March's Monthly Newsletter

For how long, I wonder, will the arrival of early March bring a frisson of anxiety? Four years have gone by since Italy was the first country outside China to “lock down”. Though we didn’t call it that then. The anglocentric pandemic lexicon hadn’t yet been established, and the lack of vocabulary to explain the situation only served to exacerbate its anomalous nature. Such was the alarmed curiosity with which Italy was viewed by the rest of the world that I was asked to write this by Apollo Magazine.

The photos that pop up on my phone at this time of year seem considerably more distant than four years ago. Rome was then a city under the torpid spell of a perpetual August Sunday during those strange days of empty streets and a year’s diary of work wiped clean at a stroke. The temporal claustrophobia of uncertainty was simultaneously enervating and alarming, and yet also intriguingly novel. I recall with a shiver the acute concern for family in a country which suddenly felt a very long way away, where governmental advice was to carry on with blithe disregard as if being phlegmatic were a barrier to a highly infectious respiratory disease.

Early March of 2020 has the hazy edges of a half-remembered dream, but the photographs of those curious days before everything closed down for good are tangible and disquietingly beautiful. I hope you, too, can look at them and breathe a sigh of relief.

Saluti from a busy, cheerful, and very much back to normal Rome!

All best, Agnes