Bergamo, in northern Italy, is among the many communities around the globe dedicating memorials to commemorate lives lost in a pandemic that is nearing the terrible threshold of five million confirmed dead.
Some have been drawn from artist's ideas or civic group proposals, but others are spontaneous displays of grief and frustration. Everywhere, the task of creating collective memorials is fraught, with the pandemic far from vanquished and new dead still being mourned.
A memorial wall in London similarly conveys the scale of loss, with pink and red hearts painted by bereaved loved ones on a wall along the River Thames. Walking the memorial's length without pausing to read names and inscriptions takes a full nine minutes. The hearts represent the over 140,000 coronavirus deaths in Britain, Europe's second-highest toll after Russia; like elsewhere in the world, the actual number is estimated to be much higher:160,000.
How victims of war, atrocities and even health crises are remembered has evolved through the ages. Victorious statues of generals gave way to tombs of the unknown soldier after World War I, in a bid to remember the sacrifices of ordinary soldiers. Paris' Arche de Triomphe was one of the first. Not since the AIDS quilt made its way across the United States, with loved ones adding squares for people who had succumbed, has a health crisis been the object of memorials of a scale like those now honoring the COVID-19 dead. The quilt has grown to nearly 50,000 squares, representing more than 105,000 individuals.
An Italian Facebook group, Noi Denunceremo, was started as a place to publicly, if virtually, remember the dead during the country's first draconian lockdown, and developed quickly into a collection of data on alleged failures that have been turned over to prosecutors. Italy has not dedicated a national monument to its some 132,000 confirmed dead, but it has designated a coronavirus remembrance day. Premier Mario Draghi stood among the first newly planted trees in Bergamo's Trucca Park on March 18, the first anniversary of the indelible image of army trucks bringing dead to other cities for cremation after the city's morgue was overwhelmed.
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