Spraying disinfectant at the Rialto Bridge in Venice.
Photographer: Marco Sabadin/AFP via Getty Images
Italy’s Nightmare Offers a Chilling Preview of What’s Coming
There are key lessons for the rest of the world: impose harsh rules, fast, and make sure your message is clear.
In Rome, the first signs of change came from overhead. Shortly before cocktail hour on Monday, the thrum-thrum-thrum of a helicopter could be heard above the winding lanes of the 2,000-year-old historic center. The police were keeping an eye on the Trastevere neighborhood, where smoke billowed from the windows of a jail as inmates rioted, protesting cramped conditions that put them at risk of coronavirus infection.
About the same time, the stock market was opening in New York, ushering in a week that would become the worst rout in more than three decades. A few hours later, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte gathered journalists for a televised, prime-time press conference. Rules that only 48 hours earlier had been imposed on Milan, Venice and other cities in the north—travel was restricted, schools were shut, and even the opera was called off—would be extended nationwide. The world’s eighth biggest economy, with more than 60 million inhabitants, entered virtual quarantine.