‘We have been living a nightmare … around here, everyone has at least one victim to mourn’
GROUND ZERO: PART 1, ITALY In a new series, our correspondents return to European areas hit hardest by the pandemic to report on what the future holds
T‘We were slap bang in the middle of a hurricane, and hadn’t even noticed … Those were truly terrible days’
‘We are trying to start again, but I’m seeing a very slow recovery. I’m particularly concerned about what will happen when autumn comes’
here is a toy shop in the centre of Nembro. Its shutters are down, and there is a curtain hanging across the entrance. It won’t be opening again. Piera, the elderly lady who ran the shop, was killed by the coronavirus. The same fate befell her brother who, with his sons, ran the hardware store next door.
It is just one of the many tragic stories that haunt Nembro, a little town on the outskirts of the northern city of Bergamo, which has the grim distinction of being the community hardest hit by the pandemic.
As Italy and much of Europe reopens for business, places like Nembro are struggling to find a new normal. For businesses able to start again, the scars of what happened here are all too real.
“At least 10 of my regular customers who used to come in once a month are now dead because of the virus,” said Manuel, a barber in the centre, who was cutting people’s hair wearing a face covering and a visor. “It seems absurd that I won’t ever see those people again.”
Nembro is emblematic of the huge social and economic costs Italy has paid as a result of the virus. This is a place where at the height of the crisis, people were “dropping like flies”. The death rate shot up by 10 times, where three brothers died within days of each other. Not since the Second World War have small Italian communities like these experienced such grief, shock and sadness.
The town of around 11,000 people was in the worst hit part of the worst hit region – Lombardy – of the first country in the West to endure the nightmare pandemic which has since spanned the globe. In the first 21 days of March, the town recorded 1,000 per cent more deaths than in the whole of 2019, according to figures released by Italy’s National Statistics Institute. Proportionately, no other place in Italy recorded as many victims.
Data published on Saturday suggests that the town may even be the worst-hit in the world, with new tests estimating that 49 per cent of the population contracted Covid-19.
Nembro, a prosperous community with residential villas with flower beds, playing fields for children, a church with an after-school centre and a piazza with fountains, is at the entrance to the Seriana Valley, one of Italy’s most productive manufacturing areas. Contacts with China were a matter of routine for companies dependent on import and export.
“In the first 15 days of March, we recorded 10 deaths per day. No one was really aware of what was happening,” Claudio Cancelli, the mayor of Nembro, told The Daily Telegraph from his office on the first floor of the town hall.
When the first contagions erupted on Feb 23 in the nearby hospital of Alzano Lombardo – a town adjacent to Nembro – rumours of an imminent lockdown started to spread. But nothing happened until March 8.
“At the end of February, we held a meeting in Bergamo with all the other local mayors in order to figure out exactly what was going on,” Mr Cancelli said. “No one was wearing a face mask. If I think back to that day, it seems incredible. There we were, slap bang in the middle of a hurricane, and we hadn’t even noticed.”
In Nembro, 188 people died between Feb 23 and March 30, 10 times as many as the same period last year.
Below the mayor’s office is the registry office where all the births and deaths in Nembro are recorded. Normally a quiet, fusty place of municipal bureaucracy, something terrible happened there. First, the office manager became ill around the end of February, with a cough, high temperature and shortness of breath. Over the next few days, three other employees began to show the same symptoms. By March 5, only one member of the registry staff remained in the office, a 60-year-old woman called Cristina. The next day she was urgently taken to hospital. Two days later, she died. With one employee dead, and three others seriously ill, the registry office had no other people available to fill the gap. Nembro’s council was no longer able to record the deaths which, in the meantime, had continued to rise sharply. The town simply lost count. “Those were truly terrible days,” said Mr Cancelli.
Nembro is slowly coming back to life. As in the rest of Italy, the shops, bars and restaurants have reopened, but there are few people on the streets.
Mauro Marchi, who runs a local travel agency, became emotional when he spoke about the toll taken on the town. “Normally, this place would be buzzing with people. Now, no one ever comes through the door. There’s a psychological block. Around here, everyone has at least one victim to mourn. On March 5, just before the lockdown, I counted 12 ambulances passing by in the morning alone. We’ve been living a nightmare. I have a few holiday bookings, but these are people who booked trips in January and have decided to head off anyway.”
Sonia Quaranta owns a photography studio in the middle of town, which she runs with her brother. More or less everyone in Nembro knows her because her studio is the most popular with young couples planning to get married. “People here were dropping like flies between late February and early March,” she said, as tears welled up in her eyes. “At one point, we realised the only people coming into the shop were customers looking for photographs of their loved ones who had died. We have customers who have lost as many as three family members to the pandemic.”
In one of those families, the Lazzaronis, three brothers died within a few days of each other.
Many people in Nembro believe that infections in the Seriana Valley began well before February. That suspicion has led to an investigation by prosecutors in Bergamo over the failure to declare the area a red zone. According to them, the virus was swirling around the valley as early as December. The epicentre was Alzano Lombardo and Nembro, including the local Pesenti-fenaroli hospital where, already late last year, there were 40 people recovering from a mystery virus. A few weeks later, that unknown virus was found to have been Covid-19.
The widespread belief among locals is that the danger in Lombardy, and particularly the Seriana Valley, was hugely underestimated and that the death toll could have been lower had prompt action been taken.
One person with first-hand experience of the huge increase in deaths is Stefano Barcella, the owner of one of the biggest funeral firms in the valley. In the past, his company handled around 120 funerals a month. “Would you like to know how many we handled so far in 2020? One thousand and 90,” he said. “March was only the peak. Something was already clearly wrong back in January. Back then, we handled double the number of funerals than in previous years and we didn’t really know why.” The true number of dead from coronavirus was almost certainly higher – authorities did not perform tests on many victims.
Father Matteo Cella, the town’s parish priest, also believes that the virus was already around in January: “We held 18 funerals in the parish in January alone. It was very unusual, but we thought that it was just a sad coincidence, an unusual year. As it turns out, it was the coronavirus.”
Nembro has five priests, but during the darkest days of the pandemic, four were sick and confined to their beds. For several days, Fr Matteo was the sole remaining representative of the Catholic Church. With churches closed, he live-streamed services on Youtube to parishioners confined to their homes by government order.
Amid the darkness, there are rays of hope – for instance, the willingness of young people in Nembro to come to the aid of older people. “The town’s young people saved Nembro, and will continue to do so,” said Fr Matteo.
Summer is in full swing now. At midday, the temperature in the main piazza nudges 30C. People walking down the town’s narrow streets still wear masks. But, as in the rest of Italy, where the overall death toll from Covid-19 is now 35,000, they smile with their eyes because their mouths are covered. The dead are still being mourned, but life in this bruised and battered town goes on.
“We are trying to start again,” said the mayor. “But I’m seeing a very slow recovery, and I’m very concerned. Here, most of our companies depend on exports, and exports have ground to a halt. I’m particularly concerned about what will happen when autumn comes.”
Tomorrow: Henry Samuel returns to the church accused of triggering the epidemic in France and beyond