Empty tables. Vacant courtyards. A priest in prayer. These are scenes from Italy on lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. For V.F.’s latest digital cover, photographer Alex Majoli captures life—and resilience—in the heart of a modern-day plague.
In March, as the coronavirus continued to spread across Italy, authorities announced they would place the entire country in lockdown. At the time, Italian-born photographer Alex Majoli was doing an artist residency near Codogno, one of the epicenters of the pandemic. He decided to head south, where he has a home, intending to chronicle the impact of the virus on the people of Sicily. “I was born in the north, Ravenna,” says Majoli, who also maintains an apartment in Brooklyn.
Back north, morgues were overflowing. Hospitals, notes Majoli, “stopped taking any non-emergency patients. It was all coronavirus.” Soon the south absorbed an estimated 30,000 Italians who had fled the stricken north, some of whom had brought the contagion with them. As the nation’s fatalities climbed into the thousands, eclipsing China’s death toll, Majoli saw a Sicily rocked by the same tremors he’d witnessed near Codogno. People were forced to remain indoors.
In the intensive care unit of Cannizzaro Hospital in Catania, Sicily, a man with coronavirus is kept breathing with the help of a ventilator.Carmelo Iacobello, head of the infectious-disease department at Cannizzaro Hospital, meets with his team. “I have never seen anything like this in my career,” he says. “You think everything is fine. Then, when it gets into the lungs, it convinces the body to fight so much, we end up killing our own bodies.”In an E.R.
Shoppers from the countryside buy artichokes and oranges in Catania, Sicily, on the last day vendors are allowed to sell produce in the outdoor market.In a small public square in Catania, a clutter of tables and chairs convey the haste with which staffers had to close down their restaurant.By Alex Majoli/Magnum Photos.
Siracusa’s Santa Lucia square typically teems with crowds. “I waited for an hour without seeing a soul,” Majoli recalls. “Then this lone figure passed by.”The freshest-and most essential-updates from Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.
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