In the only city in the world without cars, boats are the main mean of transportation. Since the early hours of the morning, the waters of Venice’s lagoon are crisscrossed by thousands of boats of all kinds: there are the famous gondole, the noisy tope used for transport, the elegant vaporetti, the oar-powered sandoli, and the sailing boats known as vela al terzo, a navigation system that is typical of the northern Adriatic sea.
Newspapers declare total alert over the rising number of SARS-CoV-2 cases, and also mention that newly impoverished hospitality workers are “knocking on the municipality’s door”. As we enter the third wave of the Coronavirus pandemic, authorities are closing schools and debating a total lockdown. In the meantime my flatmate, who left his village in Sicily one week after turning 18 to embark on a successful career as a chef here in Venice, is once again unemployed, and is still waiting for his unemployment money for May and June. While the country remain hypnotized by the evolution of the pandemic, every …
Its olive trees ravaged by the Xylella pandemic and its fields parched by drought, Salento is literally a tinderbox. Small fires break out all the time, and where once you would have seen crowds of people working frantically to save their family’s trees, today you see absolutely nothing, as trunks that stood for centuries burn and crumble into ashes, and nobody cares.
(VERSIONE ITALIANA) Among the countless popular mobilizations that are taking place in Italy during this second wave of the Coronavirus pandemic, there is one nobody seems to care about, the struggle of nurses to obtain better working conditions.
A sign on a café in Venezia reads “I have always complied with the regulations and the decrees. I have always enforced social distancing, masks and hand-sanitizer. I will not close”.