ROME (AP) – Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, who had COVID-19, said the blockade of the pandemic made him feel “humiliated and offended” by depriving him of his freedom to come and go as he wanted.
Bocelli spoke on a panel Monday in a Senate conference room, where he was introduced by right-wing opposition leader Matteo Salvini, who has protested the government’s stringent measures to combat the coronavirus outbreak.
The singer’s announcement in May that he had recovered from the virus came weeks after his performance on Easter Sunday in Milan’s empty cathedral. At the time, Bocelli said that when he found out on March 10 that he had tested positive, just as the nation was locked up, “I jumped into the pool, I felt fine” and just had a little fever. Apparently he was referring to a private pool at his residence, as the gym’s public pools were closed by then.
Bocelli said at the Senate conference that it bothered him that he was unable to leave his home despite the fact that he “committed no crime” and revealed, without providing details, that he violated that blockade restriction.
At the height of the confinement, Italians could only leave the house to go to essential jobs, walk dogs, or buy food or medicine.
Dismayed, the undersecretary of the Ministry of Health, Pierpaolo Sileri, said on Tuesday that perhaps Bocelli “wanted to express the annoyance of each Italian who, due to the confinement, stayed at home.”
“I wouldn’t have said those words, but I imagine he will be able to explain it somehow,” Sileri added.
The conference was held on the eve of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s appearance in the Senate, scheduled for later on Tuesday, where he was expected to present the case of his center-left government to extend a state of emergency due to the pandemic, which expires on July 31.
The state of emergency allowed Conte to bypass Parliament or even his cabinet by enacting a series of measures aimed at halting the spread of the outbreak in the country where it first emerged in Europe, and would continue to claim more than 35,000 lives.
Bocelli said at the conference that at first his children told him to be careful with the virus when he began to have doubts about its severity, “but as time went by, I know many people, but I did not know anyone who was intensive ” watch out.”
At the worst moment of the outbreak, some 4,000 people were in intensive care in Italy, a country of 60 million, with several hundred virus-related deaths in a few days.
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