Italy's Invisible Enemy
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Italy marked a grim milestone at the end of this week as its number of deaths from the coronavirus exceeded those in China. Yet most Italians are supportive of the country's struggling authorities says Mark Lowen who has covered the crisis from its outset.
Across the world ten of millions of people are having to adapt their way of life to avoid infection. Fergal Keane has spent decades reporting on conflicts and natural disasters across the globe. He reflects on what it means to be caught up in the universal war against a potentially fatal disease.
In New York all non-essential businesses have been ordered to close. For the army of low paid workers and small business owners in particular, this is an exceptionally difficult time says Laura Trevelyan.
Young men and women looking for love often turn to their phone and swipe through a gallery of faces. But the leaders of the Indonesia's anti-dating movement say casual relationships are expensive, get in the way of study, and go against religious teaching. Josephine Casserly met a pair of newly weds who have made not dating cool.
In these days of self-isolation and working from home, many turn to the comforting familiarity of favourite books – and memories of where we first encountered them. Forty years ago Kevin Connolly fell for a largely forgotten thriller. His love was rekindled by a recent trip to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Good morning. |
| 0:07.0 | Today I want to wake up in the city that doesn't sleep. |
| 0:10.0 | Or New York, New York, a hell of a town. |
| 0:13.0 | We're in the city which today might not quite match its great songs. |
| 0:18.0 | We look into the history book for some lessons on dealing with pestilence in the past. Away from it all, one of our correspondence |
| 0:26.5 | dives into a favourite book, actually a British thriller, though with its roots in Bulgaria. |
| 0:31.7 | And can you remember your first date? Never mind, we head for |
| 0:36.0 | Indonesia where there's a move to make dating unfashionable. First, it'll have occurred to many of us that it feels like a regular walk in the |
| 0:45.3 | countryside and we've just rolled down a very steep slope very quickly. Getting up, |
| 0:50.9 | the landscape is changing. No more so than in Italy, where it now seems quite |
| 0:57.1 | normal to sing your heart out from your balcony in the evening. Mark Lowen has been there since the coronavirus arrived. the When I think back to it now it feels like a distant memory of calm and normality a month ago |
| 1:17.1 | before Italy was struck gripped by the throat suffocated |
| 1:21.8 | It was a beautiful late February Saturday the throat suffocated. |
| 1:23.0 | It was a beautiful late February Saturday, a chance to nip out of Rome to thermal baths nearby. |
| 1:29.9 | My husband and I lulled in the sulfur- sulfur infused water, savouring the magnificent country we'd just |
| 1:35.8 | move to. |
| 1:37.3 | Three weeks earlier, they'd discovered two cases of coronavirus here, Chinese tourists, but they'd been isolated and treated. |
| 1:45.3 | Italy acted fast, stopping all flights to China. |
| 1:48.9 | It became almost old news. |
| 1:51.8 | As we sat in the hot springs, information started emerging of a cluster of |
| 1:56.2 | Italians infected in the north and the first death. I scrambled back to Rome and then |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.