The acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, who has been under lockdown in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak, has written a letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, laying out the range of emotions people are likely to go through over the coming weeks. I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance. We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood. Coronavirus: the week explained - sign up for our email newsletter Read more As we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But soon you’ll be too busy for that. First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do. You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days. You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it. You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy. You’ll have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom… Advertisement You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you like a punch in the chest. Old resentments and falling-outs will seem irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes. You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again. You will put on weight. You’ll look for online fitness training. You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all. You will make appointments in the supermarket queues with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while abiding by the social distancing rules. You will count all the things you do not need. The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises. Literati who had been omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant. Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because of the halved CO2 emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month? You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair. You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.#Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce. Many children will be conceived. Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy. Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die. You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU. You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps. You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.#italyItaly

Sorry tourists, Amsterdam doesn't want you anymore❌👇🏻 (CNN) — Famous for its tolerance as much as its narrow houses and broad canals, Amsterdam is undergoing a radical change of attitude when it comes to the millions of tourists that flock to see it each year. Tolerance, it seems, has reached its limits in the Dutch capital, which is now actively urging visitors to head elsewhere as frustrated locals complain of feeling besieged by visitors using the city's bicycle-thronged streets as a travel playground. "The pressure is very high," says Ellen van Loon, a partner at Dutch architectural firm OMA who is involved in adapting the city for the future. "We don't want to turn into a Venice. The problem we are currently facing is that Amsterdam is so loved by tourists, we just have so many coming to the city." While Van Loon acknowledges the positive aspects of tourism, which earns the Dutch economy around 82 billion euros ($91.5 billion) a year, like many locals she's worried that soaring visitor numbers are destroying the soul of this vibrant cosmopolitan city. Like Venice and other destinations across Europe, Amsterdam has become a byword for overtourism -- a phenomenon closely linked to the rise in cheaper air travel that has seen visitors flood certain places, often spoiling the very spot they came to enjoy. While some cities are still formulating ways to cope, Amsterdam -- where a decade-long surge in visitor numbers is forecast to continue, rising from 18 million in 2018 to 42 million in 2030, or more than 50 times the current population -- has simply decided it's had enough. CNN Travel's Richard Quest meets Reinier Sijpkens on board his musical boat. Netherlands tourist officials recently took the bold decision to stop advertising the country as a tourist destination. Their "Perspective 2030″ report, published earlier this year, stated that the focus will now be on "destination management" rather than "destination promotion." The document also outlines the country's future strategy, acknowledging that Amsterdam's livability will be severely impacted by "visitor overload" if action isn't taken. Solutions listed include working to dissuade groups of "nuisance" visitors by either limiting or completely shutting down "accommodation and entertainment products" aimed at them, as well as spreading visitors to other parts of the Netherlands. Some of these measures have already come into play. Last year, the famous "I amsterdam" sign was removed from outside the Rijksmuseum, the city's main art gallery, at the request of the city of Amsterdam, as it was "drawing too big of a crowd to an already limited space. Measures have also been taken to discourage travelers from visiting some of Amsterdam's seedier tourist hotspots. Earlier this year, the city government announced it will end tours of the Red Light District in central Amsterdam, citing concerns that sex workers are being treated as a tourist attraction. One of Amsterdam's most famous residents, Anne died in a concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 15. "We pride ourselves on being a city which is tolerant. A city where people can be themselves, which is true," says museum director Ronald Leopold, one of the guardians of Anne's diary and legacy. "But we also have these dark pages, and these are probably the darkest." According to Leopald, around half of the 1.3 million people who visit the Anne Frank House each year are under the age of 30. "I think it's increasingly important to learn about what happened here during World War II and the Holocaust," he adds. Like many other locals, architect Van Loon fears that Amsterdam, which came in 23rd place on Euromonitor International's report on the Top 100 City Destinations in 2018, is dangerously close to losing its unique allure forever. "The reason tourists come here is because there's something in the character of Amsterdam they love," she explains. "But at a certain point, when the amount of tourists is increasing and increasing, they actually kill what they loved in the first place."