Italy: In Rome, doing as Romans will do

Larry Wilson

Rome : By now it’s mostly just the cabbies who are wearing a medical mask here. Cabbies — always the journalist abroad’s best source. So … local. So Italian. So expert on all subjects. So without anything to do but talk to you. Seeing his mask on during a crosstown trip back to our apartment after dinner, we start to reach for our own. “No, no, is not necessary. Only driver. It’s the law.”

Not famous for obeying all Italian laws to the letter — if pedestrians even plainly in the middle of an intersection have any rights whatsoever, taxi drivers ignore them in Italy, as, for that matter, do the Carabinieri — there are still a few people in Italy by law or by choice wearing surgical masks to prevent the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus in late September of 2022, just over two and a half years since Italy became early on one of the nations hardest hit by the disease.

A very few. In a crowded Roman museum like the Borghese, maybe one out 100 visitors, foreign or native, will have donned one. Hotel clerks do, lackadaisically, a bit low in the nose department. I had a haircut in an elegant, tiny, centuries-old barbiere where Caravaggio supposedly once roughed up the barber’s boy, and there was no question of donning a mask.

Know why? It’s the vaccines, bambino. The very medicines touted in parody by a foolish Yank I’d seen wearing a T-shirt on the plane, with a photo of Dr. Faucci with a hypo beside the idiot motto: “A tiny little prick took away our freedom.”

No, he didn’t. After millions died around the world, the vaccines likely saved many of the rest of our lives. Sure, we originally thought the vaccines would stop all transmissions of the virus. In the event, what they have done instead for so many of us is dramatically lessen symptoms and shorten the illness. I picked up COVID after a trip to Texas in August. It was so mild that I still went for long runs (far from others) every morning I had it; basically, I had the sniffles for three days. And I’m in the high risk group of being really old.

Almost 178,000 Italians have died of the disease as of this week, though the strict lockdowns were swift and fairly effective. Almost a thousand people a day were dying of COVID here in December 2020; now that 85% of Italians are vaccinated, that’s down to about 50.

Last week, standing on the magnificent rooftop terrace of her ancient family’s ancient apartment in perfectly preserved medieval Siena, we asked Olimpia Marmoross if she had participated in the evening urban rituals we had heard about back at the beginning of the new plague. “Yes, we came up here, we banged the pans, and we sang, we sang our hearts out. The lockdown was really total for a while. Positively no going out. But, yes, I got to know a neighbor I never knew before, shouting across the rooftops.”

So it’s nice to not wear a mask so much, nice to travel again in our world. But there’s no point in ignoring, as T-shirt man would have us do, that about 500 Americans a day are still dying of the disease.

What kills me, as it were, is how many Americans think a doctor like Anthony Faucci was interested in “taking away our freedoms” rather than just giving us a good shot in the arm. Because there was stunning news recently from the CDC: “The 0.9 year drop in life expectancy in 2021, along with a 1.8 year drop in 2020, was the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-1923.”

COVID killed us like nothing else has in a century, and what Mencken called the greatest threat to our democracy, the American booboisie, pretends there’s nothing to see here. God save us from the ignorant among us, because they’re sure not going to.