Gabriele Della Rosa baked a cake Sunday.
He baked salmon for his family, too, his older brother Giacomo and his parents Sandra and Bruno.
The four are quarantined in their apartment in northeast Italy to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.
“I’ve been cooking a lot,” he says. “Lots of pasta.”
Gabriele will be 24 next month. He made Lincoln his home for six months in 2014, a foreign-exchange student at Lincoln Southwest High School.
“It was a way to live the American life like you see in movies,” he says in spotless English. “Go to high school, have a locker.”
He took easy classes, he says, more for the experience than the education.
He joined theater and helped with scenery, he joined the trapshooting club, learned photography, made friends. Then he went home and took a gap year before heading to Florence for college and a degree in animation.
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This fall, he returned to the U.S. to see his host family and old classmates and traveled to Los Angeles to check out job possibilities at an annual animation expo.
Life is surreal now. He counts off the days in his head, only six since the government officially shut down his homeland of 60 million people.
“It feels like a month.”
We chat on Facebook audio, early morning here, late afternoon in Italy.
The weather is warming there, he says. Spring is coming. The trees are budding.
He wants to go to the park.
Some experts say we should look to Italy — with nearly 30,000 cases and 2,000 deaths — for what we might expect here in the days and weeks to come.
Some say our culture and geography make for differences we cannot yet measure.
“When you see people you give them two kisses on the check, you hug them,” Gabriele says. “That’s just our way.”
Now there’s no hugging, no touching.
On the first days of the quarantine, vans with loudspeakers rolled down the streets of his town of 10,000, telling people to follow the new safety measures and explaining why.
Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte addressed the nation. “We stay apart today, to better embrace each other tomorrow.”
People didn't do that, early on. Heading to beaches and ski slopes and crowded bars, when they were told to stay put.
And they took the virus with them.
His family follows the news nervously, Gabriele says. In his region — like a county here — there were a total of 347 cases Monday, 46 more than the day before; 14 people had died and 17 had been declared cured.
Gabriele is like all of us. The way we were back in early January, hearing about the strange new virus in China.
A virus like the flu, but more deadly. But it was in China, and China wasn’t Italy. (Wasn’t Germany, wasn’t Iran, wasn’t the United States.)
“As long as it doesn’t touch you directly, you tend not to think too much of it. It was everywhere on the news, but you still wouldn’t pay attention to it.”
Then two Chinese tourists visiting Rome tested positive. And a cluster of cases in Venice and Milan during busy holiday times, and suddenly a partial quarantine turned into a lockdown.
“Everything was closed,” Gabriele said.
His part-time job as a waiter at a local steakhouse is gone. How do you stay 6 feet away when you’re trying to serve a plate of Fiorentina to a customer?
His father is working from home, all of his travel canceled; his mom is transitioning to home from her job as an accountant at a chair factory. (The factory is still operating, with restrictions and lots of hand sanitizer, he says.)
The days are long.
He’s working on his animation portfolio, looking ahead. He’s in the kitchen feeding his family. He’s taking a walk each day. Together they are spring cleaning.
People can go out for fresh air in their neighborhoods, in groups of one. They can visit the grocery store or pharmacy. His mom and uncle shop for his grandparents and they worry about their health.
The big cities are still the center of the outbreak, in particular Milan, where the medical system is overloaded and doctors are desperate as the death toll keeps rising.
“This is the main problem,” he says. “It’s not the virus itself, it’s too many people infected that the hospital can’t take them in. We’re not China, we can’t build a hospital in a day.”
But there are cracks of light.
“The other day we had a bunch of doctors from China going to Rome to help us. They brought hospital equipment and they brought masks to hand out to people.”
His fellow Italians are holding each other up. Spending an hour each evening on their balconies, playing music and singing.
Children are coloring rainbows on banners to hang from those balconies all across the land.
The homemade banners all say the same thing, he says: Tutto andra bene.
Everything is going to be all right.