Who are you? What do you do? What do you bring? A florin!

Abstract

My contribution consists in some ethnographic notes taken by a freelance cultural anthropologist living in Turin (capital of Piedmont, in the North-West, one of the regions most affected by Covid19) on the situation of the pandemic in Italy as seen with a very informal participant observation. After a very short chronicle of the lockdown, useful to set the different phases of the lockdown in Italy and the timing of the events, I write about the many issues faced by Italian citizens in the period, from inequality in living the pandemic to grassroots initiatives to answers it, from reclusion conditions in a variety of contexts (house, prisons, retirement houses) to strategies to get out anyway (for good reasons), from stereotypes Italian are (sometimes correctly) perceived abroad to the misunderstanding of the instruction of personal distancing, from the concept of family to that of community. All this reporting my same participation to some initiatives and actions, introducing my reflections and moreover witnessing the irony we used to face the fear.