How’s Life in the Village? : Economic Resilience and Reaction During Pandemic Lockdowns

Although pandemics have been a recurring problem in history, the COVID-19 pan- demic has some characteristics never experienced before. The human being has survived wars, nature catastrophes and economic shocks, always showing resilience in adapting to new situations. In this paper we want to check if this attitude is still strong. Our research question is: How do we react to emerging situations? In this paper we try to answer this question analyzing a dataset of Twitter messages collected through the second and third COVID-19 pandemic waves in Italy regarding everyday life during strict lockdowns and people’s opinion on these situations. The small villages are our starting point, question- ing first about the reactions in the population during severe restrictions and secondly looking at the responses to social and economic changes without any reference to the lockdown period; we focus then to the resilience behaviors considering the areas in the North, Center and South Italy thanks to the Twitter messages’ geo-localization.