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Five years have passed exactly— for some, it feels like many more, for others, it feels like just yesterday. Italy had already been watching images coming from China for weeks, with deserted cities due to the lockdown, and no one imagined it could happen to us, that a pandemic could take 197,000 Italians. Life went on as usual: the Sanremo Festival...

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In early 2020, the world watched as a terrifying new virus arrived in Italy and brought the country to its knees. Images of vacant streets, doctors in head-to-toe protective gear and stacked body bags flooded the nightly news, serving as a warning of what awaited the rest of us. By the time COVID-19 hit the United States in full force, the lessons...

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Buying a house in a small Italian town was not something I had in mind when I initially arrived in Italy in 2015 as a graduate student. As someone who enjoys big cities, I was all about the Milans and Johannesburgs of the world at the time. The bigger and more chaotic the town, the better. But in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic tested my affection for...

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From the beaches of Sicily to the medieval wonders of Florence, you’d need a lifetime to see everything that Italy has to offer. And while you may have visited Milan, the capital city of the northern Lombardy region, there’s a good chance that two of its close neighbours, Bergamo and Brescia, have slipped under your travel radar. If so, 2023 is the...

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Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute and Sternberg Family Distinguished Professor at Northeastern, has been elected as a Fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The group is the world’s largest “general scientific society” and publisher of perhaps the most widely recognized prestigious academic...

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In the first few months of 2020, huge swathes of Northern Italy were hit by the COVID-19 virus. Soon the death toll in the city of Bergamo reached such heights that an army convoy had to transport coffins out because its cemeteries and crematoriums were full. In his powerful doc “The Walls of Bergamo,” which world premieres on Friday in Berlin’s En...

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Italy has ordered COVID-19 antigen swabs and virus sequencing for all travellers coming from China, where cases are surging, the health minister said on Wednesday. Italy, which was the first nation in Europe to be hit hard by the virus in February 2020 after it emerged in China, is now the first to impose mandatory tests on people arriving from the...

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It’s not every day that you find yourself locked down in the midst of a global pandemic with a one-toothed puppet of Italy’s legendary La Befana, but through a mix of serendipitous circumstances, that some might call fate, I spent the pandemic living out an urban version of ancient Italian legend. For those who may not know, in Italian folklore, th...

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