John Henderson is an American AS Roma fan living in the Italian capital. He writes about life in locked down Rome...

April 28

Italy’s coronavirus lockdown for expats: Tears, loneliness and loved ones far away

The sidewalk cafes tempt you like the Sirens from a nearby shore. You can feel the sun’s warmth on your balcony, but you can’t feel the sea. The last time you did the Italian double-cheek kiss was with your cat.

Welcome to Porto Quarantina.

Life in Italian lockdown is harder than most places.

We live in the most beautiful country in the world but feel no closer to it than if we were quarantined in Des Moines. Look but don’t touch; read but don’t experience.

It’s an adjustment 60 million Italian residents have made.

Some, obviously, struggle more than others with health, death, finances. But one subset of us struggles in ways Italians can’t comprehend.

We expats are a long way from our roots. We can’t huddle with our families. The language is a daily challenge. Even if we can communicate, there are few people with whom to communicate. We all came here for adventure, for opportunity, for love. Every day we try to assimilate into a foreign society. Yet every day we drift farther into our own little worlds.

Coronavirus tougher in Italy

Yes, expats face the same all over the world. However, we in Italy are different.

Italy was the first country to put an entire nation in lockdown.

We locked March 9.

Today is my Lockdown Day 51.

I’m starting to put parmesan on cereal.

I recently reached out to some fellow expats and asked how they’re doing. We commiserated. We compared notes. We discussed hope. They come from all over. Beirut. Hong Kong. Austria. Canada. New Jersey. One came just for school and can’t get home.

Another is pregnant with a husband stuck on a cruise ship off California.

Most have hit the wall.

“In the beginning, I was all positive,” said Annamaria Borelli, a 33-year-old teacher from Ocean Township, New Jersey. “Now I’ve had enough.”

Said Katy Terro, a 24-year-old student from Beirut: “It’s very depressing. I’ve had a really rough 10 days. I’m in the worst moods. I’m randomly crying. It just feels so much like a prison. But at least in prison you have some people to talk to.”

Distance is a huge part of the expats’ equation. It’s not a big factor for me. I left home in Eugene, Ore., in 1978 and never moved back.

I traveled the world while working in Denver for 23 years.

I retired to Rome for good in 2014.

But for many, the family lifeline is as important as the daily cappuccino.

Borelli, whose grandparents came from Puglia and who grew up speaking Italian, moved to Rome in 2010 to attend John Cabot University and stayed. She teaches pre-school and is a jazz singer on the side. She’s not emotionally attached to Ocean Township — “I hate it,” she said — but is attached to her family.

“Not having the opportunity to get back I feel trapped,” she said. “I like Italy and I like Rome. Anytime I need I can get a taxi, get on a plane and go home. Now with this crisis I can’t go home. Not having this option is really hard. I can’t get out of here. It makes it worse.”

Terro has been in Rome for only 17 months. She came to get a masters degree in food security and human development. The degree included an internship which required clerical work. She loved the job, the interaction with co-workers. But she had no intention of staying in Rome. Then the coronavirus hit.

After only two weeks at work, she was no longer allowed in the office.

“The first 20 days were OK,” she said. “It was fine. Ah, time to relax. I was doing a lot of productive things. I worked from home. I read books. I wrote in my blog. I learned to cook. I thought I’d be able to keep it up.

“Then I hit the wall. I started waking up very depressed. I had zero energy or will to do anything. I had books to read but no motivation.”

Lockdown in Italy through May 3

Because Italy was the first country to lock down, it’s one of the first to extend it, too. The latest extension is through May 3. Then we can move around the city more.

But restaurants will remain closed until May 18.

Fitness clubs May 31.

Travel? No one knows. Local officials told us to not make any summer travel plans. I’ve already cancelled trips to Spain, Puglia and Germany.

Next on the batting tee: Greece in August. I’m not even counting on Finland for Christmas.

“It seems so hopeless,” Terro said. “It’s why I’m planning on leaving for home as soon as I can. It’s been 45 days home alone. Literally no human interaction.”

Some expats are not only a long ways from home, but a long ways from loved ones in Italy.

Alycia Reynolds, 38, came to Italy from Bridgetown, Nova Scotia, a year ago and is living in her husband’s hometown of Molfetta, Puglia, in the heel of Italy’s boot.

Her husband worked on a cruise ship off California during the coronavirus. He was expected to return two weeks ago but president Trump blocked cruise ship crewmen to disembark for flights out of the US.

Everyone on the ship tested negative, she said, and they can only return if the cruise ship company charters a flight. However, it isn’t financially feasible.

She’s five months pregnant. Her prenatal appointments were cancelled for 11 weeks.

“This has been very worrisome as I was deemed high risk and have had no reassurance from my doctors that things are ok and my unborn child is healthy,” she wrote in an email. “Luckily I do have some family members that are doctors in Canada and they have helped me with any concerns I have had.”

With no husband, however, she must do everything alone.

That includes standing for long lines at the supermarket.

“I have tried to go as soon as they open so I do not have to stand in line for too long as I once had to stand for more than an hour and a half,” she wrote. “With being pregnant this has caused issues since I am not allowed to exercise outside. I find it hard to breathe with the required masks on and had an incident last week where I almost fainted while waiting in line.”

Meanwhile, Maria Seriakov, a Bulgarian-raised Austrian citizen who’s a consultant for Biotech, came to Rome to work on a second home which she and her husband bought in September.

When the lockdown hit, her husband was stuck in Austria. Their daughter in Berlin ran out of money. Sariakov, 54, has a visual lunch with her husband every day. She last kissed him Feb. 29.

“Life alone is both a blessing and a curse,” she wrote. “Staying in contact with everybody indeed and still having this weird feeling that something is very wrong. For a couple of hours every day. People are telling me that I am lucky as the distance helps my husband and myself avoid the inevitable conflicts that most of the couples have to deal with.

“And yet…”

In the meantime, we have a lot of time to kill.

I miss my gym but also tired of my own cooking which isn’t a bad combination. Some, such as Seriakov, can work from home. Borelli does a few English lessons online.

But it’s not the same.

“I try to get up late to make the day shorter,” Borelli said. “Today I got up at 9. I clean my room, a deep clean. I go out and exercise. I eat lunch. The problem with me is at 4 o’clock I crash. I’m depressed. I can’t do anything. It’s the same thing every day.”

Terro’s is similar. She wakes up, checks her phone, is on her laptop for a couple of hours and she cleans around the house. She exercises.

“I go to my terrace to pretend I’m outside the house,” she said. “At the beginning you’re fooling your brain in thinking, ‘Ah, this is going to be good. It’ll be fine. I need to relax.’ Then you notice how much food you eat and that starts to get to you. You’re in quarantine. You can’t move. You’re gaining weight. That’s more mental disturbance you don’t need.”

Reynolds can relate, tenfold.

Finding positives possible

“I have been trying to find positive things each day. Yet I am finding it harder and harder,” she wrote. “Walking is the best exercise for pregnancy and since I am unable to do so my joints and muscles are having a hard time adjusting to my growing belly, even with what I am able to do inside. Also, since the lockdown has started, I have grown out of my regular clothes. Not only are there no stores open, but it is getting harder and harder to find places online that are delivering to our location.

“Very soon I will have nothing other than my husband’s PJs that fit me.”

Is the lockdown too much? Must we really wait until May 4 to unlock our chains, another month before we can sit down at a restaurant?

The curves for positive cases and deaths in Italy are beginning to flatten. However, scientists maintain the public numbers aren’t as high as the reality, considering many with the virus haven’t been tested and others have died at home without getting tested.

Eva St. Onge, a 10-year Rome resident from Hong Kong, is a science teacher at an international school who has a more learned outlook on it than most. She doesn’t believe the lockdown should end too soon or we’re “just going to have a second wave of the outbreak.”

I asked her what she thinks of the way Italy has dealt with the pandemic.

“Italy has handled this the best they can,” she said. “I like the fact that they’re sneakily but also smartly phasing in all these restrictions.”

It has been a long six weeks, however.

Last week I managed to walk around Centro Storico and found it more beautiful than ever. The streets were so clean you could eat off them. The sky, with little traffic, looked like what I see in Scandinavia. It was haunting but knowing that my fellow Roman citizens had adhered to the edict and stayed inside encouraged me.

Recently Borelli went to the emergency room then took a taxi through the city.

“It was so beautiful at night, so clean,” she said. “It was quiet, and it was sad. At the same time, it was positive seeing Rome clean. It’s like a woman you haven’t seen for a long time and she’s lost 40 pounds: ‘What happened to you? You look great?’ Where am I? It was like ‘The Twilight Zone.’”

Positives can be found inside the home as well.

For St. Onge, 48, loneliness isn’t a problem. She has a roommate and online interaction with her students.

The lockdown has given her a break from life.

“With more free time, it frees up some space in my brain,” said St. Onge who added she has not experienced any racism for being Chinese. “We don’t have to deal with traffic and going to work. The fact is I can’t go anywhere. It just makes us stay very focused where we are. For me, that’s wonderful. That’s something I’ve never done before. I’m forced to do this. But I see how great it is.”

She has time to do projects she has long put off. She bought a house near the Colosseum seven years ago and has wanted to paint the stairs ever since. She bought paint and a brush and never touched them again.

Until now.

“It took almost a good half hour of stirring to mix up the paint again but I did start painting it,” she said. “Painting the stairs is an interesting example because we do have to go through the stairs to get out of the house. So now we’re stuck in the house and not being allowed to go outside gives me the motivation to finally paint it.”

People have found more importance in relationships, friendships. Stock in Zoom, Skype and Whatsapp must be skyrocketing.

Even neighbors are meeting each other for the first time.

Terro was tanning on her terrace when three young female neighbors asked her if they could tan with her. In exchange they offered her a glass of sangria.

“No one had looked at me, ever,” she said. “I had no eye contact with anyone on the street. If they see you talking, police jump on you. They offered me a drink. ‘Thank you so much!’ It was 40 days all by myself. It was so sad, it made me cry.”

Said Seriakov: “I learned a lot during the quarantine, how wonderful and human people are, how much comfort they can give you, even from the balcony. On Saturday night my neighbors sent me a lovely Easter cake. I cried.

“No matter how tough the quarantine is, Rome and the Romans are giving me a lot.

“And the wisdom that came along with the difficult time is nothing one can buy with money.”

John Henderson, an American, moved to Rome in 2001 and spent two years in Italy. He returned to live in the Italian capital in 2014. He writes a blog called 'Dog-Eared Passport' and supports AS Roma. This is his personal blog. All views or opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author and do not represent AS Roma.

April 16, 2020

An eerie stroll through a silent and empty neighborhood on edge of despair

The only beneficiaries of the coronavirus quarantine are cats.

Think about it. They have all these laps to sit on and sleep on all day. Lots of hands to pet and stroke them. Someone is always there with thumbs. Owners can open a can of cat food at the first meow. The coronavirus turned them from pampered to princes and princesses.

Then I had a weird, eerie experience.

I went to the centre of Rome.

I stopped by the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary. It’s a cat shelter housed in a block full of 4th century BC ruins. If you go to the corner, just a few steps from the sanctuary office, you’ll see where Julius Caesar was murdered. The sanctuary usually has about 400 cats who sleep and play and walk among blocks of marble big and small. They’re fat and happy with an ever-present crowd of tourists who come by and pet them on the steps.

When you’re not looking, one will hop on your lap and go to sleep before you can alert authorities.

But on this day, a bright and sunny Friday afternoon, the cats were alone. No tourists offered a comforting stroke, or a tickle under a chin.

Cats sat on ruins.

Some slept. All looked bored and terribly lonely.

No human was anywhere in sight except me and my girlfriend. We had a rare experience. I was on assignment to walk through deserted Centro Storico during the sixth week of Italy’s lockdown.

On the opposite side of Torre Argentina, a string of taxis looked more out of place than sailboats in the Sahara. No one needed a ride. Hardly anyone walked the streets.

For nearly two months, every resident in Italy who leaves home must have a government-issued auto certification stating one of four reasons we left: health, work, an emergency or necessity such as groceries, post office or pharmacy.

I was equipped with my form with “Comprovate esigenze lavorative (working needs).”

In 2002, when I lived in Rome my first time, I volunteered at the cat sanctuary and I feel assured the directors come regularly to feed and care for their cats.

Cats in Rome are revered.

But during this lockdown, walking around Centro Storico, I couldn’t help but feel for their suffering in the throes of their own isolation and the suffering of their surrounding human inhabitants.

Centro Storico deserted

Rome averages about 10 million tourists a year. It’s a safe bet all 10 million visit Centro Storico, the city’s historical center which has been inhabited for 2,000 years and is walking distance from the Colosseum and Forum. During a two-hour stroll around one of the most popular tourist centres on Earth, we saw maybe 30 people. They were all locals walking their dogs or returning from shopping or lonely merchants.

There were just as many soldiers and police making sure no one was outside without permission.

It was as if this city of 2.8 million fled after a warning of a pending earthquake that never came.

The heartbeat of Rome has flatlined.

Our favorite restaurant in Rome, Renato e Luisa, looked even more dark than usual down its narrow Via dei Barbieri.

I called the co-owner, Renato Astrologo, and he said he’s starting food deliveries.

“I often go to the restaurant, it’s really very sad,” Renato told me. “There isn’t anybody. The atmosphere is like a film, a science fiction film.”

Marina and I walked across the street past the yawning cab drivers and looked at Feltrinelli, my favorite bookstore with one of the few English-language sections in town. I looked at it through an iron gate.

We walked down Via di Torre Argentina, the narrow street that runs from Torre Argentina toward the Pantheon. It was deserted. Not a soul could be seen.

Not a business without a locked door, not an apartment above with an open window.

Then I saw something I hadn’t seen in my first 15 minutes: an open door.

A pizzeria take away business called Vini & Cucina Blasi was open.

A dapper middle-aged man sat in a chair looking bored to the point of comatose. Dressed in a sharp blue blazer and white kerchief, he saw me peeking inside and hopped up as if I was his long-lost brother.

He hustled over and told me he has started delivering food. He’s getting about 30 orders a day and as I walked away, he ran over and stuffed two fliers in my hand. I said, “In bocca al lupo. (Good luck.)” Hmm. Margherita and spicy salami pizza for only 7 euros. It’s worth a plug (349-541-9810).

We walked down the empty street. We saw one woman walk by with a bag of groceries. That’s it. No line of Asian tourists following a woman with a hat and a little flag. No trattorias filled with customers. Not a souvenir in sight.

When we reached the back of the Pantheon, we reached our first checkpoint. Two soldiers looked at us curiously. They asked us for our documents, and we handed a sheaf of papers. They were friendly and courteous and seemed relieved to see another human.

I asked, “Siete in salute? (Are you healthy?)” They smiled and nodded and waved us in.

The Pantheon is one of the grand symbols of Rome. The 2,000-year-old temple is Rome’s best-preserved ancient building and one of the most striking pieces of architecture in the Western world. Dating back to 125 A.D., the Pantheon lords grandly over a huge piazza. For two millennium, people have filled this piazza all year round.

Pilgrims pour into the building to see the sun shine through the odd nine-meter diameter hole, the oculus, that was said to connect the temple with the gods. Lovers flirt in the middle of the square. Tourists pack the outdoor cafes drinking €5 cappuccinos.

On Friday, Marina and I were alone.

Without a crowd, the Pantheon looks even more massive than its 140-foot height. It looks intimidating, like it’s still a center of power. Its 16 Corinthian columns, each nearly 40 feet high and made of single blocks of Egyptian granite, seem even taller, heavier. A man with a small bag walked by the temple. Passing in front of a column, he looked like a matchstick next to a redwood.

I did see another sign of life. On the left side of the piazza, Antica Salumeria was open. This Italian meat shop is famous enough to be frequented by popes.

I walked in and the owner was talking to a friend. I asked him, “Come vanno gli affari? (How is business?)” He shouted, “MALISSIMO! (TERRIBLE!)” He said he gets maybe 10 clients a day, mostly police and Carabinieri. He said he didn’t know how much longer he could hold out.

This week, prime minister Giuseppe Conte announced details of Phase 2 in returning Italy back to normal. He set the date for freedom of movement, with social distancing, at May 3 and the opening of restaurants May 18. I hoped this historic, tasty little corner of Rome remained open when we returned.

Marina and I walked around the corner to Tazza d’Oro, home of the world’s best — and this is not hype — cappuccino in Italy. It’s the only place worth violating Italy’s social code and ordering a cappuccino after noon. It’s all closed but a flier on the gate explains where you can order its coffee grounds at Tazzadorocoffeeshop.com.

I suddenly had a gnawing craving for a coffee, a glass of wine and a bowl of pasta carbonara. After six years living in the greatest food country in the world, walking around an empty Centro Storico I felt like a drunk trapped in a Scottish distillery with all the whisky bottles locked in a safe. I felt empty everywhere, in my heart, my soul and, especially, my stomach.

My favorite city in the world was tailspinning toward a slow death.

Behind the silent walls and empty stores were people suffering from lack of employment, money and, in many places, food. According to Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most influential newspaper, Rome is expected to lose €1.5 billion in tourism dollars. Restaurants are losing an estimated €3 million a day.

The government sent out a €400 billion stimulus package for Italian businesses in need. But how long can a government support a nation of 60 million people?

Curves flattening but …

The question is yet to be answered. The curve of new cases and deaths is beginning to flatten. Yet each day on Facebook bulletins I herald “only” about 3,000 new cases and 600 deaths. In relative terms, the numbers are getting smaller. Yet in raw terms they remain astonishingly high. Tuesday’s 602 deaths are fewer than the 919 from March 27, but that’s still 602 grieving families. That’s thousands who lost fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers. That’s 602 funerals of victims of the “mostra invisibile (invisible monster)” which hasn’t stopped its swath through my beloved, adopted country.

How many tears? Immeasurable.

We walked down empty alleys and streets. Occasionally, a woman with a dog or a shopping bag, with a baguette of bread sticking out of the top, walked past to one of the many tiny apartments sprinkled throughout the Center. We crossed the wide, regal Corso del Rinascimento and Marina showed me a tiny entrance to Piazza Navona.

Piazza Navona may be Rome’s biggest piazza. It’s certainly the most majestic. It’s anchored by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 17th century Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (Fountain of the Four Rivers) in the middle. It’s lined by Francesco Borromini’s baroque Chiesa di Sant’Agnese in Agone and the huge Brazilian Embassy and its giant green, yellow and blue Brazilian flag.

This piazza, 900 feet long and 350 wide, once held a 30,000-seat stadium for athletic games and was occasionally flooded for mock naval battles. All year round it is filled with people, locals on a stroll, street artists selling their paintings and sidewalk cafes packed with tourists in shades with glasses of wine over heaping plates of pasta.

On Friday we saw four people.

An elderly man in a ball cap walked briskly around the piazza on what may be his daily rounds. He strolled past a man in a hoodie and tennis shoes doing pushups on a marble bench. Above me a man on a tiny apartment balcony, snoozed in the brilliant 70-degree sunshine. Hanging above him, like a banner of hope, was the Italian flag.

I’ve seen Piazza Navona this empty before — in winter at dawn, when the fog settles over the cobblestones and even a hack photographer like me can produce photos that can take a viewer’s breath away. But this was 5 o’clock on a 70-degree, sunny Friday afternoon in April, the start of the tourist season. We heard more sounds from seagulls than we did people.

My favorite street deserted

We exited the end of the piazza and turned right up one of my favorite streets. Via di San Pantaleo is home to Cul de Sac, with arguably the largest wine collection of any wine bar in Rome.

It turns into Via del Governo Vecchio where you find Enoteca il Piccolo (Little Wine Bar) with its tiny, romantic setting and the three or four small tables outside where the locals hold court.

They were both shuttered. Not a chair or table in sight. What seemed missing most was laughter. This is the heart of la dolce vita. Good friends. Good wine. Good weather. Good surroundings. Everyone seems happy in this part of Centro Storico.

Instead, all I saw was a leaf blowing across the cobblestones and a box with free books for the taking stood unattended. I walked past Pasquino Pizzeria, a popular tourist spot but now left with only business cards hanging from the window next to an advertisement for delivery service.

I looked above us. More Italian flags than usual hung in the sun.

We continued down Governo Vecchio to one of my favorite corners in Rome. It’s here, at Abbey Theatre Irish Pub, where I spend one or two nights a week nine months a year.

It’s where I gather with my fellow Romanisti in the upstairs room and cheer on our beloved and starcrossed AS Roma. It’s my Cheers, where the friendly staff all know my name and remember to serve me a My Antonia Italian craft beer when I walk in.

The iron shutter is down. I couldn’t hear Mike the Irish bartender making people laugh. It has been five weeks since the last game. I’d give anything for just a corner kick.

Across the narrow street is Enoteca Guerrini, a family run souvenir shop selling limoncello in every flavor of the fruit tree and always packed with tourists. We were the only visitors. A clerk wearing a mask told me she gets about 15 customers a day. I asked how she is holding up.

“It’s very, very, very hard,” Cristiana Checcoli said in passable English. “But we like to be positive. We like to say everything is possible. We trust it’ll become better.”

It was nearing 6pm. In my fifth week of lockdown and feeling too empty to drink alone at home, I was dying for a glass of wine.

I took Marina across busy Corso Vittorio Emanuele and we negotiated the maze of narrow alleys and streets to Via dei Banchi Vecchi. It’s one of the quaintest streets in the centre, lined with boutique shops, some lovely trattorias and emptying out into underrated Piazza Farnese, home to the beautiful French Embassy.

It’s also home to Il Goccetto, my favorite wine bar. It’s where an affordable selection of great Italian wines are written fresh on a chalkboard every day, where stylish workers from the neighborhood offices gather after work for a glass of Montepulciano or Chianti Riserva. At night, the crowds spill onto the street. The police never bother with a crowd holding glasses near passing cars and pedestrians. This clientele is too mellow.

But all I saw was a big drawing of Bacchus, the Ancient Roman god of wine, looking fat and happy and drunk, emblazoned on the closed iron door.

It was time to go. On the way to my tram stop, we passed through Campo de’ Fiori, Centro Storico’s teeming party centre. The Drunken Ship bar didn’t have a drunk and the barkers who usually try luring me into their outdoor restaurants were nowhere to be found.

The statue of Giordano Bruno, the philosopher who was burned at the stake for heresy in the middle of the piazza in 1600, seemed even more lonely than usual.

It was 7pm. and the sun was setting on the city in more ways than one.

We had just experienced something special. We had strolled through one of the world’s most beautiful, most historic neighborhoods, nearly all by ourselves.

Yet we did it with a backdrop of death.

My adopted country is fighting fiercely to right itself after so many weeks being the beacon an infected world looked at for hope.

The coronavirus has killed more than 21,000 people in Italy and its beautiful capital is as empty as a gilded Easter egg.

I felt just as empty.

I keep repeating the phrase that has swept Italy since the virus arrived: “Andra’ tutto bene (Everything will be alright).”

But after walking through the silent piazzas and past the dying trattorias and around the empty churches, I started feeling a lot like the cats in Torre Argentina.

We are very much alone.

John Henderson, an American, moved to Rome in 2001 and spent two years in Italy. He returned to live in the Italian capital in 2014. He writes a blog called 'Dog-Eared Passport' and supports AS Roma. This is his personal blog. All views or opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author and do not represent AS Roma.

March 31, 2020

6 million coronavirus cases in Italy? A report says so and scientists agree

I went to bed on Monday night feeling pretty good about my adopted country.

Italy, the epicenter of this vicious coronavirus, showed signs of recovery.

The percentage of new cases had dropped four straight days and in a week had been cut in half. The percentage of daily deaths had dropped three straight days.

I woke up Tuesday morning and read in Rome’s Il Messaggero that if the projections continued and people observed current protocol, the number of new cases in Rome’s Lazio region would be close to zero by April 16.

Lombardy’s shell-shocked society could be OK by April 22.

Maybe in a little more than two weeks I could go out for a pizza, read in my park, drink a nice Cesanese in my favorite wine bar.

Then I called an expert and got scared again.

Ruggerdo De Maria is the vice-director of laboratory research at Gemelli Policlinico, one of four hospitals here in Rome handling patients with the virus’ Covid-19 disease.

I brought up the numbers, such as only a 4.1% increase of new cases and 7.5% new deaths from the day before, both lows since Italy started tracking numbers on February 21.

“This data they show I don’t think matters at all,” he said. “They completely underestimated the real situation.”

Uh-oh. Admittedly exhausted, he went on.

“In Italy there should be 6 million people that are positive.”

Imperial College releases paper

I was horrified but not shocked.

I’d read about this already.

Last week, the Italian press quoted a few learned scientists and doctors who say the number of positive cases is way less than what is reported to the world.

Monday night Italy reported the number of cases at 101,739, second most behind the United States’ 164,266.

However, the Department of Infectious Diseases at London’s Imperial College, one of the world’s top research institutes, presented a 35-page report Monday that blew the ink off the widely accepted statistics.

Using a complicated formula combining the number of infections, the number of deaths, the reproduction over time and the intervention introduced, the report on various European countries estimates that 9.8% of the population in Italy is infected. (Spain is 15%)

Italy’s population is 60 million. You do the math.

“People say something like 30 percent in some areas are positive,” De Maria said.

He echoed many sentiments I’ve read that the accepted statistics don’t include those who carry the virus but have no symptoms and, thus, have never been tested. They also don’t include those with mild symptoms and are self-quarantining at home.

I have not been tested.

I asked De Maria if that means I could have the virus.

“Yes,” he said.

Day 24 of lockdown

Terrific.

This is Day 24 of my lockdown.

I last gathered with people on March 8. Italy’s government-mandated national lockdown, the first in the world, is scheduled to end Friday.

Most expect Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to announce this week that he’ll extend the lockdown until Easter, April 21. De Maria thinks April is too optimistic.

“I think probably in late May the number of cases will be manageable,” he said. “As soon as people realise that there are already millions of people in Italy who were infected, some will be concerned. They’ll realise that many are now immune and can have a normal life. This is something new. It’s difficult to predict.”

Rome’s coronavirus situation isn’t the war zone that is Lombardy which, as of Monday, according to published statistics, has 41% (42,161) of Italy’s 101,739 cases and 59% (6,818) of the 11,591 deaths.

Gemelli isn’t quite at capacity but still has 291 Covid-19 patients, 57 in intensive care. The problem is Gemelli is also a general hospital and the biggest trick is keeping the regular patients away from the highly infectious patients with Covid-19.

Across Rome at Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases, just up the hill from my apartment, they’re trying to develop a vaccine that could save the world.

What happened?

How did we get here?

The world is looking for guidance from Italy, which has nearly a third of the world’s deaths and responded faster than anyone in the western world.

What happens to Italy may happen elsewhere.

Americans watch Italy’s numbers closer than stock reports.

Italy may have been the first to order a national lockdown and one of the first to cancel flights from China, but many officials say mistakes were made along the way.

Stay home

If this pandemic reaches a point where it will define a generation — forget only 2020 — what shall people do in the meantime?

De Maria said everyone should wear masks and debunks all theories that they do not help.

Wash your hands, of course.

Avoid touching others.

The most important method was confirmed by a video I saw the other night.

It showed Via Petroselli, a wide, busy road that helps connect the Tiber River to Centro Storico, taken at 7:30pm. In the 30-second video, I didn’t see a single car. The center of Rome looked like an oil painting.

This is good.

“You should isolate everybody,” De Maria said. “The best measure will be to try and reduce the peaks and try to always have the spreading of the virus at levels that can be managed by those who have the ability to take care of their most severe patients because in Western countries it’s really, very, very difficult to block the virus.”

Here’s hoping numbers really do lie.

If not, all of us in Italy are going to have a lot of sleepless nights.

John Henderson, an American, moved to Rome in 2001 and spent two years in Italy. He returned to live in the Italian capital in 2014. He writes a blog called 'Dog-Eared Passport' and supports AS Roma.

This is a personal blog. All views or opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author and do not represent AS Roma.

March 25, 2020

Some improvement after two weeks of lockdown but death still haunts country as government clenches fist

My girlfriend, Marina, finally started working from home Monday.

I could hear her exhale as she left her office near the Vatican two miles from my apartment. She no longer works around elderly men, the favorite target of the coronavirus that has laid waste to much of the world.

Nowhere has it run more roughshod than it has here in Italy where our 7,503 dead is more than twice as many as China, second on the list and where the virus began.

The world is watching us

It looks to Italy as its guiding light. It wants to know if the draconian sanctions prime minister Giuseppe Conte laid down two weeks ago will help kill what Rome newspaper Il Messaggero has labeled “the invisible monster”.

I have been interviewed by ABC News, a radio show in Portland, Ore., a journalist in Oklahoma City and a columnist in Colorado Springs. My nightly statistical updates of Italy’s infected and dead are getting a huge response. I feel like Walter Cronkite during the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, I am watching Marina.

Unfortunately, I can’t watch her in person. The latest of three edicts laid down Tuesday is no one can leave their house for anything other than: 1, work; 2, a necessity, such as the grocery store or pharmacy; 3, visits to a hospital or clinic.

Intimacy is still nowhere to be found.

Since March 8, our lone contacts have been nightly Whatsapp video dates.

Now we have a countdown. When this outbreak began in February, the general consensus is the virus’ incubation period is two weeks. You can show no symptoms for two weeks and still have the virus. We don’t know if she has it. Thus, we won’t see each other until at least April 4, when her two-week incubation period ends and the day after Conte’s lockdown is scheduled to end.

That means my birthday Sunday will rank down there with the worst of a life full of them.

Maybe I’ll call her on Skype and have her take off her clothes!

I passed my two-week period Sunday. Since March 8, I have not ventured more than 100 meters from my apartment and have only gone to my supermarket, pharmacy and newsstand. I don’t have a sniffle. I should be fine. But how consistent is that two-week rule? No one can say for sure. I do not trust this virus.

Two weeks ago I marked down Wednesday as a huge day.

It would be two weeks since Conte’s lockdown, two weeks for the virus to slow its methodical hop, skip and jump around Italy. Maybe after two weeks our numbers would improve, the world would find an ounce of encouragement. Maybe they’ll maintain their own lockdown or lock down if they haven’t already. And the conclusion after two weeks?

No one knows.

Coronavirus numbers vary

While regional variances make it hard to measure, on paper Italy has shown some encouraging signs.

The number of cases is big at 72,186, but the percentage of new positive cases each day is dropping.

Wednesday marked the third straight day of single-digit jumps, the lowest since Italy’s first case surfaced on February 15.

In fact, Wednesday’s 5,210 new cases was only a 7.5% increase from the previous day’s total after it dropped to 8% both Monday and Tuesday. Maybe the virus is beginning to die.

Or maybe not.

Wednesday’s total of 683 deaths was the third most of any day and the daily jump in percentage has been between 10-12 percent the last four days.

Rome’s Lazio region has only 2 percent of the nation’s total cases but the charts are up and down.

Wednesday’s 15 deaths, following 17 on Tuesday, is by far the biggest two-day total and brings the overall total to 95.

Lazio’s new cases of 173 Wednesday were a 10-percent jump from the previous day.

The government and scientists don’t sound optimistic.

Issuing an ominous tone as his nation tries digging out of a deadly hole, Conte said Italy is going through “the most difficult moment since the Second World War”.

Said physicist Giorgio Parisi, an expert on complex systems at Rome’s Sapienza University to ANSA, Italy’s wire service: “The number of deaths is rising, but at a slower pace than before and it could continue to rise for a very long time.”

And it could get worse.

A 34-year-old nurse in Monza, in the Central Italy region of Emilia-Romagna, committed suicide Tuesday after she learned she had the virus and “had been living with heavy stress out of the fear of having infected others,” according to ANSA.

Lombardy, Milan’s region, has 32,346 total cases and 4,474 dead, more than any other country.

That’s a death rate of 13.8 percent, more than three times the world death rate of 4.5.

In Brescia, 50 miles east of Milan, 10-15% of doctors and nurses have the virus.

“Right now in Lombardy the contagion is so widespread that we should consider every person potentially positive,” said Roberto Burioni, a virologist at Milan’s San Raffaele University, to The New York Times.

About 8,000 doctors have volunteered to help in Italy.

Yet understaffed hospitals are forcing doctors to decide who gets treatment and who gets to die, alone.

In this case, the youth often get served. And in some hospitals, a patient is only admitted when someone dies, which helps explain why the number of total cases in Italy is down but deaths are up.

Police stop 250,000

What has happened? It may be due to people not respecting the lockdown. Italy hasn’t reached the moronic level of Florida where its governor didn’t order the beaches closed until after spring break or my home state of Oregon where motels on the coast advertised great rates last weekend.

Rome seems deathly quiet. From my balcony I nary see a car or a pedestrian.

However, nearly 250,000 people have been stopped around Italy and asked to show the government-issued self-authorisation form listing one of the reasons they’re out of their home.

From March 12, 53,000 people were given citations. Mobile phone records showed 40 percent of Lombardy residents traveled more than 300 meters from their residence.

Over the weekend, police stopped 53,500 cars and scooters trying to leave Rome and wrote 1,380 citations which carried €206 fine or three months in jail.

News reports said people cried in their cars and in the streets. One 53-year-old died of a heart attack at one of the checkpoints.

Some have gone to extreme lengths to skirt the regulations. One woman walked her dog in her neighborhood. An hour later she walked another dog. An hour later, again, another dog. The same police were on duty and investigated. As it turned out, she was asking neighbors to walk their dogs because she couldn’t stand staying inside.

Another woman was walking to take care of her elderly aunt. Police followed her to the aunt’s home and she turned out to be 40 years old.

Conte doesn’t think this is funny.

On Tuesday he jacked up the penalties to €400 to €3,000 for anyone out of their home without the form listing one of the three listed reasons or up to five years in jail for anyone who leaves home knowing he or she has the virus.

The measures already passed the council of ministers and are now in chambers. He also is allowing regional governors to add their own restrictions. Northern regions have asked help from the army to stop people from moving around.

No, I won’t risk a four-mile trip to Marina’s apartment Sunday.

This is getting serious.

Officials feel with the lockdown two weeks old, we should wait until the end of the month to see if the numbers drop. However, a concern is spreading around Italy that the situation is worse than numbers indicate. Keep in mind how many people don’t have symptoms who could still have the virus. Italy has conducted nearly 300,000 tests, only behind China and South Korea.

However, I haven’t been tested. Marina hasn’t been tested.

In fact, Giovani Rezza, an epidemiologist at Rome’s Istituto Superiori di Sanita, said many people with symptoms don’t get diagnosed.

“Those who are counted are only the people with the most serious symptoms,” Rezza told Il Messaggero.

The newspaper also reported that scientists and doctors conservatively estimate that Italy likely has 700,000 positive, with 300,000 in Lombardy.

“There are so many people walking around who have the virus and who are at risk of infecting others,” said Matteo Bassetti, head of infectious diseases at San Martino hospital in Genoa. “To say 700,000 positive is even prudent. There are many more.”

And it’s getting younger.

As of Friday, the average age of the dead was 78.5 years and just over 1 percent had no pre-existing condition.

However, stories are surfacing such as Vittorio Baldassarini of Rome, a 46-year-old gelato maker and father of a 9-year-old. On March 9 he felt bad and worsened. On March 15 he was taken to Tor Vergata Hospital and March 19 a breathing tube was placed down his throat. On Sunday, 13 days after falling ill, he died.

His bed wasn’t far from Emanuele Renzi, a 34-year-old who died a few hours later.

So for all those interested in me, I’m fine.

I have enough food for a few more days. I finished Francesco Totti’s 500-page autobiography — in Italian — and am enjoying Elena Ferrante’s eight-part TV series, ‘My Brilliant Friend’.

Not that my days are slow but my weekly highlight may be watching the next episode of ‘Better Call Saul’ every Tuesday night.

But for those asking of the fate of Italy, we need more time.

We need more patience.

We need more discipline.

In other words, after nearly two months of sounding death knells, this war here is far from over.

John Henderson, an American, moved to Rome in 2001 and spent two years in Italy. He returned to live in the Italian capital in 2014. He writes a blog called 'Dog-Eared Passport' and supports AS Roma.

March 17, 2020

In virus-torn Italy, misery loves company but our suffering is soothed by the Italian pride...

Sergio Serra rents out holiday houses around Rome.

He has a wife and a three-year-old daughter. Underneath all the death, the overflowing hospitals, the empty streets and the fear as the coronavirus cuts its swath through Italy, Sergio is one of many stories that doesn’t get told.

“My income,” he said, “is completely zero.”

Unlike many of his friends, such as myself, he’s not sitting around watching Netflix.

He’s scrambling to find a way out of tail-spinning circumstances totally beyond his control.

“I’m losing a lot of money,” he said. “I’m trying to face all the payments I have, mandatory payments for electricity, power supply. I’m a bit nervous about that.”

The one ray of sunshine in a tsunami of sorrow is this battered country has come together like a family reunion.

People are following the rules. The government has shown leadership. Italians and expats alike have reached out to each other. And every night the country stands as one and sings or plays music and shows a solidarity rare around the world these days.

It’s why on Monday I reached out to my friends, none of whom I have seen since I departed for Saudi Arabia on February 17 and returned 12 days later to find Italy in the early throes of nationwide paralysis. If you read my last two blogs, you’ll know Italy is ahead of the worldwide curve on restrictions.

Well, it got worse.

Hours after I posted my last blog Wednesday, prime minister Giuseppe Conte ordered all bars and restaurants closed. We were all ordered inside. We can’t go out unless we: one, have a medical issue; two, have a required errand (grocery shopping, post office, bank); three, are going to work; four, returning home. And if we do go out we must carry a government-issued form with one of those reasons checked off.

Without it, we could be fined €300 or put in jail. The government just added a box to check if you have not been quarantined.

The last social thing I did came on March 8 when I went to my local birreria to watch the Juventus-Inter Milan match — with no fans.

Earlier that day was the last time I saw my girlfriend.

Marina took me to our clinic for a checkup, scheduled long ago, on an inflamed prostate. No, I don’t have the virus. For a later appointment, she couldn’t accompany me into the clinic. It was against regulations.

We devised a plan to rendezvous in a park, posing as joggers. A few hours after our plan, it became a moot point.

The government closed the parks.

I haven’t seen Marina and her cat Coco since March 8.

Also, Marina brought up a valid point. We don’t know if we have it. One could have the virus for up to 14 days without showing symptoms. She works in an office with many old men, and her parents she looks after are in their 80s.

I have occasionally taken public transportation, an absolute buffet for the virus. She didn’t want one of us giving it to the other without knowing it. I wholeheartedly agreed. Instead, Monday night we had a video date on Whatsapp.

It was similar to my nightly calls to her last May from Central Asia.

The only difference is now she’s only four miles away.

Since going to the clinic for the last time Wednesday, I have left my apartment twice: on Friday I went around the corner to my pharmacy to see if they had masks for Marina who can’t find any.

They had none.

Yesterday morning I went grocery shopping and to the post office to pay bills. I did it all in a mask I picked up in my hotel in Saudi Arabia, just in case I thought at the time, and plastic gloves I picked up in my supermarket’s produce department.

I’ve gone nowhere else.

I have continued reading my Francesco Totti autobiography, ‘Un Capitano’, a slow 500-page slog for me in Italian; watched Elena Ferrante’s series, ‘My Brilliant Friend’, about Naples in the 1960s and 70s; watched Ken Burns’ 1992 nine-part documentary, ‘Baseball’; written emails; cooked; tried rescheduling my March 28 birthday trip to Asturias, Spain; had senseless Facebook debates with people who believe the coronavirus is a media hoax; and researched said coronavirus.

27,980* cases in Italy

The numbers are right out of a horror film script. The number of cases in Italy has gone from 3,800 two weeks ago to 10,149 last week to 27,980 Monday. The number of deaths has skyrocketed from 148 to 631 to 2,158, respectively.

Italy’s 23,073 active cases (total cases minus number of deaths and recovered patients) is more than China, Iran and the USA combined. For those keeping score at home, worldwide it’s 186,689 cases and 7,471 deaths. And still some think it’s no worse than the flu.

The new international danger zone is Lombardy, where Milan is its base and the town of Codogno is the epicenter. The region has 14,649 cases (1,420 deaths) with Bergamo leading the country with 3,760 cases.

Rome has only 412 cases. Its Lazio region has 523 (19 deaths).

We’ve been lucky — so far.

This is not news to Italians. We all follow the charts, provided dutifully by the honest government, like we do the daily weather. It’s why no one is complaining about the country’s draconian measures.

But it’s also why people like Sergio are struggling.

He isn’t the only one. Tour guides, waiters, souvenir stand owners, none of them has income.

Businesses have already folded. Friends are asking friends for loans. Adding more doom.

When I called Sergio, 47, to see how he was doing, he was also fighting a cold.

“I DON’T have the virus,” he said with a chuckle.

His wife, Rita, stopped working as an assistant on trains doing the long-cancelled Rome-Palermo, Rome-Bolzano runs. However, recently she learned she’ll start receiving emergency wages of about 80 percent of her previous income.

Sergio’s spending his time playing with his daughter, watching TV and feeding a lifelong passion for Russian culture by studying the language. It hasn’t relieved the stress.

“I’m quite worried,” he told me. “I’m not thinking real disaster like in a war but I’m quite worried. I think there will be a financial, international crisis. International authorities, monetary and financial authorities, should take steps now to prevent a crisis that could be heavier than it is at the moment.”

I know it’s going to get worse. With no virus (I don’t think) and no family and a kitchen full of food, my only concern is my finances.

I called my fellow retired America expat, John Samuels. We are fellow Romanisti, fans of AS Roma who spend at least two nights a week watching our club play from the designated upstairs room of Abbey Theatre Irish Pub near Piazza Navona or at Stappo around the corner from me.

We are also fellow film extras who played cardinals in Paolo Sorrentino’s ‘The Young Pope’ and ‘The New Pope’.

John, who moved here three months before I did in 2014, is a news junkie. He has more coronavirus graphs on his laptop than a CDC intern.

“The information is sort of a mental health cure to watching the panic in the States and around the world,” he said. “When you do that, it starts to take the emotions out of it. The data itself and the virus itself is not an emotional thing.

“It actually makes me feel more optimistic. If I relied on Facebook or emails or friends, I’d probably be climbing walls. I find the information certainly negates some of that. I’m thankful I’m here. I can go to websites at 6 pm. You can’t do that every day in the US. There’s no central site for that.”

John doesn’t wear a mask, unlike me.

I’m a late convert.

He lives in my old Testaccio neighborhood and, like me, is thoroughly impressed, and almost moved, by how well Italians are following the rules.

“I’m certainly more cautious,” he said. “If I hear someone cough, it’s hard not to look in that direction. But I’m not as concerned as I thought I might be. The measures are easy to comply.”

Eric Lyman is a fellow American freelance journalist who has carved out a nice living since moving here in 2000.

He writes for USA Today and the Chinese wire service, Xinhua, among other news sources. He’s the one friend who had a serious health scare. He went to Milan to report on the virus and when he returned he suffered a slight fever, one of the virus symptoms. He also had a sore throat.

The sore throat turned into a cough, another symptom, and he got tested the next day on March 7.

It’s a simple swab of the mouth and he was in and out in 10 minutes. He called his mother in Florida.

When Eric was an infant, his older brother died at 3. When he called her, his mother began to cry.

Eric didn’t get the results until three days later. A woman looked him up and said, “You’re OK. You just have a cold.”

“I had been calm since I took the test and could be relied on to tell my friends to be calm, but the good news hit me like a wave,” he wrote in a first-person account in USA Today. “I began to cry.”

Later, he did a stand-up report for Xinhua and talked about his stroll around Rome’s beautiful but now vacant piazzas and monuments.

“I had an experience several years ago when I was on a movie set in Cinecitta, which is a movie studio here in Rome,” he said in the report. “They had rebuilt part of the city and I remember walking around on it and feeling that it looked like Rome but didn’t feel like it. I have that same sensation now that I’m here.”

Alessandro Castellani, a native Roman and my longest friend in Rome, has the same feeling.

We met as fellow sportswriters and he continues going to his office at ANSA, Italy’s wire service. It’s right in the heart of Rome and every day at work it’s like going to a different city.

One major change is people no longer need validation to enter the centre

“I go to work at 4 o’clock,” he said. “Usually, even if you have permission, at 4 pm it’s difficult to find a spot to park. Now the centre is a desert. It’s completely deserted. It’s very depressed. My work is very close to Trevi Fountain. Trevi Fountain is always very, very crowded. Sometimes in the spring and summer I must push to get past people to work.

“Now there is no one. It’s just me and policemen.”

He’s assigned to cover the Tokyo Olympics which may join the long of list of cancelled sports, including our beloved football. The 2020 European Championships, which was set to open in Rome on June 12, got postponed Tuesday to 2021.

However, like everyone else here, all our perspectives have been put in a blender and scrambled.

“I feel sad like everybody in Rome,” he said. “But I don’t think too much about football now, to be honest.”

If there’s anyone who will suffer tonight, it’s my friend Patrick O’Byrne.

He’s Irish. He moved to Rome two years ago to work for the European Union and now is between jobs.

He’s spending all his time in his apartment in the Parioli neighborhood with his lawyer girlfriend, Valeria, who’s working from home.

He spends his time tearing his hair out over what he reads on Facebook.

For a sedative, he takes Baldo, the dog of Valeria’s mom, around the neighborhood.

“It’s a license to walk,” he said.

Normally tonight he’d be at Finnegans, his favorite Irish pub near the Colosseum. It’s St Patrick’s Day and Finnegans is closed.

“I’ve got some beers and am going to make some beef, something resembling Irish,” he said.

However, in Italy one learns to look at the bright side. Here there is so much bright side to see.

I’ve always said that you’re never too depressed for too long here.

For in Italy, no matter how lonely you get with your life, how frustrated you get with the language, how mad you get at the bureaucracy, you always have dinner to look forward to.

These days, the plucky Italians still find ways to smile.

The ‘flashmob’ movement has taken over the country.

Every day and night — sometimes at noon, sometimes at 6pm or 9pm — people from Sicily to the Alps get on their balconies. They sing songs. They play instruments. They clap. They holla.

It’s moving, even for non-Italians like me.

“We have a professional singer who lives in our building,” John said. “The first day she sang. It was ‘Azzurro.’ I started to cry. It’s because people have come together. It just makes me happy to be here and to be part of it.”

Italians are tough, resilient people.Over 3,000 years they’ve gone through tougher times than a virus.And they will recover.History proves it.

Italy’s growth rate after World War II was unmatched by other countries.

It’s times like this when Italy, a fractured collection of city states until unification in 1861, comes together.

“It’s really emotional,” Sergio said. “Because it shows us that people have ties, that the ties with people you normally don’t see in normal life at the moment are very important.

“I feel really excited when I hear our national anthem because I don’t know why but it’s symbolic for me and important. It’s very important to have national ties. Normally Italians don’t consider at all about being proud to be italians.

“I think the people have started to understand in this special, sad occasion.”

The nightly gatherings have struck a nerve I didn’t know I had.

I have no Italian blood.

I’m as WASP as Wonder Bread.

Yet Sunday night I had looked at my stock portfolio. My broker wasn’t working and I had no one to talk me off my balcony. But instead of throwing myself over the rail, I looked out and saw neighbors on nearly every balcony of every apartment building.

They held up cell phones and lights and candles.

It looked like stars had descended on Rome.

I heard cheers. I heard applause. I heard some fractured attempts at music.

But then I heard something else.

To my left, I heard an unseen neighbor sing a passable version of ‘Volare’, Domenico Modugno’s 1958 song of flying through the air on a wave of love, the one Italian song the world knows.

Yes, the song seemed to say, we Italians can fly over all this sorrow and in the end, love will be there again as it always is in Italy.

When he finished, the neighborhood gave him roaring applause.

I yelled “BRAVO!” and caught a lump in my throat.

I thought, I’m going to be OK.

We all are going to be OK.

At least we will in Italy.

John Henderson, an American, moved to Rome in 2001 and spent two years in Italy. He returned to live in the Italian capital in 2014. He writes a blog called 'Dog-Eared Passport' and supports AS Roma.

*Since writing this article, the number of cases and deaths due to Covid-19 in Italy has increased significantly. To make a donation to AS Roma's coronavirus campaign to buy medical supplies for the hospitals in Rome, click here.

March 11, 2020

Life in Coronavirus lockdown: Italy closes its borders

On Tuesday I had to make the risky move of traveling across Rome to a clinic using public transportation.

As Italy becomes the western world’s most paralysed country courtesy of the coronavirus, I felt like the guy sneaking out of his shelter in a scene from ‘Night of the Living Dead’.

My girlfriend, a third-generation Roman terrified of the virus, begged me to take a taxi.

The virus, said to lurk menacingly on the handrails and seats of buses, trams and subways, was going to eat my lower intestine.

I refused. I wasn’t going to spend 75 euros on taxis when I can travel free with my Metrobus card. I promised I wouldn’t touch anything. She gave suggestions on various protective clothing items. Funny, I had no idea she knew what an ice hockey goalie wore.

I did not don the transparent gloves found in my supermarket produce department. I did not wear a mask, not after reading it only works if you have the virus or working with people who do. I did promise I’d wear a mask to the clinic Wednesday.

As I left home at 4pm for the first time that day, I saw raw evidence of how a country in total lockdown goes through life.

I passed the supermarket and 14 people were in line, outside, standing one metre apart. A supermarket employee, in mask, stood with them, waving in one person at a time.

That morning in the check-out aisle, I was scolded by a masked cashier to move one metre back. I walked onto the bus and no one wore gloves but half wore masks. Rome is about sold out. Many pulled their ubiquitous scarf over their mouth and nose.

The three buses and one subway I took had only a handful of people. From 4pm to 6pm on a normal weekday, Rome’s public transport is cheek to jowl, ass to ass. A vacant seat is as rare as a parking space near the Colosseum. That’s no problem now, either. The Colosseum is closed.

When I reached the clinic, I waited outside with a half dozen others. They wouldn’t let us inside unless we had an urgent appointment. They wouldn’t even let me inside to wash my hands. Instead a masked woman squirted alcohol on my hands and for an hour I smelled like an industrialised bathroom.

I waited 10 minutes before the woman came out and handed me a CD for the MRI I had done Monday on my kidney stones. No, I don’t have the virus. This was an unrelated matter.

At least, I don’t think I have it.

This is the problem with living in Italy now. The numbers are multiplying like fungi. Every morning I see the red dot representing the virus growing bigger and darker over the Italian peninsula. I wrote Friday about living in Italy during this crisis. At that time I wrote there were 3,800 cases and 148 deaths.

As of Wednesday, Italy had 10,149 cases and 631 deaths. In less than 48 hours, 168 have died.

In Lombardy, the huge northern region where Milan is located, the health care system is one step from collapse, according to CNN.

Antonio Pesenti, head of Lombardi’s crisis unit for intensive care, predicted that by March 26 there will be 18,000 sick and 3,000 “who will be needing assistance to breathe.”

Lombardy already has intensive care units in hallways of overflowing hospitals. The Italian government said if the virus spreads in the South as it has in the North, it will not be able to cope.

“Our future and the future of Italy is in our hands,” prime minister Giuseppe Conte said.

We just don’t know anything

ABC News interviewed me Monday afternoon and I told them the problem for locals is we don’t know who has it, if we have it, what will happen if we do have it and, for us American expats retired in Italy, we don’t know what will happen to the market if we get it or not.

About five hours later, prime minister Conte locked down the entire country.

The lockdown that began last week in Lombardy stretched all the way south to Sicily. We can’t fly in or out, except for family emergencies although tourists can fly home. Then again, my March 28 birthday trip to Spain was out the window anyway. Earlier, Iberia joined the growing line of airlines that cancelled all flights in and out of Italy.

In fact, the government distributed an online form called an autocertificazioni. It’s to explain why we are out and about, moving from city to city. You must check one of four reasons: work, emergency, doctor’s appointment or returning home. Il Messaggero, Rome’s newspaper which had 13 pages of coverage Wednesday, pictured a man with a mask and roller bag showing his form to three masked Carabinieri at Termini train station.

The paper said it’s a soft enforcement. Nevertheless, I filled in the “motivi di salute (health reasons)” circle and took it to the clinic, just in case.

Through all this, I haven’t heard a single Roman complain. Romans have been through a lot over 3,000 years. The fall of the Roman Empire, the sacking of Rome, World War II, the clash of fascists and communists.

But this virus is different.

I sense fear.

Everyone is abiding by the rules. I took my tram to Campo de’ Fiori, one of Rome’s most popular piazzas where for centuries they held public executions, and all the restaurants were open but the barkers had hardly anyone to bark at to take a table.

Via della Lungaretta, one of the main drags of bustling Trastevere, a major hangout for students and tourists, was empty. Photos in Il Messaggero showed Via del Corso and Via Nazionale, major shopping streets, void of shoppers. Signs on closed businesses read, “Riapriamo a meta’ Aprile. (We reopen in mid-April).”

St. Peter’s Square is closed off.

Changing Romans’ lives

It has polexed the behavior of all 2.8 million of us living in Rome.

We are told not to leave home except in an emergency. I feel like I’m in Upstate New York during an ice storm and told to hunker down. Yet I look out my window as I’m writing this and it’s bright sunshine and 63 degrees. I’m spending my time reading about the virus, reading my Francesco Totti autobiography, cooking in, watching the few college basketball games ESPNPlayer.com is showing during Italian waking hours and watching Netflix.

Not that I’m getting desperate for new shows but the other night I watched a two-hour documentary on sawdust.

We have little choice.

Bars and restaurants must close at 6 p.m. I can’t go to my local birreria and watch my AS Roma play its Europa League match at Sevilla Thursday night. No matter. The game was called off Wednesday.

I also find myself adhering to the one-metre edict. Everyone stands in line one metre apart. Outside the post office, bakeries, pharmacies. No one complains. Neither do I. In fact, as I left the bus, I found myself swerving to avoid getting within a metre of the man leaving before me. I’m scrambling on escalators to avoid people.

Keep in mind, Italians are arguably the most affectionate people in the world.

They invented the term Public Display of Affection.

Now only couples hold hands. It’s strange to see men and women on the streets of Rome fist bumping each other.

Government applauded

The Italian government is earning well-deserved props. The two majority parties, the Democratic Party and 5-Star Movement, usually exchange gunfire daily. Lately they’ve worked together smoothly for the common good, agreeing to spend 7.5 billion euros to fight the virus.

The World Health Organization even praised the government which has now tested more than 61,000 people and set up a hotline number (1500) for anyone who thinks they have the virus (flu-like symptoms of dry cough and fever).

Compare this to the US, where fewer than 9,000 have been tested and the president told the people to relax, that the virus will go away when the cold weather does. I wrote a friend in Palm Beach, Fla., and sarcastically said, “Congrats! You’re safe!”

I’m not worried about getting the virus.

I’m not part of the target audience. Of the 133 who died in Italy Sunday, 78 were 80 and older, all of whom had preconditions.

Another 39 were 70-79.

Only 14 were in my 60-69 age bracket.

After six years in Rome, I have learned the Italian way. I always said in the US, you learn to work; in Italy, you learn to live. Friends. Family. Spare time. Good food. Fine wine. The coronavirus can’t take any of that away.

They don’t call Rome the Eternal City for nothing.

John Henderson, an American, moved to Rome in 2001 and spent two years in Italy. He returned to live in the Italian capital in 2014. He writes a blog called 'Dog-Eared Passport' and supports AS Roma.

*Since writing this article, the number of cases and deaths due to Covid-19 in Italy has increased significantly. To make a donation to AS Roma's coronavirus campaign to buy medical supplies for the hospitals in Rome, click here.

March 6, 2020

Coronavirus in Italy: inside Europe’s biggest petri dish

Hello from Quarantine Centrale.

Here in Italy we have become Europe’s red-headed, deformed stepchild.

We are shunned, ridiculed and home bound. The Coronavirus has turned all 60 million of us into passengers on one giant cruise ship. We’re sitting motionless with no port accepting our wretched, damned souls.

I myself am quarantined. Yes, it happened to me. Since returning from Saudi Arabia last Friday, I have not left my neighborhood except a Saturday night jaunt to my girlfriend’s four miles away.

I have only left my home three other times: once to go to a hospital emergency room, once to a private clinic and once to email my Democrats Abroad ballot at my corner Western Union office. On my short walk to the corner, I fell flat on my face.

I have a terrible illness. I’m in pain. I’m worried. I’m struggling with a restricted diet. I’m taking more pills than a Hollywood housewife. The Coronavirus has affected 3,800 people in Italy and killed 148.

Forty-one died Thursday.

Fortunately, my illness is kidney stones.

Good timing

As it turns out, I couldn’t have picked a better time to contract an illness that prevents me from walking without risk of falling like a house of cards. I am the last person in Italy who could contract the coronavirus which has put my adopted country in world headlines and the crosshairs of other countries’ immigration policies.

My left side is terribly weak. It feels like I had a stroke without the speech difficulties. With the inability to walk without feeling like I’m one step away from making a public arse of myself, I’ve been homebound.

I’ve continued researching Saudi Arabia, read, cooked, watched Netflix and ‘My Brilliant Friend’ and tried finding a sitting position that doesn’t cause pain. I have had contact without almost no one.

However, the self-incubation hasn’t prevented me from seeing what’s going on around me.

Italy has become a growing petri dish of germs. Keep in mind the high numbers are also due to the excellent Italian state health service that has tested nearly 17,000 residents.

According to The Atlantic, fewer than 2,000 have been tested in the US. But to summarise:

All 20 regions in the country have cases.

Eleven towns in Northern Italian are in lockdown, affecting about 50,000 residents who are under threat of arrest if they leave.

Schools across the country closed Thursday for 10 days.

All Serie A football matches will be played in empty stadiums.

The England-Italy rugby match next weekend was postponed indefinitely and operas in Milan’s famed La Scala opera house and masses have been cancelled.

Funerals are limited to immediate family members.

The list of airlines that have cancelled or greatly reduced flights on routes to and from Italy include British, Czech, EasyJet, El Al, Kuwait, Norwegian, TAP, Ryanair, SAS, China Air and Wizz Air.

Great Britain is requiring any person arriving from Italy to do a self-quarantine.

Economic impact

The economic impact has been massive for a tourism industry that makes up 13 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product. An estimated 10 million tourists cancelled travel plans to Italy.

Of the 4.5 billion euros expected lost during this period, 3.2 billion come from Lombardy, Veneto, Tuscany and Lazio, where Rome is the capital.

Here in Rome where only a handful of people have contracted the virus, business is down an estimated 70 percent.

Ninety percent of hotels and travel agencies report cancellations.

Rome hasn’t been this deserted since the fall of the Roman Empire. The only difference is the conquering Goths and Vandals wouldn’t come near this city now.

The streets are void of tourists in Yankee hats and tour guides carrying little flags.

One report said the Colosseum had no lines when they usually stretch more than 100 meters.

You could count the number of visitors to the Forum on two hands. A fellow AS Roma fan who watched Sunday’s game at Cagliari from our Abbey Theatre Irish Pub said only about 10 fans were in the room and the usually bustling bar “was hurting.”

Tourists aren’t cancelling just for fear of catching the virus.

They’re frightened of being quarantined once they return home.

Milan’s famed Duomo was empty when it reopened Sunday.

Marina and I have our own fears.

On March 28, we’re scheduled to fly to Asturias, a beautiful, lightly trodden region of northwest Spain, for my birthday. We have until March 20 to cancel our hotel for a full refund.

What if Vueling and Iberia, the two Spanish airlines taking us to and from, join the long line of above airlines to cancel flights to and from Italy? Vueling said it will give us a full refund. But what if it does it at the last minute and the hotel charges us anyway?

Marina is worried about Spaniards taking out their anger on us, as if we’re all carrying the bubonic plague. I’m not worried. The Spanish aren’t like that but it’s tempting to cancel it all now and just take a road trip to another part of Italy’s giant quarantined ship. But would the airline reimburse us if it doesn’t cancel the flight? No.

Our friends aren’t panicking but no one knows where coronavirus is going to lead in Europe’s most affected country, where more than 40 people died in one day.

One Rome hospital is treating seven people with the virus, including the Chinese couple who were the first in Italy to catch it. On Friday, a patient in the Vatican hospital tested positive and the hospital was temporarily closed to be disinfected. The priest at Chiesa di San Luigi dei Francesi, famed for its three Caravaggio paintings free for viewing, contracted the virus.

In Saudi Arabia, I had a mild argument with a Spanish traveler who pooh-poohed the virus for a 2-percent fatality rate that’s no worse than the common flu “and no one is freaking out about the flu.”

True. However, 2 percent of tens of thousands of potential patients is a lot of people. Also, there is a cure for the flu.

Coronavirus has no cure.

Here in Italy we are like the extras in the first scenes of a disaster movie where an unknown, mysterious virus begins to spread around the world, turning friends and family members into slobbering, bleeding zombies. Tents are set up outside hospitals to keep the infected from infecting patients inside.

The measures the Italian government is strongly suggesting are right out of a science fiction film: No double-cheek kissing. Stay at least one metre away from everyone.

If you suffer mild virus symptoms similar to the flu, stay home.

Anyone over 75, stay home.

Don’t share drinking glasses.

Marina accompanied me to the clinic Wednesday. I’m going to a specialist for another exam Monday.

She is no longer allowed to come. Italy’s medical centers will no longer risk it.

I never thought I’d ever say I’m lucky to have kidney stones, but I do.

I could be in a hospital bed hoping mankind finds an antidote before I die.

Instead I’m sitting at my laptop behind closed doors trying to get down three to four liters of water a day. Seals don’t need this much water.

Kidney stones are debilitating

Kidney stones are nasty and they hit me as if I got knifed. I took the train back from Marina’s Sunday morning and as I left my station for my walk home, I felt this surging pain in my back. It’s similar to when you’re lifting weights and have bad form on one rep. It’s debilitating.

I thought I’d done it the day before in my first gym session the day after I returned from Saudi Arabia.
Impossible. I did only some bench press and my usual interval workout. I always take it easy my first day back.

But as I walked home it got worse. I had to make two big-time, NBA-level jump stops to gather enough strength to continue. To walk the usual 10-minute route home, it took me more than 20 minutes.

I laid down on my couch. Pain shot up and down my left side. I went to the gym to stretch. That made it worse. A trainer said if it doesn’t go away by the next day, go to the emergency room.

I didn’t last the next hour. I went to the emergency room. However, Marina had to drive me the three blocks to the hospital. (The older I get, the closer I seem to live to hospitals.)

At San Camillo, one of the best public hospitals in Italy, they interviewed me, took blood, gave me an ultrasound and diagnosed it. My total bill for an entire afternoon in the emergency room with the above treatment was … ZERO!

Kidney stones. But they were small, so small they’re like sand. They said they may have come from the Saudi Arabian tap water I read was safe to drink but really isn’t. All that sand I saw floating in the air above Riyadh? That must have reached the city’s water supply. I took two sips to down pills. That’s it.

I was told the stones should flush out of my system naturally, as long as I intake more water than your average sperm whale.

The doctor at the private clinic where I had a regularly scheduled prostate checkup Wednesday did an ultrasound and said one stone is in my kidney. That’s not dangerous. Another stone, however, is in a tube and, depending on its shape, will either leave naturally or be a major problem. Another clinic Monday will try to identify the stone. He told me my lone dietary limitations are no chocolate and no beer.

There goes my trip to Belgium.

Meanwhile, I am staying home, safe and sound from the more mysterious coronavirus and drinking so much water I have dug an indention in the tiles leading to my bathroom. My urine is now the color and general makeup of bottled water in Norway.

So have no fear, dear reader.

We’re OK.

We’re going nowhere, sealed in our self-contained peninsula where no one wants to visit with us, meet with us, talk with us.

Fine.

More pasta for us.

John Henderson, an American, moved to Rome in 2001 and spent two years in Italy. He returned to live in the Italian capital in 2014. He writes a blog called 'Dog-Eared Passport' and supports AS Roma.

This is a personal blog. All views or opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author and do not represent AS Roma.

To make a donation to AS Roma's coronavirus campaign to buy medical supplies for the hospitals in Rome, click here.