It’ s an Italian experience like no other for James
HAVING HAD HIS ERASMUS EXPERIENCE TURNED COMPLETELY UPSIDE-DOWN, PHD STUDENT JAMES IS ADJUSTING TO LIFE IN LOCKDOWN, WRITES CATHY LEE
A GOREY PHD student is experiencing extraordinary times firsthand as he has been living in lockdown in Florence in Northern Italy for the last few weeks and has seen the beautiful and idyllic city become a ghost town.
Having only arrived in Italy at the beginning of February to take part in an Erasmus+ programme for his course in UCD, life was quickly turned upside-down for James Grannell from the Rock, Gorey, when he and fellow classmates were told that the university would be shutting its doors.
‘I got here not long before it all started, and the university closed a week before the lockdown started. Public parks and gardens closed in Florence, everything apart from essential businesses. When I go out, I see police move people along in the streets, while benches and buildings are being sprayed with disinfectant. It’s surreal, like something from a movie and when it’s eerily quiet, there are more pigeons than people sitting at restaurant and café tables’.
James said that, because he only arrived on February 9, he doesn’t really know his neighbours or many other people at all in Florence, but has still managed to experience kindness and solidarity.
‘As I’m living alone, it has positives and negatives. I’m unlikely to come into contact with someone that has the virus, but the negative means I’ve been on my own for a lot of the lockdown. Those communication channels, like regular phone calls with my mum Sheila and my friends back home with video chat, it has been good as you don’t feel isolated from family and things happening back home. If this had happened ten or 20 years ago, it would have been a completely different scenario.
‘I have one or two people here I know but I can’t say that I know a lot of people. I get phone calls from people in
Ireland about the situation and what has to be appreciated is that a lot of those images and people affected by coronavirus are in a particular region of Italy. So it’s not really spread evenly across the whole country, but you have a huge amount of people that have been infected in Lombardy and Bergamo. It’s very heavily concentrated there and the deaths are heavily concentrated as well.
‘In Florence, if you can say you can be lucky at a time like this, the numbers haven’t been as high. You don’t have that sense of doom around you that you would have if you say lived in Lombardy or Bergamo.
‘But what I have noticed here is a change in the media. When the first case was reported in Florence, around February 25, we heard it was a man in his sixties. We heard that he was an entrepreneur and had some connections with a business in Asia, and that first case was quite heavily reported. You heard that he had a family, his children, the school where his children attended. But as the numbers began to rise, you began to lose the human story behind it and you become slightly desensitised,
‘ The numbers have grown kind of exponentially, and you kind of lose sense of the human impact of it. It’s hard to comprehend the numbers of people affected and what it’s like for them.
‘Last week in Florence, it was a very good day when we only had 34 new cases identified. You feel happy about that, which is a strange feeling. It’s easy to lose touch but when you think about it, that’s 34 families and social groups that it affects.
‘ The ministry for health in Italy is very good, you get daily updates in the evening online on the website on the numbers and you can look at regional breakdowns and each city, so you’re very much kept up to date on what is happening’.
Although there are some similarities comparing Italy to Ireland and the rest of the world, James explained that he has not seen stigma associated with the virus.
‘It was minimal, and because the numbers increased so rapidly in Italy, it was very difficult to paint it as a kind of foreign illness. Earlier on, I had some friends back home telling me that I should try to get out of Italy, because the numbers were growing each day. One of the things that I said to people then when I was discussing it was that you kind of feel safer here, because everybody is engaged in this kind of social distancing, it’s a collective effort to stop the virus.
‘Generally I think everybody here has rowed in behind the efforts to stop the spread of the illness. I did notice that the first day, when the universities and schools closed across Italy, when I went to do my shopping I saw a couple of small groups of teenagers who were off school and they were walking around together in the city but that was the only time. I haven’t seen that since, nobody is breaking the lockdown and there is a great effort from people here.
When you’re walking in public, say you’re going to the supermarket or the pharmacy, people would very consciously distance themselves from each other, even walking on the footpath. You go to the supermarket, and you stand in a queue outside two metres apart and maybe five people are allowed in at the same time so the doors don’t automatically open, the staff have to come and let you in. It’s essentially within the entire infrastructure of the country now, to stop the virus from spreading’.
‘In a strange way, even though I’m in a country that has huge numbers, I feel safe here because of the measures that are put in place and people’s attitude towards them’.
Keeping up with how things are changing at home, James said that he is concerned about a lack of understanding in Ireland.
‘People in Ireland need to take responsibility and realise the reality of the illness, it’s a serious thing. I know early on some people at home were describing it as just a flu and there wasn’t really an appreciation of how it can just take over so quickly.
‘I see that things are getting stricter on people in Ireland, but there is a big difference between engaging in social or physical distancing voluntarily and it being a mandatory thing. When you are told that you can’t leave your house, only for essentials, it’s very different than you voluntarily choosing to stay inside your house to make sure that you’re not spreading the virus or allowing it to spread through your community.
‘It seems from what I have seen that you have kind of two groups of people in Ireland. There’s one group who are staying at home and doing everything that they can to self isolate that they aren’t going to spread the virus, but then you see other cohorts of people hanging out on beaches, queuing outside shops in not very good form at all.
‘When we saw people running out and packed into supermarkets, it seemed like such a counter-intuitive thing to do because if you’re worried about a virus, why would you go to a
LAST WEEK, IT WAS A GOOD DAY WHEN WE ONLY HAD 34 NEW CASES. YOU FEEL HAPPY ABOUT THAT... BUT WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT, THAT’S 34 FAMILIES
IN A STRANGE WAY, EVEN THOUGH I’M IN A COUNTRY THAT HAS HUGE NUMBERS, I FEEL SAFE HERE
place where you’re going to be in contact with lots of people? I feel in the last few days, people are taking it more seriously. Closing the pubs, that was a big deal in Ireland, but I’m not sure yet.
‘As it hasn’t infected Ireland in the same high level as it has here, I feel that some people maybe haven’t grasped the gravity of it. There will come that tipping point realistically in terms of cases and deaths, where people will have to face the awful reality of the potential of a virus like this to go through a population. It’s important for people to take those early precautions to flatten the curve.
‘On the other hand though some people seem to be very panicked by the whole thing and panic doesn’t really help anyone. One of the things I found that people should be aware of is that if you’re looking at the media and social media a lot, you can become paranoid that you are experiencing symptoms. I had a slightly sore throat one evening and I thought I had coronavirus. That can affect your mind, so I suppose my advice would be to try to keep some manner of calm’.
James is due to finish his Erasmus in May, but he’s not sure now when he might get back to Wexford.
‘As I’m doing a PHD, I can work a lot from home here in the apartment and there’s electronic communication. I’m researching the role of activists and voluntary organisations who were working with people infected with HIV/AIDS in Ireland from 1982 until 1992, looking at organisations like Gay Health Action and others that worked with haemophiliacs and drug users.
‘In terms of going home, I know another Irish guy here, and we’ve been discussing this. When the lockdown happened, there was a three day period where we could have gotten flights and left the country. There weren’t any direct flights from Florence so we would have had to travel to Rome or Milan and taken a flight from there. At the time my thinking was that being on public transport for an hour wasn’t the best idea. I contacted the Irish Embassy, and was told that I technically can leave the country by train and go across France and get the ferry back to Wexford but again, you have to weigh up your own safety and the chances of you coming into contact with the virus, whether to stay or whether to make a mad dash to get back.
‘Personally, I feel I’ll stay here until things calm down a little bit. If the numbers keep falling, it’s better to avoid unnecessary travel and travelling here is difficult. You need to have papers to say where you’re going and why you’re taking different forms of transport. We are pretty much locked in the city now.
‘At the moment I’m kind of playing it by ear and I’m keeping track of the Irish situation, what’s happening and whether it’s safe to come back home.
‘But I have to say, in terms of the Italian experience, it has been very strange.
‘Before the lockdown happened, all the American students left as they were advised to go home. Suddenly you had six or eight thousand people just off the streets of Florence so it became very empty. Even now when you’re walking around, you can’t see very many people but you can hear from windows, music playing and people talking from inside their apartments, it’s a very odd experience. The main thing keeping me sane has been keeping contact with people at home’.
Although things have been challenging for James, he has found moments of relief.
‘I found the first few days of lockdown difficult, it was hard being stuck inside and not being able to go out as much. What I noticed just after the first couple of days, was that I didn’t spend as much time on social media or on news websites constantly reading about it, because I found that the constant influx of information just wasn’t helpful for keeping good mental health.
‘ Then I noticed that there’s a woman who lives down the street and she comes out on her balcony and plays records, so you can hear this kind of music wafting around the street.
‘People would have seen the videos of the singing and dancing, but that kind of thing is actually really important in a way because it reminds you that you’re not cooped up in this apartment on your own, there are people across the way or around you with those gestures.
‘I must have the cleanest apartment in Florence as I go around once a day and clean everything, but it’s just to get some semblance of normality out of what is an extraordinary scenario’.