Triage, table B04, number V697. Table D03, number V701. The board quickly rotates codes and numbers like the arrivals and departures screen at the station. Indeed it rotated, until Sunday, when the last checkout appeared for the last call of the last patient.
La Nuvola di Fuksas, a steel and glass giant with a light soul in the heart of Rome’s EUR, has closed its vaccination hub, one of the largest in Italy in the battle against the pandemic: 536,000 vaccine administrations anti-Covid in all, which make 2,500 a day to want to divide them equally without counting the Sunday or summer downturns and the mid-March break, when AstraZeneca was suspended by AIFA. It closes as all the large vaccination centers are closing, now that almost 80% of citizens are immunized. Mission accomplished.
In between, between the inauguration and the closing, between the first and the last puncture, seven months have passed. And in seven months thousands of faces, voices, stories, hope, light.
“It was a beautiful place to stay, with a profound beauty that proved compatible with the most terrible of emergencies because it is not true that hospitals, local health authorities and health centers should be ugly”, he says. Marco Delogu, photographer and curator, who spent long weeks in the 3,700 square meters of the Nuvola taking a photo gallery on display from 30 September. It is called “33 portraits of the Cloud”, “a medical number, less than 0.01% of the people who have been vaccinated in this space created for something else and become the safe, public, efficient place for a collective ritual in search of a better world “.
This mass vaccination appointment, by no means taken for granted, has also become a documentary by Delogu himself, the son of a doctor, who grew up on the streets of Eur: “Days of the Cloud” is the title. It is from there, from above, that the light glides, on a drone that flies over the empty spaces that slowly fill up, in a crescendo of voices that recapture the spaces, resume life with vaccines.
There are state lawyers, philosophers, city councilors, pop artists, priests from Centocelle, priests from the Ivory Coast, merchants of the Roman generone, the military. The vaccinated high school student “to hug her best friend again without the teacher looking at us badly”, and the teacher who wanted to “give an example, even at home, to my children, out of civic sense”; the nun who tells her sisters abroad “that the vaccine is free and for everyone”, and the shopkeeper “excited to participate in a collective appointment”. Individual identities of a great people that passed here.
“It is said that Rome is provincial and instead every day the Cloud became a place where diversity was more and more surprising – says Delogu – I first saw the elderly, then a generation of sixty and seventy-year-olds, and then the age that was slowly lowering. and at the same time the number of people of different ethnic groups and religions rose “. A cycle of life in reverse, from the oldest to the most children. And in the midst of this flow of faces, more than 140 health workers including doctors and nurses; faces that, shifts aside, have never changed.
One after the other in front of Delogu after the vaccine, the masks are lowered – surgical, military, pink, black, flowered, with the Mona Lisa. “It is the liberation – says Delogu – from a battle that is not yet over but which here at the Nuvola has closed and we all hope it will not start anymore”.
It was a sanitary baptism and an encounter with the city. “I got vaccinated, I saw the Cloud” he heard himself say in Rome. The spaces are empty again, for a new life: Patti Smith, the G20. “Now to overcome the fear and anxiety after the pandemic we need sociality, culture. Let’s go back to hosting large congress and cultural events – he explains. Antonio Rosati, CEO of Eur Spa – Let’s start with the exhibition and the documentary on our vaccination center which we believe has made a significant contribution to the perception of vaccination safety. We come out stronger and it is the right tribute to those, health workers, operators, employees, who have provided a service to be proud of “.