San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Returning to Italy amid virus odd for Turati
AUSTIN — The Italy Anna Turati returned to in April felt like a hollow facsimile.
She’d never seen Milan like this. So empty. So ghostly. So unwelcoming. It was dystopian movie horror come to life.
But the Texas tennis star and her twin sister, Bianca, were at least nearing home. Soon to be back with blood after weeks stuck in Austin, watching from afar as the COVID-19 pandemic besieged the country of 60 million. They’d finally get genuine face time — not FaceTime — with parents Giuseppe and Silvia and older sister Sara, a small piece of joy for the family from Barzano, Italy, about 50 minutes north of Milan and its international airport.
“When we got to Milan, our dad came to pick us up and it was just very, very scary,” Anna recalled Thursday during a Zoom interview. “No one was around. No cars were around. It was like everyone was inside.”
None of the typical metropolitan traffic greeted the Turatis on their swift, eerie drive to Barzano. Anna spotted a few mask-wearing walkers during the ride, but those faceless few only added another layer of unease to her frightening new reality.
They’d had an earlier brush with life within a COVID-19 epicenter the day before, stuck in New York City because of a canceled flight. It was a restless, fraught time for the Turati twins and their family. UT women’s tennis coach Howard Joffe was all nerves, too.
“Getting home for them was like an odyssey,” Joffe said. “Italy was the hot spot in the world. Then they’re stuck in New York, have to spend the night in a place where the numbers are going off the charts and (Gov. Andrew) Cuomo is giving his daily death count.”
The first case of COVID-19 in Italy
was confirmed Feb. 20. Over the next two months, the country added more than 180,000 cases to its total. Nearly 25,000 deaths were attributed to the novel coronavirus during that time.
Anna spent much of that period thousands of miles away. She was in the midst of a what Joffe deemed a “breakthrough” campaign — an 11-3 dual-match record and No. 4 ranking in the Oracle/ ITA Collegiate Division I rankings — when the NCAA announced it would cancel all remaining winter and spring athletic competitions.
Stuck in an Austin apartment with Bianca and Chilean teammate Fernanda Labrana. Senior season wiped out by a ravenous global virus. Family quarantined back home, trying to ride out the worst of Italy’s COVID-19 storm.
That confluence of events all put an enormous strain on Anna, whom Joffe calls the more emotional Turati.
“I was very frustrated and maybe a little angry,” Anna said. “It took me a few days. I just thought, ‘Is my college career going to end like this? Is this really happening? What did I do to deserve this?’ I didn’t know how to feel.”
On March 30, the NCAA granted an additional year of eligibility to the Turati twins and every other spring student-athlete whose seasons were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. It was the perfect situation for Anna, who was still one semester away from a UT degree.
“It was such a relief, getting a chance to make my own decision,” Anna said. “And I thought, ‘Why not?’ I know my coaches. I have everything I need at Texas. And we’re still going to have an amazing team. So of course I was going to come back.”
Bianca wasn’t coming back though. The other twin figured her college résumé was just about bulletproof as is: two-time ITA AllAmerican, No. 1 ITA singles ranking, 2018 Big 12 player of the year and a 57-19 career singles record.
While their paths will diverge soon, the two remain in Barzano for now. It’s as much time as the family has spent together since Anna and Bianca enrolled at Texas in 2016.
And with Italy doing its part to flatten the curve — the seven-day moving average of daily deaths has plummeted from 813 on April 2 to 13 as of July 17 — the twins have been able to get some work in on a court while exploring new hobbies, like joining in on the TikTok craze with Sara.
“The only thing we could do at the beginning was just work out,” Anna said. “We have a courtyard, so we go out there and do some training. It was only later that we could go out for a run, either very early in the morning or late at night when people weren’t around.
“But just spending time with our parents and other sister. And we started doing some TikToks just to stay busy and have fun.”
Anna expects to remain in Italy throughout the fall. She’ll only have a couple classes remaining to earn a degree following the summer semester, so the plan is to return for spring competition, pandemic permitting.
She admits the eventual splitting of twins will be odd. But Anna is buoyed by the prospects of what might be accomplished without Bianca around. She sees next season as the continuation of a critical transformation that began just as the world started to implode.
“I really felt like I was becoming my own person,” Anna said. “I got to know myself better. I started to realize this competition with my sister was bothering me and giving me negative energy, keeping me down. I now really understand that wasn’t helping me grow.”
Anna also had a final message for the subsect of Americans continuing to flout COVID-19 guidelines, lest they keep her from returning for a ride-off-into-thesunset season at UT in 2021.
“I don’t know what people are doing,” she said. “But I can say please, follow all the instructions and be careful. It’s really a dangerous situation, I’m telling you from firsthand experience because we’ve gone through hell here.”