COVID-19 lockdowns in Italy

On 9 March 2020, the government of Italy under Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte imposed a national lockdown or quarantine, restricting the movement of the population except for necessity, work, and health circumstances, in response to the growing pandemic of COVID-19 in the country. Additional lockdown restrictions mandated the temporary closure of non-essential shops and businesses. This followed restrictions announced on the previous day which affected sixteen million people in the whole region of Lombardy and fourteen largely-neighbouring provinces in Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Piedmont and Marche, and prior to that, a smaller-scale lockdown of ten municipalities in the province of Lodi and one in the province of Padua that had begun in late February.

The lockdown measures, despite being widely approved by public opinion polls, were also described as the largest suppression of constitutional rights in the history of the republic. Nevertheless, Article 16 of the Constitution states that travel restrictions may be established by law for reasons of health or security.

Italy was the first country to enact a COVID-19 lockdown nationwide; many countries would introduce similar measures in subsequent months as the COVID-19 pandemic spread globally.

Background

Following the outbreak of COVID-19, the Italian government confirmed the country's first cases of the disease on 30 January 2020, when the virus was detected in two Chinese tourists visiting Italy. A third case was confirmed on 7 February, with the patient being an Italian man evacuated from Wuhan. The number of confirmed cases increased on 21 February, when sixteen people in Lombardy and Veneto were confirmed to be infected. Following the first two deaths of people with the virus, several towns in Lombardy were placed on lockdown due to the large number of infected patients in the region.