News Coronavirus in Italy

Italy's foreign press recalls lockdown with Rome exhibition

By: Wanted in Rome

Date:

08 Oct, 2020

Lockdown Italy seen through the eyes of the foreign press.

Rome's Capitoline Museums hosts a new exhibition of photographs, opening today 8 October, taken by foreign reporters in Italy of life during the covid-19 lockdown.

Organised by the Foreign Press Association in Rome, Lockdown Italia visto dalla Stampa Estera comprises 70 powerful images taken in several Italian cities by 30 photographers from 10 countries, including the Italian correspondents of major news agencies such as Reuters, AP and AFP.

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The exhibition is hailed as "a tribute to a country that has been hit hard but which has set an example for the rest of the world," offering a journey through dramatic images of hospitals, 'red zones', deserted cities, solidarity, life on the balcony.

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Rome mayor Virginia Raggi said that the reporters were also ''citizens who understood and shared with Italians the feelings of pain and anguish and the difficulties they were experiencing."

Photo: Esa Cakir/Agenzia DHA. Rome, 18 April 2020.

The capital's superintendent Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli said that the photographers of the foreign press have "documented the Italian side of a global tragedy" with "courage and lucidity."

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One of the more powerful images on display shows Pope Francis in a deserted St Peter's Square, under the rain, who imparts the Urbi et Orbi blessing.

Photo: Chris Warde-Jones/The Daily Telegraph. Amalfi, 6 May 2020.

Other hard-hitting images document intensive care units, coffins inside churches, the suffering on the faces of frontline nurses and doctors. The exhibition also documents the "new normality" as Italy emerged slowly from lockdown.

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"In March, Italy jumped to the top of the news and the front pages of the international media" - recalls Trisha Thomas, president of the Foreign Press Association in Italy - “We correspondents of the Foreign Press have reported how the Italians faced this unprecedented crisis with courage, discipline and solidarity."

The exhibition, which has the patronage of Italy's culture ministry, can be visited at Palazzo dei Conservatori until 1 November. For full details see museum website.