Italy, slowly waking up from its nightmare, is experiencing a strange and sluggish summer

Italy, a country whose economy relies heavily on tourism and pleasure-seeking, has had a very strange, down summer in 2020.

Rome, Italy, where the streets are now quiet, where the squares are now empty, where historic sites that have been steeped in history for thousands of years are finally having a quiet summer day. In broad daylight, you can even hear the bubbling of the city's ubiquitous fountains.

There are no Chinese tourists in line anywhere to be seen, along with American tourists in hats, sandals, and vacation shorts, who are all but gone this summer.

Only a few German families with small children could tolerate the afternoon heat. Of the 1,200 hotels in Rome, fewer than 200 reopened after the blockade, some with as few as five rooms. In the center of Veneto, only three stores were open, the rest were closed.

On the surface, all of them are hanging signs of being closed for maintenance, but the actual truth is that these hotels were originally mainly for foreign tourists. And this summer, foreigners are staying at home, unable or unwilling to travel.

Only a few native Italian tourists wandered the streets. Some Romans who don't live on the nearby beaches (Ostia, Fregene) will come for an evening stroll. Some will drive to the top of Gianicolo Hill, where the fresh westerly breeze provides relief from the summer heat and the city of Rome below glistens in the sunlight.

While the scenery of Rome remains beautiful, Italy's national economy is no longer rosy.

Projections show that Italy's GDP could shrink by 11% in 2020, which would be the worst performance among the 27 EU member states.

The sweep of the new crown virus is a nightmare for Italy, but without tourists, the impact will be more long-term. Italy's tourism industry, which includes hotels, bars and restaurants, transportation, museums, and more, accounts for 13 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).In 2019, half of the tourists are foreigners who left long ago.

It is predicted that half of Italians will not go on vacation this summer. Even for those who are willing to go out on vacation, most of them choose to go to places that are far from big cities (Milan, Turin, Naples, Palermo) and artistic cities (Rome, Florence, Venice), and people become more willing to travel to less crowded places like Alto Adige, Friuli, Abruzzo. There is also the tiny Molise, where the number of tourists doubled last year.

It's been a strange summer, and the warm and cheerful Italians now seem unusually cautious. Most people on the streets wear masks, even outdoors which is not mandatory, though of course some of those who are outdoors will pull them up under their chins.

Italians, unlike people in many Western countries, do not consider caution and fear during an epidemic to be cowardly. Instead, they consider fear to be wise in an epidemic, while blind boldness is a sign of carelessness.

Italy was the first country outside of Asia to bear the brunt of this coronavirus, with 35,000 people losing their lives, half of them in Lombardy.

Italy would not be in the good shape it is today without the excruciating spring blockade, just look at the current situation in the United States.

While the Italians made some mistakes in the run-up to the epidemic, overall Italy followed the rules. Although the Italians did not perform as well as the Chinese in the face of the epidemic storm, they were also one of the few representatives of rationality in the West.

Italy was the first country in Europe to close its schools and will be the last to reopen them. In terms of how they behave in the face of natural disasters, it sometimes feels like Italy is more of an Eastern country, with its flexibility and that human touch between groups.

Yesterday was the first day since the outbreak that there were no new coronavirus deaths in the Lombardy region. While Italians are still in a worrying mood, they also smell the approaching freedom.