To your health!

When we arrived here I was impressed not only that people were wearing masks pretty universally indoors, but that everyone seemed so good-humored about it. Ditto the rest of the COVID protocols here, which are a little different from what we were used to in California. 

Doing the right thing.

The small shops that line our street all have signs saying that only two or four or some other (usually single-digit) number of people can be in the store at one time. Additional customers dutifully wait outside, masked and spaced more or less six feet apart. And the staff inside are masked, too.

There don't seem to be maximum occupancy rules in large stores, like the Conad supermarket a few blocks away, where any number of people can go in whenever they like. But there, too, customers and staff are all masked. When we took a train to and from Bologna last week, to have lunch with some American friends who were passing through, I didn't see a single person on the train who wasn't masked. This despite the fact that there was no one official to enforce the rules; on neither our outbound journey nor our return did anyone even come by to punch our tickets.

I thought that we'd mostly given up worrying about catching COVID from handrails and countertops, but here both large stores and small ask you to sanitize your hands when you enter, and there's always a stand with an automatic dispenser or a pump bottle of disinfectant near the front door. It's a bit reminiscent of people dipping their fingers in the font of holy water when they enter a church. 

An even more mystical belief in ritual's power to defend against misfortune seems to hold sway in the nonprofit that sponsors our weekly qi-gong class, which is held in a public building that used to be a quite lavish Jesuit monastery. In addition to having their staff check everyone with a temperature gun when we arrive (a bit like being shot in the head), the nonprofit requires Pam, who's our teacher, to walk around the cavernous classroom before class begins spraying a heavily scented Italian version of Lysol into the air. What good this does in a large hall with open windows and thirty-foot ceilings baffles Pam and me and probably everyone else. But that's the rule and we follow it. 

Our qi-gong classroom, fully disinfected.

As an earlier post detailed, restaurants, theaters, and other places where people gather indoors are also supposed to check everyone's Green Pass to make sure they've been vaccinated. At the first restaurant we went to the waiter met us at the door to check our vax status, and I even had to show my Green Pass to go on that moonlight walk, which was entirely outdoors.

However, this is Italy, and Italians are suffering from pandemic fatigue just like the rest of us. Now that we've been here for a while, I am noticing that a lot of people are following the spirit of the regulations but not exactly the letter.

Take masks. Yes, everyone wears them indoors, and many outdoors as well, but an awful lot of people sometimes leave their noses hanging out. (This seems particularly true of the older men, though I haven't done a rigorous tally.) I myself have occasionally been guilty of this when my glasses fog up. I've also repeatedly strolled into a store or the railway station without remembering to put on the mask that I'd tucked away while I was outside. Then I realize my faux pas and scramble to remask before I'm mistaken for a Trump voter. 

Taking a breather.

Likewise with hand sanitizing. I see that not everyone stops to do it, and frankly often neither do I. If you're making several stops, and you've resisted the urge to pick your nose or suck your thumb en route, it seems silly to cleanse your hands each time you enter a store when you haven't touched anything or anyone since you sanitized them at another store a few minutes earlier. 

Clean hands, clean conscience.

The Green Pass isn't universally enforced, either. Yesterday we visited a rather fancy pizzeria where they checked our passes at the door very officially (albeit very hospitably). But a high-end place in neighboring Salso Maggiore that we went to last week asked to see our QR codes but didn't bother reading them. And two other favorite restaurants here in town didn't even ask, perhaps because we'd been there many times before, or maybe because they're pretty relaxed in general. Apparently so are we, since we sat down and ate without any hesitation.

If there is another outbreak here this month, as some fear there will be, all of us who are being less than perfectly rule-abiding will bear some responsibility, and perhaps some of the consequences as well. But so far that doesn't seem to be happening. How lovely if being merely sort of careful and doing only mostly what you're supposed to turns out to be enough to keep us all safe.