Covid-19: letter to my grandmother while cooking her passatelli (+recipe)

Yesterday's war, today's war

Covid-19: I see dead people thanks to a proliferation of last-minute virologists

Dear Grandma, the good news is that the whole of Italy is being led by an exceptional Prime Minister: Giuseppe Conte. Even though he was brought up by the 5 stars who are not even close to my political thinking, I admire our PM so much. Not only has he not abdicated or exploited the moment to make propaganda, but he is even showing courage, pulse and foresight by making unpopular choices for the good of us Italians. I am sure that the whole world envies him, starting with the English moron who condemns thousands of people to death relying on a supposed herd immunity, or the American phenomenon that says that the cure cannot be the disease, but meanwhile the USA has overtaken Italy and China for contagions in less than 15 days. 

Covid-19: I apologise in advance for this provocation. Ah, no, it is not a provocation, I mean it.

Dear Grandma, I believe that on the one hand, Covid-19 was absolutely necessary. The richest and most productive slice of the world really needed to stop and find time to reflect. I know, probably for those who post a selfie every day on Instagram with half a torso out the window and a victim's face there is nothing to be done, but the Coronavirus will probably take it in the name of natural selection. For all those who will take advantage of this quarantine to reflect on their lives and will be able to re-embrace those values hidden by futile layers of flab, commitments and consumption, there will be hope for them. Wealth has made us blind, but this connected world has given us the ability to take photos that can reach anywhere in real time, provided the algorithm - the true deity of this millennium - deems them worthy. Of course, even in our rich world there are still some who choose to live disconnected from reality and ignore social networks, news sites, newspapers and the news in the name of self-proclaimed superiority. These are dangerous individuals, but fortunately rare. Information today can run everywhere and this freedom to circulate is the key to progress. 

Dear grandmother, this is an image that you only expect to see in war and that neither our generation nor your daughter's generation, my mother, has ever seen before. We are in the centre of Bergamo: 70 military trucks are carrying away the coffins of corpses caused by the Coronavirus. These trucks, queued up in Via Borgo Palazzo, are transporting the coffins from the Bergamo cemetery to the crematorium ovens in Emilia-Romagna because there's no more room here and the crematorium - in operation 24 hours a day - can't cope. So much for seasonal flu and rampant imbecility.

We challenged Nature, how would Turner paint us today?

Dear Grandma, pandemics circulated even in the days of curtailing economies, just think of the plague that plagued mankind in alternating periods over the centuries. What if we have simply become a world too old? What if Covid-19 is not so much needed to give us a sense of life, as to cut off the older people that medical advances are causing to live beyond their time by mocking nature itself? Covid-19 has existed in mammals for dozens of years, it is proven. Yet it has mutated on this very day and is capable of killing humans. Could nature have triggered this virus leap to demand a bill from us? I remember a beautiful documentary on telomeres that Fabrizio showed me. Do you know what telomeres are? Imagine our DNA as made up of the strings of a shoe, you know the two plastic ends that make sure the ribbon of cloth doesn't fray? There, that's the telomere, its job is to make sure that the DNA is copied, from one cell to another, correctly and completely. The length of our telomeres is directly proportional to our age. When the telomere becomes too short to protect the copied DNA, it sends a message to our body: goodbye and thank you, it's time to die. Today, there are studies to ensure that telomerase, the protein (I think it is a protein, but I don't want to misremember) preserves our telomeres for as many years as possible so as to improve the quality of life of the elderly. 

Dear Grandma, I put up the shelves this afternoon - do you like them? I know, you too were 79 when you died of the same disease as my dad, much younger than you. Forgive me if I find these studies to be yet another selfish project of this rich part of the world, which, despite being a reduced %, robs itself of almost all resources. Do we really want to study how to get an 80+ year old to climb Everest when most children in Africa do not reach 5 years of age? Are we really so blind? What if nature with the Coronavirus is asking us to rejuvenate the world? I don't do politics, I don't have to be voted in by anyone... so I can write exactly what I think. If there are 7 billion of us human beings on the planet, hoping there will always be new births, we cannot want quality life to go on any longer, unless we really do colonise other planets. But are we sure that this colonisation is right? Or is it fairer to cycle life according to nature and invest in it for almost all human beings?

Passatelli di Romagna: my grandmother Diomira's original recipe

Ingredients for 2 sweethearts:

All my notes on wine and food in one book.