On 9 March 2020, the government of Italy under Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte imposed a national lockdown or quarantine, restricting the movement of the population except for necessity, work, and health circumstances, in response to the growing pandemic of COVID-19 in the country. Additional lockdown restrictions mandated the temporary closure of non-essential shops and businesses. This followed a restriction announced on the previous day which affected sixteen million people in the whole region of Lombardy and in fourteen largely-neighbouring provinces in Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Piedmont and Marche, and prior to that a smaller-scale lockdown of ten municipalities in the province of Lodi and one in the province of Padua that had begun in late February.

Corriere della Sera is an Italian daily newspaper published in Milan with an average circulation of 246,278 copies in May 2023. First published on 5 March 1876, Corriere della Sera is one of Italy's oldest newspapers and is Italy's most read newspaper. Its masthead has remained unchanged since its first edition in 1876. It reached a circulation of over 1 million under editor and co-owner Luigi Albertini between 1900 and 1925. He was a strong opponent of socialism, clericalism, and Giovanni Giolitti, who was willing to compromise with those forces during his time as prime minister of Italy. Albertini's opposition to the Italian fascist regime forced the other co-owners to oust him in 1925.