Living in a Sci-Fi Movie: An Italian Screenwriter on Coronavirus

In her March 2020 personal essay, “Living in a Sci-Fi Movie: An Italian Screenwriter on Coronavirus,” published in the “Voices from the Pandemic Series” on Words Without Borders, Silvia Ranfagni reflects on life in Rome at the onset of the pandemic as it swept through Italy. She likens the experience to a science-fiction movie, with the city’s eerie emptiness resembling an apocalyptic wasteland. The sense of disaster, sudden and surreal, caught citizens off guard, leaving them in a collective state of disbelief and denial, as if they were unwitting extras in a dystopian narrative. Ranfagni explores her and her family’s initial disbelief, depicting her children’s urge to socialize during quarantine and her parents’ reluctance to alter their routines. She critiques this behaviour as forms of denial, drawing parallels to American President Donald Trump’s negligent approach to national and global crises. Ranfagni connects denial to consumerism, observing that her mother’s primary frustration lies in her inability to shop—a ritual she likens to a kind of religious devotion.

As lockdown silences the city, sounds like birdsong evoke what Ranfagni calls an “Eternal Rome,” suggesting a continuity of the city’s spirit stretching back to ancient times. She closes by translating the Italian poem “The Ninth of March, Two Thousand and Twenty,” which went viral in Italy, “This is what I want to tell you: / we had to stop. We knew it./ We all felt that our living was much too furious. / Inside things. Outside ourselves. / Shake each single hour—make it bloom.” With the pandemic upending Italians’ expectations, Ranfagni envisions the crisis as an opportunity to address systemic social issues left unaddressed for too long. Ultimately, she hopes the upheaval will pave the way for some kind of renewal.