Wednesday 18 of March 2020, 16:15.
Milan, Italy
From more than one week now the city of Milan, for the first time in its modern history, it’s under lockdown. Milan, in fact, has been the first big city in Europe and the second worldwide after Wuhan to be completely shut down. The official lockdown started on the 8th of March when the national government declared Lombardy region and the area around of Milan as a Red Zone.
The night of 8th of March, while the government was announcing the new strict measures an incredible amount of people reached the main train stations of the city, trying to escape with the last night trains in order to reach the South of Italy, spreading the contagion to the whole country. This massive escape was followed by a law that set the entire nation under lockdown.



There are few visible movements around the city, and most of them are the ones of public transport. A key necessity for many. Despite all the other services being shut down, the municipality kept the public transport running at 75% of its power to help the workers to reach their workplaces and guarantee the fundamental services.




Among the others, two of the “fundamental” services that are still operating are supermarkets and delivery services. But all those delivery services, like the supermarkets, have been literally assaulted. Due to this alert status, in fact, all the delivery slots for the next two weeks are sold out and almost all the supermarkets’ shelves are empty. A demonstration of this dramatic situation is the fact that Amazon, well known for the optimization of its logistic, had to stop selling “not essentials goods”.





Milan was the subject of a transformation, it went from being the economic centre of the country to the epicentre of a disaster. One of the city’s most important cores is now missing: its vitality. Today, when it is already 29/03/2020 nothing has changed. There are many hypotheses on how the situation will evolve, but still, not a clear vision for the next days, months and years. Once the great lockdown will be over and we will return to normality, how “normal” this will be?
Featured photo: Hope to come back to normality is what everybody’s asking for. Milan, Italy.
Photography and Writing by Giovanni Franco
Giovanni Franco is an Italian travel blogger and reportage photographer. In 2016 he started the project The Sustainable Tour with the goal to promote and raise awareness toward sustainable and smart tourism.