Angelo Picone lowers a wicker basket full of food to the ground on a rope, leaning over his rustic balcony, verdant with pot plants.“If you can, put something in. If you can’t, take something out,” Picone, a Naples street artist, merrily hollers to bemused passersby in the alleyway below.

Picone’s simple message is resonating in a country trying to feed a growing number of poor during the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 has officially killed nearly 200 in Naples and more than 15,000 across Italy in just over a month.