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If you want to understand why Northern Italy ended up the first western epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, this is the place to start https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-chinese-workers-who-assemble-designer-bags-in-tuscany
A geographic clarification is in order: this article focuses on Tuscany, whereas the Italian outbreak was centered in Lombardy, to the North. But: the labor conditions, with lots of Chinese “guest workers,” ALSO exists in Lombardy (as well as many other places across Italy).
One representation of this was in Robert Saviano’s GOMORRAH, which describes similar (horrific) conditions for Chinese workers in sweatshops around Naples https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/12/crime.mafia
If you want an academic analysis of the Chinese worker presence in Lombardy, here you go https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JEC-11-2015-0052/full/html?skipTracking=true
According to Italy’s official statistics agency, the Italian City with the most Chinese is... Milan — the epicenter of the outbreak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown,_Milan
