Tourism at bound distance. Minute cityscapes in Covid-19 times

The present paper explores in a subjective and collective perspective the experience of the “lockdown” in Milan- Lombardy in Covid-19 Times, and reflects on its impact on perceptions and practices in our everyday life of modern and global ‘touring subjects’- we people accustomed to radical mobility but now made to experience an unprecedented shock of mind and body. The word lockdown refers primarily to “the confining of prisoners to their cells”: all of us are prisoners now, locked indoors, watching the streets below from windows and balconies, the only mobility allowed being brief walks around the nearby city quarters, within the bound distance of 250 metres. And yet, by virtue of a paradox perfectly fit to the surrealistic context of the pandemic, we are perennially on the move, wandering across virtual spaces, in the realms of memory and desire, managing a host of images related to movement. On the web we Travel, Navigate, Tour, Visit, Explore, Run, Walk, Bike, Climb, Sail, Drive, Fly, almost non-stop, to exorcise a loss to be thus compensated. Alongside the new ways of restricted mobility, a paradigm of ‘total’ visuality emerges, a new urge to mobilize one’s eyes. In a memorable study on the “ways of seeing”, John Berger remarked that our gaze is never neutral but always ‘affected’ by circumstances, physical, spatial, emotional. We can come to see the same things differently: spaces and places perceived with strangers’ eyes, pointing out things once unnoticed, turning to unfamiliar corners, glancing at details: one’s gaze somehow resembling that of a tourist.