COLOGNE — As the coronavirus sweeps across Europe and countries respond by closing their borders, I’ve found myself thinking about my Bisnonna (Italian for great-grandmother) Corinna Meregalli. Specifically I’ve been struck by how different her experience of living in Europe was from mine — until recently anyway.
My mother recently shared some letters Bisnonna Corinna wrote the summer of 1943 to three of her sons who were scattered across Europe serving in the Italian fascist army. The notes, often accompanying care packages, ask of their whereabouts. In them, my Bisnonna wonders whether they are still alive. (One would eventually go missing in Yugoslavia).
She also recounts her daily labors as she single-handedly keeps the family business alive, runs errands for her soldier children and takes care of her fourth son, who didn’t enlist because of polio, and the elderly members of her family. Through them, under a careful display of normality, is a sense of angst at the risk of loved ones — and a sense of separation and the struggle to convey affection and care from a distance.
Those same feelings, albeit in far less dramatic circumstances, are being experienced by Italians across Europe today as we find ourselves in a situation we never expected to live through.
I was born in 1992, two years after the Schengen Convention paved the way for the abolition of border controls within European Union countries — and I damn well took advantage of it. I’ve lived, studied and worked in four EU countries. A combination of free movement, the EU’s Erasmus study abroad program and cheap Ryanair flights means I’ve got friends and family scattered across Europe. I’ve had multiple cross-border relationships that entailed taking night buses, Eurostars, early morning flights and shared cars crossing hardly visible EU borders.
Unlike my great-grandmother, we can consider ourselves fortunate to have more than the military mail service to stay in touch.
For my generation — Western Europeans born in the 1990s — borders are such a non-thing that experiencing their resurgence in times of an epidemic is the closest I’ve ever come to a trip in the past, and I am not a fan.
Nearly 80 years after Bisonna Corinna sent her letters, my entire family is in lockdown. My mum and aunt are both in Milan, the largest city in the region of Lombardy, which is the hotbed of the Italian epidemic.
Across Italy, people are only allowed to leave their homes to go to work, shop for food or because of a health emergency. The penalties for an unjustified outing includes, in theory anyway, up to three months in jail.
Unlike my great-grandmother, we can consider ourselves fortunate to have more than the military mail service to stay in touch. On Monday, we gathered online to sing happy birthday to my aunt and raise a virtual toast.
My mum’s a doctor in one of Milan’s largest hospitals. I give her a call every day after work, half-jokingly asking whether she’s been “coronated.” She half-jokingly answers that she needed an epidemic to get me to call her daily, Italian mamma style. As a specialist, all her non-urgent appointments have been canceled; she’s doesn’t work in the emergency room and doesn’t have direct contact with COVID-19 patients.
People sit next to a fountain in Piazza Gae Aulenti square on March 16, 2020 in Milan, Italy | Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images
In hospitals nearby, the situation is much worse. Antonio Pesenti, the region’s crisis unit coordinator for intensive care, says the situation in the nearby cities of Bergamo and Brescia is “close to total collapse.”
“We really hope that the pressure on them will begin to drop,” he told Radio Popolare — radio is one of the old technologies experiencing a resurgence, along with bicycles and home-made meals, under the epidemic. He spoke of “wartime conditions.”
My sister is in Switzerland, which as of Monday entered into lockdown until April 19. She’s in a surreal situation reminiscent of the classic Italian novel “The Bethrothed,” by Alessandro Manzoni. The story features a couple living in Lombardy, Renzo and Lucia, who are forced to separate by the malign Don Rodrigo. Through hundreds of pages they struggle amid an outbreak of the bubonic plague to finally be reunited and married on Lake Como.
My sister’s story is a bit less dramatic. Her fiancé lives in Italy, and their wedding, planned on Lake Maggiore for early July, is on hold until the situation becomes clearer. They’ve taken a very Northern-Italian, practical approach to the problem: They’ll get married anyway; the party can come later. After all, people get married in times of war.
My 13-year-old brother, who lives with my dad and his wife in the southern Italian city of Bari, is the one who’s having a better time — with classes canceled, he hangs out at home. My dad set up football goal posts on the terrace, and they get some sun and exercise that way. But isolation from his peers and the obligation to stay at home are already starting to take their toll.
I have daily calls with my locked-down friends, in Austria, France, Italy, Belgium and everywhere in between.
I’m the least affected in my daily life: I’m currently in Cologne, Germany, where my partner lives. I found myself here without official ID, aside from my Belgian residency card — an indication of how unused to concepts like nationality, residency, borders I am.
I’ve decided to stay here and work remotely because if I go back to Belgium where I live, he wouldn’t be allowed to come and visit under German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ban of non-necessary travels out of the country. On Monday, the German government ordered the closure of nearly everything, and asked people to stay at home along the Italian model that Spain and France have also adopted.
I have daily calls with my locked-down friends, in Austria, France, Italy, Belgium and everywhere in between. We’ve already decided that once this is all over, we’ll get together to spend a week at the sea. It will be a moment of solace, a return to the future, and a chance to remember that a borderless Europe is not something we can afford to take for granted.