Covid 2020: Italy's much-loved landmarks fall into silence

Italy saw the first major outbreak of Covid outside Asia. As the cases spiked, its world-famous tourist sites were plunged into silence.

When the Covid-19 pandemic spread, it was Italy that saw the first serious outbreak outside Asia.

In late January 2020, Italy recorded its first cases of Covid, when two Chinese tourists visiting Rome tested positive for the disease. By the end of the month, the Italian authorities stopped all air travel to China and declared a state of emergency. Clusters of cases which appeared in the northern provinces of Lombardy and Veneto, however, it soon showed that the measures were too late.

In the first weeks of the Covid pandemic, Italy emerged as the worst-hit country outside China. Case numbers climbed and local lockdowns began. The first death was reported on 22 February in Lombardy. Days later, there were Covid patients reported in every region of the country.

On 9 March, the Italian authorities announced all sporting events in the football-mad country were on hold. By the end of the day the situation had worsened to the point that prime minister Giuseppe Conte told Italians the local restrictions would be introduced across the entire country. Nearly every commercial enterprise other than supermarkets and pharmacies were told to close their doors.

Italy – all of Italy – was under lockdown.

Italian photojournalist Laura Lezza says the change from almost normal everyday life to lockdown was almost unbelievably swift. Over a Zoom call from her house, she holds up a photocopy of the front page of the national newspaper La Repubblica, which reads: "Tutti a casa!" ("Everyone stay home!"). Lezza says Italy, the country that bore the brunt of Covid's first surge through Europe, had to adapt from day to day. "We just had China as an example," she says, "but China didn't really show us anything." Lezza says she believes the trauma from being the first Western nation to have to deal with a major outbreak of Covid was something Italy has still not properly processed.

"So when we arrived at the 10th of March, when everyone was at home… suddenly it was like a kind of war. I remember the morning, the very first day, I got up and we went with my husband to have breakfast in a bar near my house. And I said, 'Let's go and see what the end of the world looks like.' There were very few people about, just those that could go out for work. And what really impressed me was to see at the end of the street a supermarket, and the people were queuing like on a chess table… one on the right, one on the left, and two metres between the people." From 6pm later that day, even the cafes would be shut. The first lockdown would last for the next two months.

Lezza's job as a photographer for the Getty Images agency allowed her to roam outside her home, but she constantly had to show proof she was able to travel – Italian police and carabinieri – the national gendarmerie of Italy – patrolled towns and cities to clamp down on unauthorised journeys. The ancient sites and monuments that draw so many millions of tourists every year were suddenly quiet.

The image of the leaning Tower of Pisa was taken exactly a week after Italy's national lockdown began, on 17 March. At the city's mayor's urging, health authorities began a programme of public sanitation which was "not just for the people, but was for the objects, for the streets, for the pathways, for everything", says Lezza. 

The figure covered in the mask and protective clothing looks like someone from the sharp end of a disaster movie or sci-fi thriller. He brandishes a sprinkler in front of an iconic tourist attraction suddenly marooned in an empty plaza. The only other figures, far in the background, appear to be police officers. The tourists that are part of everyday Italian life are nowhere to be seen. 

Lezza reads out the mayoral press release from March 2020 that led to this public sanitisation, with the local authorities listing the thoroughfares that would need to be cleaned, the number of teams that would carry out the task, reassuring the public that the disinfectants used would not harm people or their pets.

"We must assure daily washing, because it remains the area most exposed to a greater influx of people who go there for work needs," Lezza says, reading from the press release. But it is not just those public places where the tourists would normally flock. Districts far from those madding tourist crowds are also included. "What was incredible is that by the town hall law in Pisa, and in many other cities in Italy that week, they decide to sanitise the surface of our life. 

"The pathway near the tower of Pisa, as we know, is one of the most crowded places in Italy, even the surface and the monuments and the pathway could contain the virus," says Lezza.

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"I remember they were wearing all white," she says of the sanitation workers. "Covering their face and the head and the hands completely. I remember how hard it was that day and the day after and the months after, to take a picture of people. Because as a news photographer, you try to stay as much as you can close to your subject… but with the pandemic, I had to experiment [with] a new way to be [a] photographer, because people started to become afraid of you. 

"I remember even that day, the atmosphere became lighter, even if there were a lot of deaths and anxiety and terror in Italy. Even the guys [the sanitising team] became less stressed and not so worried about me any longer."

Lezza juxtaposes this image, taken when the pandemic was in full swing, with an assignment just a few weeks before. She travelled from her home to cover a carnival in a nearby town. Covid was already spreading, though at this stage it was a concern more than a crisis. That was the first time since the disease had arrived in Italy that she saw a sudden change in daily life – like taxi drivers wearing masks for the first time. Italy lurched from apparent calm to pandemic in a matter of a few weeks.

A few nights after Italy's first death, Lezza took pictures of hardcore football fans – or ultras – during the Livorno/Pisa derby. "They watched all together the football match on television, and at the end, they asked me, 'Laura, can you take us a picture?' And I have this picture of all these guys hugging together. And for months, I thought 'That was my last picture of people hugging each other'."

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