L’alleanza degli atomi. Crisi pandemica e risposte sociali locali nel tempo del distanziamento

Through a reflexive and auto-ethnographic analysis, the present article discusses meanings and effects of the governance that, in Italy, followed the 2020 pandemic crisis. The essay shows how, paradoxically, the political imperative of isolating and distancing has produced the emergence of collective sentiments that, at least in some cases, have not resulted in the primacy of the “private”, but in digital forms of political participation. Thus, a type of governance that presented the risk to dissolve the social space through the suspension of public forms of sociability, in certain Italian areas showed to be: a) a measure apt to create forms of sentimental connection between atomized individuals; b) the object of a resistance against the urban authoritarianism of city mayors and presidents of the Regions devoted to populist style of government and interested to use the current crisis as an instrument to climb new political positions; c) a way to relief the individual strains deriving from a crisis that, for generations that have never experienced comparable social traumas, was unprecedented.