No country has been hit harder by the coronavirus than Italy, and no province has suffered as many losses as Bergamo. Photos and voices from there evoke a portrait of despair.

There have been 8,165 deaths in Italy, more than China and Spain combined, many times more than the United States.

Once known as a quiet and wealthy province, Bergamo is now a place where Red Cross workers go door to door, carrying away the afflicted, like Claudio Travelli.

Where patients line hospital corridors, exhausting and infecting doctors and nurses.

The streets of Bergamo are empty. As in all of Italy, people can leave their homes only for food and medicines and work. The factories and shops and schools are closed. There is no more chatting on the corners or in the coffee bars.

But what won’t stop are the sirens.

While the world’s attention now shifts to its own centers of contagion, the sirens keep sounding. Like the air raid sirens of the Second World War, they are the ambulance sirens that many survivors of this war will remember. They blare louder as they get closer, coming to collect the parents and grandparents, the keepers of Italy’s memory.

Källa: ‘We Take the Dead From Morning Till Night’