ROME — The last time we saw Italian flags hanging from balconies, the last time this triumphant national anthem was heard in the streets on a grand scale, Italy was on a much darker world stage.
It was spring of 2020, and the nation was the first to be upended by a national coronavirus lockdown. In the northern city of Bergamo, the military was called in to transport bodies while the crematorium furnaces burned 24 hours a day. Funerals were canceled. Police roadblocks cut off towns and families and all the simple joys of life that Italians protected at all costs. Doctors casually referred to hospitals as war zones.
At 6 p.m. on those early pandemic nights, when leaving the vicinity of your home was technically illegal without written permission, Romans gathered on their balconies and did the only thing they could: They sang. They waved their flags. They beat pots and pans and applauded their doctors and nurses and went viral for what they could do from home.
This is still an old world that lives with the memories of what nationalism can do to a continent. This is still a people wary of salutes and flags and the zealous chanting of names as the fringes of Europe steadily regress into a dark, chauvinist past. Still, it’s exceedingly rare to find flags above doorsteps. There is no national anthem played before most sporting events. Those occasions are almost exclusively reserved for national teams.
In Rome’s UEFA Fan Zone, before Friday’s Euro 2020 opener between Italy and Turkey, Italians waved their flags and sang their anthem with a different verve than those balcony renditions from more than a year ago. Beneath the skeletal ruins of the Roman Forum, fans were transfixed by a giant screen broadcasting the match, once again able to gather in droves.
Light blue medical masks muffled the anthem’s words, making it clear that Italy wasn’t quite beyond the horrors of the pandemic just yet. But there was an understanding that a moment that seemed so normal not long ago was worth commemorating, even if the limited-capacity crowd was nothing compared to the estimated one million people who gathered to watch the Euro 2012 final in an ancient Roman racetrack.
For a city that has seen it all, from plagues and wars to popes and emperors, for a place that is known as much for what it has built as for what has crumbled, one story continues to be told: How it carries on, embedded in its past, always among its ghosts and ruins.
