Everything started with the Aeronautica Militare’s first flights to bring back home all the Italians living in China. They lived, worked, studied in Wuhan, in that far away, incredibly modern province where a virus we believed distant had begun killing. But closing our airports was not to be enough to protect our country. We couldn’t even imagine what was to happen from the 2nd of February onward. 

The repatriation of the first 56 Italians, on board of a KC767, part of the 14th Flock of our Aeronautica Militare, the medical screenings supervised by the Spallanzani hospital, where the first two Covid-19 patients in Italy were cared for — two Chinese tourists who were to be discharged 49 days later — the quarantine in the military citadel of Cecchignola: everything was just a short prelude to what was to come.