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BRINGING THE PANDEMIC HOME: MEMES AS LOCAL POLITICS AT TIMES OF GLOBAL
 CRISIS

It was late February 2020 when part of Northern Italy entered the
 first Covid-19 lockdown of the West. While stories of people fleeing quarantined areas soon
 made national headlines, the international news was suddenly reporting of coronavirus
 patients connected to Italy all around the world. Against this background, Italian social
 media started thriving with Covid-19 humour. On 9 March the lockdown turned nationwide and
 became one of the strictest in Europe. By focusing on Covid-19 memes of quarantined Italy,
 this article explores the local - and mundane - appropriation of memetic practices, in both
 its cultural and political dimensions. We combined digital methods and netnographic
 techniques to generate and analyse a dataset of Covid-19 Twitter memes produced by Italian
 publics during the first national lockdown. This allowed us to follow the circulation - and
 evolution - of memetic practices, explore how cultural fabric contributed to different
 dimensions of meme production and categorise the emergence of political expression. Our
 findings show that Italian pandemic memes had a primarily affective function fed by past and
 present pop culture, local or sub-local stereotypes and popular public debates. Where
 political expression did emerge, it was never particularly innovative or new because it was
 there to mark previously established communal belonging driven by populist narratives more
 than to initiate contentious practices. Ultimately, this work suggests that memetic
 practices can highly intertwine with the geographically or linguistically local and point to
 the need for contextual approaches able to enhance our understanding of digital practices as
 shaped by local publics.