Eyes Wide Open with Paper in Hand: The Year in Italy

We already know that 2020 is a year to remember. It is fair to wonder how many essays of this issue of Biography's International Year in Review will center on this common scarring experience. For sure the year 2020 in Italy is deeply marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the shadow it casts on lives and life writing. This is a year that has changed the flow of time, suggesting a before and an after. Italians had a clear awareness of living through such a time hinge. At the beginning of the pandemic in March, Italy was on the forefront of the contagion and showed the grimmest record of deaths, many of which concentrated in the small area of Lombardy. It was followed by other European countries, but in those few weeks, Italians made the world news. The nation's lockdown was among the strictest in the world, with fines imposed on citizens for jogging or for going to the store more than once a week. Italians made the news for the number of deaths, but also for their lively spirits. Two images appeared across international newspapers and social media, and remain etched in minds: the long line of military trucks that transported the coffins out of the small city of Bergamo in the night because there was no space for them and it was not possible to hold funerals, and Italians singing and playing instruments from the cities' balconies in several flash mobs. Everyone in Italy knew these were times to remember, and this knowledge—as in other significant historical moments—pushed many to write. Historians calls these experiences eventi separatori (separating events), and have observed that they produce an abundance of scritture dell'io ("I" writings). In these kinds of times, such as in wars or mass migratory movements, writing becomes more necessary than ever.

Behind closed doors, imprisoned by fear and lockdown mandates, people had nowhere to turn but to the blank page—on paper or on a screen. This essay considers three different initiatives that promoted and gathered autobiographical writings. They are autobiographical in a larger sense, as they are all forms of life writing, but they are not comprehensive. Rather than looking back at an entire life, they zoom in on the particular moment that—it seemed clear—would change an entire life. The first is the collective journaling of a city, which united its inhabitants in a common misadventure: Donata Carelli's "Journal of Sabaudia." The second is an effort to promote autobiographical writings that heal, initiated by Libera Università dell'Autobiografia di Anghiari [Free University of Autobiography of Anghiari], and the third case is a self-conscious document for the future, a thick volume born in a "time of silence" and "other confinements": Il tempo del Silenzio: Lockdown e altri confinamenti by historian Marco Severini. This writer in particular understands, with the instinct of his profession, that this time will soon become history.

Life Writing to Create Community

Sabaudia is a small city on the coast south of Rome, on land that was reclaimed from swamps in Fascist times. In the 1930s, families of farmers from Veneto were sent to these areas to work their fields and "colonize" them. During the pandemic, the town was frozen on its green dunes, in stillness and waiting. Sabaudia native Donata Carelli, a screenwriter and lecturer at the University of Rome, called her fellow citizens to write journals of their COVID days, and she gathered them in the forthcoming Diario di Sabaudia. By mobilizing her town, she started a healing process through writing.

"Tra dieci anni sarebbe stato bellissimo leggere il nostro diario collettivo" [in ten years it would be beautiful to read our collective diary], Carelli told her fellow citizens, in an article in the national paper Il Corriere della Sera. They welcomed the invitation and started clogging her physical mailbox and email inbox with diary pages. Writing turned the solitude of those surreal days of lockdown into a collective experience, lightening it by sharing the weight—"my pandemic" turned into "our pandemic." Writing also provided the...