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.

The lockdown measures, despite being widely approved by the public opinion, were also described as the largest suppression of constitutional rights in the history of the republic. Nevertheless, Article 16 of the Constitution states that travel restrictions may be established by law for reasons of health or security.

Italy was the first country to enact a COVID-19 lockdown nationwide; many countries would introduce similar measures in subsequent months the COVID-19 pandemic spread globally.

Following the outbreak of COVID-19, the Italian government confirmed the country's first cases of the disease on 30 January 2020, when the virus was detected in two Chinese tourists visiting Italy. A third case was confirmed on 7 February, with the patient being an Italian man evacuated from Wuhan. The number of confirmed cases increased on 21 February, when sixteen people in Lombardy and Veneto were confirmed to be infected. Following the first two deaths of people with the virus, several towns in Lombardy were placed on lockdown due to the large number of infected patients in the region.

The first lockdown began around 21 February 2020, covering ten municipalities of the province of Lodi in Lombardy and one in the province of Padua in Veneto, and affecting around 50,000 people. In the most affected town of Codogno (pop. 16,000), police cars blocked roads into and out of the quarantined area and erected barriers. The quarantined "red zone" (zona rossa) was initially enforced by police and Carabinieri, and by 27 February it was reported that 400 policemen were enforcing it with 35 checkpoints. The lockdown was initially meant to last until 6 March. While residents were permitted to leave their homes with supplies such as food and medicine being allowed to enter, attending school or going to workplaces was not allowed, and public gatherings were prohibited. Train services also bypassed the region.

Early on Sunday 8 March 2020, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced the expansion of the quarantine zone to cover much of northern Italy, affecting over sixteen million people, restricting travel from, to or within the affected areas, banning funerals and cultural events, and requiring people to keep at least one metre of distance from one another in public locations such as restaurants, churches and supermarkets. Conte later clarified in a press conference that the decree was not an "absolute ban", and that people would still be able to use trains and planes to and from the region for "proven work needs, emergencies, or health reasons". Additionally, tourists from outside were still permitted to leave the area.

Restaurants and cafes were permitted to open, but operations were limited to between 6:00 and 18:00, while many other public locations such as gyms, nightclubs, museums and swimming pools were closed altogether. Businesses were ordered to implement "smart working processes" to permit their employees to work from home. The decree, in effect until 3 April, additionally cancelled any leave for medical workers, and allowed the government to impose fines or up to three months' jail for people caught leaving or entering the affected zone without permission. The decree also implemented restrictions on public gatherings elsewhere across Italy. With this decree, the initial "Red Zone" was also abolished (though the municipalities were still within the quarantined area).

The lockdown measures implemented by Italy was considered the most radical measure implemented against the outbreak outside of the lockdown measures implemented in China. At the time of the decree, over 5,800 cases of coronavirus had been confirmed in Italy, with 233 dead. A draft of the decree had been leaked to the media late on Saturday night before it went into effect and was published by Corriere della Sera, resulting in panic within the to-be-quarantined areas and prompting reactions from politicians in the region. La Repubblica reported that hundreds of people in Milan rushed out to leave the city on the last trains on Saturday night, as a part of a rush in general to leave the expanded red zone. La Repubblica later reported that this was an exaggeration and that, through an analysis of telephone cells, less than 1,000 people had left Milan for the southern regions during 7 March; by comparison, on 23 February, about 9,000 people left Milan for the south. However, within hours of the decree being signed, media outlets reported that relatively little had changed, with trains and planes still operating to and from the region, and restaurants and cafes operating normally. The BBC reported that some flights to Milan continued on 8 March, though several were cancelled. New guidelines for the coronavirus had assigned the responsibility of deciding whether to suspend flights to local judiciaries.