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The reactions to the pandemic continued with other contributions:
This, from June 2020
F Mangialavori
Letter from a postman to you…Yes to you, Covid damn!
You know, Covid, I didn’t think I could write to anything invisible. A few months ago I would have been taken for crazy, exaggerated, a little nutty as well as agitated. Yeah, sure, a few years ago maybe for other reasons I did, but it wasn’t you, all it took was a fuck-up to go back to being free to decide my time, to take it back, fill it up and try to build the future I think I deserve. I thought I knew the dangers, almost all of them, like most of us, and instead…
Instead I didn’t think I could be afraid crossing something or someone. Me who have always been an
observer of objects and gestures. I was afraid of myself, but at the same time I knew that the strength was me and my smile. The smile, yes, that I didn’t think I had to hide wearing a mask, not being able to even receive that of others always because of a rag. To the latter, they say, we owe part of the protection from you when, forced, we need to look with suspicion at a distance, outside the four walls in an illusory temporary freedom.
The feeling, however, is that it is not enough to put a patch with you, covering a hole created by you in our flag that has always been synonymous with beauty, culture, history. Here, the feeling is that you are fraying it, the Italian flag, separating the hands of all of us who together compose the green, white and red threads; that you’re taking our breath away locked up in our bodies like a perfect parasite; that you’re forcing us to remain in our homes.
You’re taking away our loved ones in the most bizarre way, keeping us away at the worst moment to make it worse and putting in danger even those who try to save them.
You know, I and others are working despite your invisible presence, for this country, for us. Your name is Covid. You have the same name of a supermarket chain, or like the one of a discount card, but at the end you don’t make any discount. Am i right? Know, however, that we will return after this human, health and economic tragedy to live our Italy, to play the intercoms smiling to people or friends without the fear of being on a button, to fill the squares, alleys, beaches and the peaks of the boot without the fear of breathing you.
Know that we carry and will continue to carry packages. And know that no one should throw the packages behind our backs.
F. Mangialavori
The Green Bridges Project. 