My quarantine story starts in Cambridge, MA, where I have been based for the past two years as a Ph.D. student in City Planning at MIT. I am originally from Italy, and, back then, in early March, I was already constantly in touch with my family, who kept sharing with me the tragic development of the epidemic outbreak in my home country. The virus, at the time, seemed to be something absolutely distant from my daily academic life. However – as we know – things changed quite rapidly.

I was supposed to travel to West Bengal (Kolkata) with senior faculty and architecture students to study the fascinating system of industrial jute mills along the Ganges. This study trip got canceled, and the evolution of the events brought the entire class to an existential conundrum: how to design for a place that you have never visited? And how to brainstorm design ideas on tracing papers and models where you can’t share architecture studio spaces anymore?

In addition to the pedagogical challenges, I remember the “last” department lunch at MIT, DUSP. We all gathered in the last “large gathering” I have attended in my life so far (March 12) to say goodbye to each other. A digital life was about to begin! I emptied my Ph.D. office and carried back to my room in Cambridge hundreds of library books. I took advantage of the several suitcases I had there to transfer most of my books in a single move, and a dear friend from Harvard borrowed me his car to facilitate the process.

Since March 15, I started quarantining with my flatmate (an architecture master student at Harvard GSD) in our two-bedroom apartments in Cambridge. We turned the living room in an office space in order to create a physical boundary between the night and day areas of our new apartment routine. We went to get groceries every three weeks, and we agreed on minimizing any sort of external activities. I enjoyed getting a glass of wine on my rooftop: it has a great view of the Boston skyline, and I could even spot the MIT iconic dome. We baked, we made fresh pasta (strangely, first time for me doing fresh pasta despite my origin), and we enjoyed random chats to share our mutual research and class progresses.

Another interesting experiment that happened during this unprecedented time was to organized a socially-distant social event among my fellow Ph.D. colleagues in Cambridge. I managed to order a synchronized series of Uber Eats deliveries to 10 different apartments in Cambridge, and then we all eat together on Zoom. That was fun!

After spending almost two months quarantining in the US, I immediately realized that travel restriction would have soon compromised my planned trip to Italy. Initially, I was thinking of going back for a couple of weeks and then back to NYC for a summer program where I usually teach at Columbia University. Well, the summer program got canceled, so I decided to book an incredibly expensive one-way ticket from JFK to Catania (Sicily) via Rome. Eventually, I managed to leave the US on April 25. I rented a car and left Boston early morning and drove to NYC, where I entered a deserted JFK airport where from Terminal 1 only two flights were scheduled to depart on that day: Alitalia to Rome and AirFrance to Paris.

I am now writing from my summer house, where I am still actively involved with the MIT academic life. Yet, at the same time, I contemplate the Mediterranean coastline and the silhouette of Etna volcano. I haven’t had the opportunity to hug my family yet. I am still waiting for the COVID-19 test results, but I look forward to doing this very soon.

[submitted on 5/11/2020]