Week 15 - Wednesday in Milan explores the 'new normal' for Ellie

Edited BY

G P Kennedy

Ellie - Milan, Italy

 

 “How are y'all doing?” a friend from Texas asked me recently. I am happy to report that the contagion rate in Italy have been mostly down. Daily rates of new infections have been around 150 for the country.

 

 I have the feeling, though, that this is due not only to scared people who mostly stick to their masks and distancing, but of the possibility to do things outdoors, which is what helps with holding new infections down. There are many unwelcome signs for change, though. For example, hope for getting rid of plastics, and its dispersal in the environment, is definitely given up.

 

 Now that all coffee shops, company cafeterias and restaurants that hope to have clients indoors are required to outfit their spaces with distancing partitions, plastic has drastically increased. But it has also started causing some awkward moments.

 

 I met with a friend for a coffee recently, our first get together after the lockdown, and it was such a delicate moment trying to figure out the social choreography of our encounter. Do we greet each other with the new elbow touch? Or not at all? Shall we keep our masks down even after we are done with coffee or is it too rude for each other to put them back on? 

 

 Beyond our immediate circle of friends, the whole social calendar, the thing that makes a bunch of people an actual community, has been stuck, too. 

 Public events in the city of Legnano have frozen somewhere in early March.

 

 The next town over, famous for its street food festival, decided to celebrate the end of the biggest scare and the beginning of summer by actually holding it. Well, at least some version of it. But it was not a street festival, it was contained in a single space outside of the city limits, and It was by reservation only. We didn't know the details and ventured early hoping for some social-distanced spots. Too late, we were told; the reservations for the street food festivities have been exhausted and all the community tables have been reserved.

 

 

Only take out was possible, but what kind of festival would that be if everyone took their food home to eat? Not sure how the festival really went after our disappointment, but I suspect that not everyone who reserved actually came. The city needs to rethink its policies and perhaps require a card to hold a spot, while we need to acquire the new habit to always call in advance before we go somewhere.

 

 So we had no choice but to take out some carciofi alla giudia from the vendors to eat in the car. 

A Roman Jewish traditional specialty, they are basically deep-fried artichokes to be enjoyed on a piece of bread. Front view: the fence of the industrial complex abutting the parking lot.

 

 Lest this feels like some insignificant inconvenience to complain about, especially in the middle of a pandemic when millions of people are dying and many more are left with long-term health effects, consider this. Just like Italy was the real wake-up call of what happens when a public health threat is left without attention - a glimpse into the future for the rest of the world - now that the worst of the direct health threat for the community is over, take this as a picture of what follows.

 

 The foundations of the experience economy are shaken. This isn't just sbout the joys of communal get-together or eating out, but all invisible ties that lead from there and have a gigantic social impact that is also economic. For Italy, this means tourism, but don't just imagine hotels and small B&Bs going under. 

 There are so many other sectors that are under threat because of that: art, bookstores, concerts, food events, speciality crafts, luxury goods, and everything that is based on chance encounters with other human beings, the very willingness to be out and about and do things with others, and what ultimately makes life worth it. Think that even the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is so impacted by the lockdown that it is currently crowdfunding for its reopening.

 

 Now, what shall we expect for the gorgeous, but less famous Villa Litta in Lainate that is just a local treasure to be discovered behind its heavy doors.

 

 You can't digitize that experience for sure, nor the purchase of a leather bracelet from the gift shop next door that would follow after you visit Villa Litta, or the coffee you would have with a friend in the courtyard, or the desire to write a poem following meeting your friend and feeling the uneven cobblestones of the sidewalk. Life, in general cannot be digitized.