C’era una volta un virus. Metafore e narrazioni della pandemia

The essay analyzes scenarios, consequences and side effects of the global Covid‐19 pandemic. Coronavirus presents itself as a “total social fact”, a phenomenon closely related to all aspects of life, involving different levels of society and allowing to comprehension of apparently distant and different fragments of the same society. The pandemic emergency has highlighted the complexity of the human world, the interdependence between the various economic, health and social aspects and the gaps in the process of secularisation of our model of civilisation which at first sight seems to be unstoppable. This event confronts us with a “metamorphosis of the world”, a great socio‐anthropological rupture that requires a rethinking of paradigms, of categories, of thinking otherwise, in order to understand a radically transformed world.