree with new restrictive measures applied to all of Lombardy and the provinces of Modena, Parma, Piacenza, Reggio Emilia, Rimini, Pesaro and Urbino, Alessandria, Asti, Novara, Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, Vercelli, Padua, Treviso, Venice, now affecting around sixteen million people. Movement to and from and within these territories is restricted.
Figure 2. Min and L during the Carnival celebrations along the street parallel to the Passaggiata. The float in the background is titled “Home sweet home” dedicated to Greta Thunberg and designed and built by the Lebigre and Roger. We were all unaware of what would occur just a few days later. L’s face has been obscured from all the photos. Photograph by Andrea Borghini, 2020.
Passeggiata (Saturday, February 22 – Sunday, March 8)
We had only prepared for a weekend stay, but for the two weeks after schools closed in Milan, we went about our lives relatively normally. There were the daily routines of buying bread, drinking coffee, writing in a café, going for a run, shopping for groceries, and playing with our child on the beach. The town still was functioning regularly; the beaches and parks were open. There was a foreboding atmosphere, but Viareggio seemed to be isolated from what appeared to be a regional problem. The town’s poor communication/connections with other cities, while normally a hassle, felt like a shield of protection.
Viareggio’s largest public space is the Passeggiata. It is a long promenade that runs about two kilometers along the beachfront and is lined with cafes, stores, hotels, and bars. The mornings are filled with the clicking sound of espresso machines being packed with coffee grounds, and glasses toasting aperitivos resonate in the evenings. On the weekends, crowds of people from neighboring towns and cities take long and slow strolls up and down its length, chatting, greeting, observing, and being seen just like they did in the nineteenth century.
As a draft of the fifth ordinance was leaked online earlier on the evening of the 7th, many from Lombardy fled to areas not yet under lockdown. Scenes of panicked Milanese broadcast on the evening news showed the wheels of their strollers scrapping the limestone surfaces of Central Station and the heavy plastic of their bags banging against the closing doors of the last buses leaving the city. The next morning, many of those fleeing from Lombardy were in Viareggio, drinking in the sun-baked cafes of the Passeggiata or playing tennis on the courts in the Pineta, the public park named after the tall pine trees that offer shade from the strong sun.
Figure 3. The Passaggiata during Carnival with the crowds of spectators and participants. The large float in the background is titled “Ole” by Carlo Lombardi. Photograph by Min Kyung Lee, 2020.
The year-round residents, including L’s grandparents, looked on with incredulity. Instead of going to the beach with L for their afternoon stroll, they walked the more reserved parts of the Pineta. Fleeing was a privilege of those with resources, but their entitlement to mobility had surely brought the virus to Versilia, the region that comprises the northwestern coast of Tuscany and includes Viareggio. Many of those who had escaped the quarantine assumed that they had left the virus behind, as if it was linked to a place instead of our bodies. They took this as a summer vacation that began a few months earlier this year. Lines formed in front of pizzerias and ice cream shops, restaurants were packed for lunch, and long traffic jams formed.
A regional lockdown was clearly futile.
Later that evening, under the new quarantine directives, Juventus and Milan played a soccer match to an empty stadium. The referees’ whistles echoing against the vacant seats were strangely audible, while the fans’ cheers were muffled inside closed homes.
Figure 4. Map of Viareggio. Courtesy Orange Smile.
ORDINANCE #6
Wednesday, March 11
The quarantine was extended to the whole of the country. Gathering in public spaces is prohibited. Stores selling “essential” goods would remain open, but circulation would be monitored and people would have to maintain a distance of at least one meter from each other. In the meantime, the northern Italians who had fled the quarantine were now required to register with the local police.
Piazza Mazzini (Thursday, March 12)
Figure 5. The same street along the Passaggiata after the national lockdown. This and all of following pictures were taken after the lockdown. They are rushed photographs taken on the way to buy groceries because it was illegal to go outside simply to take pictures. We might have been stopped by the police patrols and given a fine for leaving the house for any other reason. Photography by Andrea Borghini, 2020.
Very quickly we, like everyone, were forced to change intimate habits and structural patterns. In the span of a week, the public spaces of Italian cities and towns emptied out. The laughter of children in playgrounds, the swish of soccer balls, the clinks of food service, the loud banter of pedestrians, the traffic of cars, scooters, bicycles, and buses all went silent. They were replaced by the rumble of trucks spraying disinfectant, the sirens of police patrols and ambulances, and the beat of helicopters transporting people and goods.
Gatherings were no longer allowed. Walking together was forbidden. If you did take a walk and encountered another person, you looked from behind a mask, fearful that they might be infected. Every stranger was potentially diseased, and no one said hello. It felt like a strange civil war was beginning.
Many of you may have seen footage of music and dancing on balconies in many Italian cities. Even in small towns, these became a ritual. These semi-private spaces, where laundry is hung to dry, recycling bins stored, and flowers and herbs grown, spontaneously became new public spaces. They share an airspace, but each is its own disconnected unit. These rituals of music and dance were announced and organized via social media, such that the physical spaces of the balconies were supported by a virtual space. But, Viareggio, a beach resort, is atypical. Mostly empty except in summer, there was often no one to hear the songs being sung from balconies.
March 12 was the last day Min took L to the beach. With L in the baby seat of the bicycle, we heard the church bells ringing. L waved his hand to their long melody. No one would be attending mass that day or the next and the lonely sounds bounced off of the walls of an empty piazza. We meandered through the Pineta towards the town’s main square, Piazza Mazzini. It is the largest square in the city. On one end is the town’s public library and art museum, housed in a crumbling nineteenth-century neoclassical edifice, originally designed by the architect Giuseppe Poggi as a hospice. On the other end is the beach, with tall palm trees framing the open sea.
Figure 6. Alone on the beach at Piazza Mazzini, the town’s main square. Taken just before the final lockdown. Photograph by Min Kyung Lee, 2020.
The last time we stood here was for Carnival, weeks ago, when it was filled with celebration. Now, it was deserted except for the three masked workers using a forklift to install concrete planters as barriers. We stood about ten meters from them with L fixated on the heavy machinery. We crossed the square to the beach, and where there is normally the rhythmic sound of waves, instead there was an eerie calm that left us feeling strange. We turned back. Biking through the center of town, all of the stores were closed, but the lights were still on. The tennis courts still had balls that needed to be collected and rackets were left leaning against benches. It felt like a town deserted in a rush.
ORDINANCE #7
Saturday, March 14
The mayor of Viareggio ordered the closing of the Passeggiata and the beach, anticipating potential gatherings over the weekend.
Figure 7. The closed Pineta, the town’s public park. Photograph by Min Kyung Lee, 2020.
The Pineta (Sunday, March 15 – Saturday, March 21)
March 15 was the last day that we all went out together, anywhere. We walked across the street to the Pineta, and for an hour wandered around and explored the spring growth, keeping a low profile, while also trying to have fun with our son. The police patrol came by to instruct us to return home. With the second warning, we turned back.
Figure 8. The empty soccer field and tennis courts in the Pineta. Photograph by Min Kyung Lee, 2020.
Compared to the openness and visibility of the Passeggiata, the Pineta is a more heterogenous public space that vacillates between being overdeveloped and regulated in some sections, to overgrown and obscure in others. There are the dance halls for seniors, the open air theaters, food stands selling doughnuts, amusement rides, bocce and tennis courts, all full during the summer months. There are the immigrant families who bring generous lunches and lay out elaborate table settings on leisurely sunny days. There are the new mothers pushing their strollers with napping babies, and the retired men who occupy the benches gossiping the day away. But there are also drug dealers who hide their goods in the bushes and in the ground, and sex workers who work at night in the unlit corners. There are the homeless and vulnerable, who roam the side paths trying to escape surveillance.
Since the beach closed, the park became the only open space available to us: not just a space to pass through on the way to the beach or the town center, but a free place to explore and linger. We listened to the birds singing, gathered the new flowers blooming, and smelled the pine trees in the warm sun. But with tightening restrictions over the course of the week, first for children to stay at home, then against going out in groups even as a couple, and afterwards, only for individual outdoor exercise and dog walks, our time, even in this last public space was quickly reduced. There was constant surveillance from the police patrols even on this restricted time, and finally, on March 21, the Pineta was closed.
ORDINANCE #8
Saturday, March 21
Prime Minister Conti announced more stringent measure to the national quarantine. All non-essential businesses and industrial productions are shut down. Travel across municipal lines is prohibited, with the exception of designated workers or for urgent health needs.
ORDINANCE #9
Sunday, March 22
Ban on all outdoor physical activities.
Market (Tuesday, March 10; Tuesday, March 17; Friday, March 27)
One of the most dramatic changes to daily life has been to foodways. The town’s original central market is composed of a yellow art nouveau pavilion forming a square. With much of the building in disrepair, newly built kiosks and vendors now occupy the corners. The formal spaces are used by bakeries, cafes, fishmongers, and butchers, but now turn outward away from the originally planned enclosure. For many of the shops, where there had been multiples entrances and exits, there is now only one entry point that is controlled and guarded. Lines form outside and entry is limited to one person at a time. Some shops have placed marks on the floor to indicate safe distances between people for waiting. Because of the ban on traveling between towns, business has ceased for many. Shops now only serve locals and there is not enough commerce to sustain them for the long-term. What was a public space filled with the busy movement of vendors, delivery trucks, shoppers, and strangers, is now hushed.
Figure 9. An empty street and closed shops on the edge of the town’s central market. Photograph by Andrea Borghini, 2020.
Italians shop daily for food, creating a dense rhythm and pattern to movement. We buy bread daily, visit the farmers market weekly, and shop at various specialty stores in between. That is no longer possible. The farmers markets are now banned. Rather than buying directly from local farmers, we must reinvent commercial relationships. For the vendors whose phone number we had, we call and try to arrange some makeshift agreement for home delivery. “Home delivery” was a unknown concept to most merchants here but it has quickly become the only way for small vendors to survive—and to get food to people unable to leave their homes. A new meaning to local food is emerging.
Meanwhile, for the last three weeks, Andrea is the only one who goes out to do errands, partly because of the restrictions requiring only one person per household to do the grocery shopping and partly for fear of Min facing harassment. L’s grandparents remain at home because of their age and health. When out, there is a constant calculation of the steps and one is hyperaware of one’s body in space: how far am I from another person? How many people have passed from here? How many have touched this jar or package? How many people can fit inside? How is the air circulating? In which direction?
Figure 10. The balcony of our house. Andrea teaching online. Photograph by Min Kyung Lee, 2020.
Figure 11. The interior courtyard of our house, taken over by L’s toys. Luckily, we had an outdoor space where he could play. Photograph by Min Kyung Lee, 2020.
Balcony, AKA the Office (Saturday, March 21 – Sunday, March 29)
We are now left with the house as the only space to inhabit. We are hosted by L’s grandparents, who retired to a housing type particular to the town, and aptly called a viareggina. It is a single-story narrow but long residential building. There is often a small inner courtyard and small secondary building at the back end, used for storage and, if larger, as a guest space. With a renovation, a loft was added to create a second floor and a cozy bedroom in the back with a rooftop terrace. So, with a front garden, the inner courtyard, and the terrace, we fortunately have three small spaces where we can feel the warm sun on our faces and watch the moonrise at night.
Figure 12. Banners with rainbows drawn by children hung from balconies and windows with the words, “Andrà tutto bene.” (Everything will be okay.) Photograph by Min Kyung Lee, 2020.
Depending on the time of day and where the sun is, L plays in various parts of the house, and the rest of us circulate around him. The terrace has become Andrea’s de facto office, where he records online classes and logs into Zoom meetings. We can hear the neighbors: the shutters being pulled open, the domestic quarrels, and the desperation of dogs. But the streets are quiet, except for the police patrols, and the occasional masked passerby scurrying quickly with their groceries back home.
L was woken up one morning to the sound of trucks disinfecting the empty streets. With a recent fixation on trucks, it was his dream come true to see an orange tank rumbling down the street, twice. Meanwhile, Min wondered what toxins were used in the disinfectant and heard ambulance sirens in the background. From the balconies of many houses, banners with cheerful rainbows read “Andrà tutto bene.” Everything will be okay. A message of hope from children for all of us.
Kitchen/Table (Saturday, March 21 – Sunday, March 29)
Figure 13. A homemade sign strung across our residential street that reads, “Ce La Faremo Stiamo a Casa.” (We will get through this. Stay at home.) Photography by XXX, 2020.
With five people confined to a small house, we have reconceived and devised new ways to use space. L discovered that depending on the time of day, the kitchen table is not only a surface to eat and draw, but also a volume to inhabit and play. Under the table, he has hidden his toys and created a new space behind the forest of chair legs. He finds new corners and hiding places, and observes the sunlight moving across the room. Never have the interior details of our home become so present.
Beyond the confines of the house, there is also the virtual space we inhabit through text messages, video calls, and virtual classrooms. If our physical conditions have demanded us to be present in the now, the different time zones of our friends and family and the asynchronous recordings of lectures for our students have us simultaneously living in a second, alternate, dimension. Our world has split between living within spatial and temporal confines and without any physical limits.
Lazzaretto of Milan (date to be determined)
The restrictions of quarantine have meant that we cannot return home to Milan. Ironically, our home there is in the historic Lazzaretto. This section of the city, just outside of the city gate of Porta Venezia, is about three square kilometers and defined by its narrow streets. Bustling with Ethiopian restaurants and shops and gay bars, and located between the city’s central train station, Montanelli Park, and Corso Buenos Aires, one of Milan’s busiest commercial streets, it is a socially, economically, and ethically mixed neighborhood marked by its connections to every part of the city and constant movement.
Figure 14. Giovanni Francesco Brunetti, “Vero dissegno con le misure giuste del grande lazaretto di S. Gregorio di Milano come si trovava nel tempo della gran peste l’anno 1630” (true plan of the correct measures of the large lazzaretto of S. Gregorio of Milan as it was found during the time of the great plague in 1630). Courtesy wikicommons.
Conceived in the late fifteenth century, the original space was surrounded by ditches filled with water and connected to the rest of town only by a single drawbridge, occupied and managed by the Ospedale (Hospital) Maggiore. Over the next two centuries, the Lazzaretto was used to contain and treat those with the plague. By the nineteenth century, it became a space for the military, administration, and then eventually, worker housing. An octagonal chapel built by Pellegrino Tibaldi in 1580 is the only edifice that betrays the neighborhood’s original function.
Lazzaretto—like Settala and Casati, the locations of our school and favorite café—was until a few weeks ago just a placename to us. But all were protagonists in Milan’s great plague of 1630, and settings for the tragic events narrated by Alessandro Manzoni in chapters 31 and 32 of his 1827 novel, The Betrothed. Ludovico Settala was a physician who observed and reported the first cases of the plague and Felice Casati was the director of the Lazzaretto of Milan, managing the sick and dead who were quarantined. Those names now have taken on new meaning, to remind us that our daily dwelling, in Milan and perhaps everywhere else, will not be the same.
