Milan Under COVID-19: Life and Death on Via Giaccomo Venezian

by Alfred Lela

Giacomo Venezian Street offers little of what a foreigner might expect from a city like Milan. Yet it cuts with knife-sharp contrast: it is a street of life and death. On its right side looms—cold, silent, and sprawled like a beast at rest—the Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori. It is not merely a hospital, but the home of a foundation that supports cancer research, intertwined with clinical services ranging from diagnosis to surgery and hospice care.

The Institute does not simply dominate this street and the one running parallel to it; it conditions life—and death—throughout this entire stretch of metropolitan Milan. Directly opposite stands a wig shop. Many of those undergoing chemotherapy lose their hair. The shop itself has turned bald: duralumin and marble, its shutters pulled down, deepening the greyness and muteness of the city on this late-March midday.

A little further down, after crossing a side street, one encounters a closed bar that on ordinary days must have served patients’ relatives and hospital staff alike. The awnings that once shielded from sun and rain are now folded inward like whispers. Slumped at the sides, they resemble cypress trees lining the far edge of a public cemetery.

At the roundabout at the end of Giacomo Venezian Street, I turn right, passing behind the Tumor Institute. On its back side, across the road, appears the Neurological Institute. The architecture is unmistakably Italian: porticoes, tastefully framed windows, a vertical reach toward the sky—never pompous—and the unmistakably Roman lettering of Istitvto Nevrologico, where the victorious Roman V replaces the profane modern U.

On the façade hangs a white banner. At first glance, a large heart stands out, followed by its smaller offspring. As you draw closer, you can read: Ciao Sergio! Not Addio. Love and respect suffer this “excess”: they do not recognize permanent separation, only temporality—until the next meeting. Beneath it appears the subtitle of this “wall newspaper”: un grande uomo, una grande perdita!

Chances are that a colleague—a professor and renowned neurologist—has passed away and is being honored by the Institute. Perhaps from coronavirus, or perhaps age finally tipped the balance, amid the spring that Italy has laid out before itself—capricious and lethal.

I try to imagine this Italian gentleman, beginning with Hermes Corsini, the handsome doctor from the TV series Disperatamente Giulia of my childhood. Now grey-haired and bespectacled, slightly stooped at the shoulders, with a shy tremor in his hands, a melancholic gaze trained over years on the cold proofs of science and the mysteries of God, who in Italy is never absent, anywhere.

I recall that the actor who embodied Dr. Corsini, Fabio Testi, appeared fleetingly a few nights ago on one of Silvio Berlusconi’s Italian channels—Canale 5, I believe—part of some show or reality program (Big Brother VIP Italia). A kind of demotion for the Hermes Corsini of my childhood. Yet “heroes” are also there to remind us that every human relationship, imagined or real, ultimately becomes a ciao, if not an addio.

After all, the heroes of our time are different. A man, for instance, who on his deathbed leaves instructions that his funeral car be a Maserati. This, at least, is offered by a funeral service on Giacomo Venezian Street—Servizio Funebre SVE: starting at 947 euros, you can have a funeral for the right price. A photograph of the Masserati and its heraldry, bearing a trident reminiscent of Poseidon, the Greek god of the seas, silently promises that, toward your final dwelling, once death has felled you, it will carry you like Achilles.

 

This quarantined Quartier Latin continues to revolve, chewing over its own silence with other (extra)ordinary episodes. A faded poster advertising a tribute concert to The King, Bruce Springsteen, by a band called 40 Fingers, is a memory of Milan as it once was. The date—March 24—has already passed over it with the haste of a virus. Until life resumes, it stands like Neanderthal cave writing.

Another memorial-spectacle appears at La Scala Theatre: The Turk in Italy by Giacomo Rossini. A dormant gas station nearby announces, “Petrol is finished.” The small park next to it stages its own theatrical piece: the monologues of benches. In Milan, at least, they have not been torn out as they were in France and Turkey.

A gym, its grey shutter pulled down, reminds passers-by that April 4 will be the day of return. Someone on the second floor of an apartment building has merged patriotism with civic duty: “I stay at home,” reads the message written across an Italian tricolour hanging from the window ledge.

This is Milan on an (extra)ordinary day: numbed, but not surrendered; silent, but not extinguished; wounded, but never without a future. In this standstill, the city walks like a tightrope gymnast.

Beneath this aerobics of life, there is me: a reflection of that gymnast on rain-washed asphalt.