*The streets of Bergamo are empty. As in all of Italy, people can leave their homes only for food and medicine and work. The factories and shops and schools are closed. There is no more chatting on the corners or in the coffee bars.
But what won’t stop are the sirens.
More than 1,600 people have officially died in the Bergamo region. That is the most in Italy, which as of Friday evening had registered 9,134 total deaths, more than China and Spain combined and many times more than the United States.
Officials think that the real number of deaths in Bergamo is at least four times higher and that the official number of infections, 8,060, is but a fraction of the total. Bergamo, once known as a wealthy, ancient city with a handsome center, is now known for the coffins piled up in its churches, for the military convoys carrying bodies away for cremation, for the overwhelmed hospitals staffed with exhausted doctors and nurses.
And while the world’s attention shifts to its own centers of contagion, the sirens keep sounding in Bergamo. Like the air raid sirens of World War II, they are the ambulance sirens that many survivors of this war will remember. They blare louder as they get closer, coming to collect the parents and grandparents, the keepers of Italy’s memory.
The grandchildren wave from terraces and spouses sit back on the corners of now empty beds. And then the sirens start again, becoming fainter as the ambulances drive away toward hospitals crammed with coronavirus patients.
“At this point, all you hear in Bergamo is sirens,” said Michela Travelli.
:cry:
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.yahoo.com/news/dead-morning-till-night-140604050.html[/URL]
If you don't shed a tear or twi0 reading this article - I don't know.................*
