Moderated by Alberto Faustini, editor of the newspaper L'Adige
Modernity has accustomed us to view death as a senseless, incongruous event. Yet, an unknown pathogen forced us to confront the most elementary calculation every day—the one between who lives and who dies. But every chart, every count that seems to reveal the secret of misfortune is actually double-edged. It speaks of both it and us, and the balance is the measure of our daily fear.
To escape harm, we hid, seeking shelter, abandoning social relationships to imprison ourselves within the walls of our homes. Meanwhile, a second, invisible contagion was silently spreading, and no one knows yet how many victims it will claim: it is a contagion that transfers fear and emergency from health to social organization. The virus seems to undermine what we once considered achievements, striking at the heart of the system by attacking the democratic mechanism and proposing a new, different power, founded on anomaly as necessity. Thus, the infection is transforming not only social and emotional relationships before our eyes, but also freedoms, work, and rights—in a word, politics. That’s why, if we entered the pandemic all equal, we risk emerging from it changed.
Ezio Mauro traces the virus's path from its origins in China to today, as if it were a social actor, studying its tactics, strategy, and character. At the same time, he reflects on us, on how we are transforming in the vortex of the emergency. It and us: the whole book is built on these two planes, in a continuous exchange from the first to the last page.
