Town squares across northern Italy are now (relatively) deserted, as quarantine measures and fears about the COVID-19 coronavirus take hold. But time and again in the run-up to the regional elections in Emilia-Romagna at the end of January, the squares were packed with ‘Sardines’, as we mobilised against Matteo Salvini’s campaign to unseat the centre-left governor in a region that has been a left-wing stronghold since the end of the Second World War. One Saturday in December I spent the morning drawing the shape of a sardine onto the back of a flattened cardboard box. I retraced the pencil in thick black pen, and added watercolour from a small portable paintbox. With a wooden stick taped to the body, and the tail articulated by a fold in the cardboard, it would appear to move naturally when it was held overhead later that evening, swaying gently as if the cardboard creature were indeed swimming, moving forward as one of many, a single body in a great shoal.
