Giuseppe Verdi, the country’s passionate national composer, put it best when he said: “You may have the universe if I may have Italy.” Having lived in five other European countries, I can personally attest to the fact that Italians remain uniquely adept at the art of living life.

The pre-eminent 19th-century American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau had a thing for the regenerative power of swamps. As he put it: “A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.”

Who better than the sublime author of “The Plague,” the existentialist writer Albert Camus, to sum up this dreadful, awful year? As he put it in the conclusion of his masterpiece: “All that man could win in the game of plague and life was knowledge and memory.”