“If we continue to be unjust, God will take away our music.”

I want reassurances about what’s being done, not what will be done. I don’t want to hear about the future. There are people who don’t know how to get to the end of the day and feed their children. In my long life, I never even imagined such a thing, let alone experienced it. We’re living in a science fiction film.

In Ravenna [where he lives] the shutters are closed as though the virus could enter through the windows. There is a death-like silence, cemeterial. I’ve always spent Easter in Molfetta where, as a child, I saw the Good Friday processions. It’s very much a Southern tradition, and is accompanied by the band, which was my first music lesson: for centuries they have always continued, even in wartime.