Due to the continuing uncertainty around the corona virus, ECGBL will be a virtual event this year.

Passano le stagioni, ma solo quelle di Netflix.

Real data shows that book sales are down some 25 percent during this lockdown. People are not actually buying books—not in physical shops (understandably), and online sales are plummeting too. So, either Italians are rereading all the volumes they have at home, or they’re just lying.

Was it a reading pandemic?

It’s a story playing out among many couples in Italy right now. Unpredicted move-ins. New families.

Will their children be called the coronaboomers?

Canceled. Cancellato has became to me the most beautiful word in the Italian dictionary. Not Ti amo or pizza. Canceled.

As a freelance writer, I say to myself that the lockdown doesn’t change much from before. I stay in my pajamas all day, as before, plus there is the cancellation of all social activities. No more endless dinner parties or pointless meetings. It’s so relieving.

The turning point, for me at least, came when I learned that someone real, someone on the fringe of my immediate circle, was in mortal danger. It was the 70-year-old father of a friend of a friend. He died. But the scariest and saddest thing is how he died: alone, in an intensive care unit, with no chance to say goodbye to his loved ones. For now, funerals are also prohibited. That is how one dies in the time of the coronavirus. This is the most terrible thing.When you hear stories like that, you start following the rules. You are suddenly ready to stay home. You wear your mask, and you don’t feel like making jokes about the virus. You get depressed.

This is a very Italian kind of sport: negotiating a bureaucracy.

Is it OK to hire someone to assume a risk you don’t want to?