During the height of the pandemic, cities such as Milan and Bergamo were eerily devoid of people, the quiet punctuated by frequent ambulance sirens. In the past few days, residents here have been remarking on a return of that dreaded sound. The memories are still too fresh.For a while, things felt as though they’d almost returned to normal in Milan. Over the summer no one was in town anyway, decamping to the beaches of Sardinia and Sicily. Remarkably, when cases surged in France and Spain, it seemed as though Italy had escaped the worst – people were even kissing each other at aperitivo and going out for meals in restaurants. But this month everything has started to head in the wrong direction. On Tuesday alone the country registered more than 17,000 new cases – more than 5,000 of them in Milan’s Lombardy region.