During the debate in the Senate on Thursday, the opposition parties grilled Conte. Ex-prime minister Matteo Renzi, who has called for less restraint in the reopening, remarked, “The people in Bergamo and Brescia who are gone, those who died of the virus, if they could speak, they’d tell us to relaunch the country for them, in their honour.”

Renzi’s controversial statement was harshly criticised by doctors who warned that the spread of the disease, which, as of Thursday, had killed almost 30,000 people in the country and infected more than 205,000 [ael: my emphasis], was not over and that a misstep could take the entire country back to mid-March coronavirus levels.

“We risk a new wave of infections and outbreaks if we’re not careful,” said Tullio Prestileo, an infectious diseases specialist at Palermo’s Benefratelli Hospital. “If we don’t realise this, we could easily find ourselves back where we started. In that case, we may not have the strength to get back up again.”