People didn't pay much attention to the first signs. The old lady who came coughing to the emergency room, worried about an epidemic in China, but who was reassured by the staff before being sent home with an encouraging smile. The ever-increasing number of people with some kind of flu who flocked to the pharmacy. A small article in the local newspaper about a lung disease spreading in the region and about which little was known. The ambulance sirens people began to hear more often than usual at the bar, and the increased comings and goings near the town's funeral parlor. Then, all of a sudden, everyday life was turned upside down. The police, the military... Parents rushing to school to get their children, then running to supermarkets to stock up on supplies. The blocked roads, empty streets, closed doors. The fear, the death. And the silence, occasionally shattered by the sirens of ambulances, invisible to those confined inside their homes but made all the more painful now that they knew why they echoed in the deserted city.

This is how Codogno's residents remember those crazy days in the winter of 2020 when the unthinkable broke the ordinariness of this provincial town. For want of a better word, residents often use "war" to describe what happened: "a war."

On February 21, 2020, the 50,000 or so residents of this small Lombardy town and nine neighboring communes were the first Europeans to slip into an unheard-of condition that would soon become the norm for the rest of the continent, and which in Italy was called by the English word "lockdown." Codogno is where the country's first case of Covid-19 infection was recorded. Five years have now passed. What remains is a lot of grief (at least 200 dead), memories that bring back tears and three pieces of steel erected in front of the local Red Cross headquarters, the monument erected in memory of the victims of the pandemic and those who survived them. On its base are inscribed three principles that sound like a motto: "resilience, community, new beginning."

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