11/3 2020 Kalrskrona, superboring hotel no names

I am now in Sweden, the place where I live and where my family is. I long for them. But I am now in a very little town in the south waiting to be able to get to my destination for the next 12 days: a cabin in the Swedish countryside, where I will spend my quarantine. Coming from Italy, I think it is right to do so and let be to spread a possible virus through my body to the family and friends I so long for. (But I long to get home!)

Today it was a very windy day in Europe.

Thinking that the wind could take with it both sickness and pain.

Beautiful landscapes in northern Germany, sheep just breezing unconscious of the Covid 19. Cows and horses, and storks and swans. And the earth ready to break out in springtime. So near this springtime! Earth stretching in all directions, as it has always been. I try to imagine it without roads and traffic.

I am so grateful for Play Radio 3, internet and my country’s deep way of analysing what happens through a lins of human and historical context. And the music on that channel, and the poetry of Mariangela Gualtieri!

And then I am the border between Germany and Denmark, and the police stops me.

A young officer asks for my passport – we are in Schengen?!?! – and starts to talk Italian to me. So young , and I am 60 years old, but I am a little bit nervous in front of him. He takes pictures of my passport and says he is not so good in Italian.

What could have happened? He tells me that I am suspected of spreading the virus in Scandinavia and therefor arrested. He says I am not welcome in Scandinavia, even if it is my home? Why don’t I have a Swedish passport? Well I have never thought it would come a day when I could have missed it. Covid 19 can make me think differently.

Fortunately I am released from the Danish border without any of the above problems, and come soon to the incredible bridges, the first between Odense and Copenhagen and the second between Copenhagen and Malmö. The same way of making architecture, the same kind of gas stations on the road, the same sausages. But two countries that always fight each other, even now. A Swede is not welcome in Denemark, and a Dane is always the happy silly smoker of the other side of the bridge.

Beautiful bridges, with a wind that make my car nearly blow off. Scary as hell.

A little tragic to be in a boring hotel in a pretty boring little city in my home country, and knowing that I have to wait so long to get home!

But I am in good health!