Covid 2020: The surreal 'hugging room' in a care home

In November 2020, one Italian care home created a ingenious solution to Covid's isolation: a "hugging room" where people could safely embrace through a plastic screen.

As the Covid-19 pandemic dragged on int the final months of 2020, care home operators tried to find ways for their residents to keep in touch with loved ones.

In many countries, residential homes had been put under special measures, as elderly people were more vulnerable to infection. In Italy, the disease had raced through the north of the country in the first months of 2020 and claimed hundreds of lives among those in care.

The result was a new epidemic of isolation. Giving people tablets and smartphones to do video calls was one solution, but virtual meetings could not compare to in-person contact. But how could this be done in a way that kept the residents safe from Covid-19?

In November 2020, one Italian care home came up with a novel idea: a "hugging room".

The Domenico Sartor nursing home in Castelfranco Veneto in northern Italy decided to build a room where visitors could hug or embrace their relatives through a special screen of plastic sheeting – one which would keep the residents safe from infection but allow them some physical contact with people they had not touched in nearly a year.

Italian photographer Max Cavallari, based in nearby Bologna, heard about the initiative from local media and thought it would make for compelling photographs.

Cavallari did not have any relatives in care homes, but was aware of how easily the virus could be transmitted to other people. "I was working in Bologna as a journalist. I was visiting so many hospitals and so many sensitive places that I wasn't brave enough to come back home and visit my parents," he says. "I'm pretty young, so I wasn't worried so much about myself, but I was worried that I could be a transmitter for Covid. I remember that I visited them just once in my car."

Cavallari was working for Ansa, the main news agency in Italy, and told the care home's management he wanted to cover the "hugging room" for the agency. "The place was super nice. It was a very bright room with lots of windows, no walls, just glass all around. And I remember that they put these tables that sat in this huge plastic wrap," he says.

Cavallari says that he had been watching the dystopian TV series Black Mirror during Covid-19, and that despite the brightness the room looked like something that might have featured in the show. "But it was nice, it was a solution… we didn't know when this Covid thing would finish."

"I interviewed some people, and it was the first time that they saw their mother or father for nine months. And you know, even if you have a layer between you and your parents, you can touch them. You can really see them, even if it's under a cover… You could really feel the emotions."

According to Cavallari, the owners were proud of their innovation, but not boastful. "It didn't feel like, 'We'll became famous, we are the best,'" he explains. "It was something more emotional, like, 'We have to find a solution.' And this was not the solution, but it was something."

Cavallari says there was a common thread among the people he spoke to about the experience – they all remarked on being able to feel the warmth of their loved ones through the plastic sheeting, which had arm holes so that people could embrace each other in safety. Each of them remarked on "the warmth, the feeling, the temperature", he recalls.