“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

I’m experiencing absurdly long loading times on this blog. Every page seem to be hanging for tens of seconds before showing every post. I don’t know why. If you are experiencing it too, my apologies. My hosting service is not answering my emails. They’re probably got drowsy waiting for my blog to load.

**update. They’re actually very kind. They say they are experiencing no problems. So I must be dreaming, which is the story of my life.
Is anyone of you noticing loading problems on the page? Like, around ten seconds for each post?

**update. It seems like it was a plugin causing it all. Well at least I wasn’t dreaming.

There were yellow flowers on the table we had prepared for breakfast. There was sunflower honey in a large jar –very bright near the surface and dark at the bottom. There was goat butter by the salted taste, green tea, american coffee. There was greek yogurt in a white container by the strange blue characters, and muesli and warm bread and the orange juice that I had squeezed and wholemeal biscuits. The spring was windy and mild, the terrace was pervaded by the scent of jasmine flowers coming from the rambling plants. We were sitting at the white and blue table that I had recently painted and shined clean. We were only interrupted by the flapping of wings of the pigeons moving between the roofs above. Everything seemed good and hopeful.

“we are lucky”, I remember saying.
“hm-hm”, Libi quickly answered , looking into the yogurt, as if she was conceding it. A sparrow defecated on the terrace.

why was she conceding it? I still surprise myself asking to myself, almost two years later.

Fortified with a small tower, marked in solitude by two tufts of palms standing out of the inside courtyard exceeding the roof, some beautiful, of Arabic kind: such are the houses where landholders resort, only for short periods, for the vintage or the sowing. Many don’t bring the families with them anymore. From the simple dinettes, among unpretentious 19th-century furniture, between servants or peasants turned into servants, seems to be emanating a patriarchal affability like there was one in Veneto half a century ago. One senses though that the Idyll is treacherous… There’s a great ambiguity that could be defined double sincerity, caused by belonging to two masters¹ at the same time: You witness the ritual effusions between the peasant and the master, like they were father and son. Right after that, the master drops his voice so that the peasant does not hear what he has to tell you.
If you pass in the morning, the peasants meet you joyously; one thinks: “here people leaves like in the ancient times.” But if you pass at night, in the hours of bad encounters, nobody recognizes you anymore; women look down or sideways and they cover their faces to say that they haven’t seen anyone if they were to be called upon to testify. Beneath the patriarchal vest are invincible silences.

(…) This part of Sicily is all a swinging between morose moods and human sufferings and sublime landscapes. Between arabic houses, former feuds, stony grounds and villages of Mafia solitary stands the greek temple of Segesta. With the surrounding nature it makes one of the highest landscapes humanity have. (…)

Sicily, like Greece, puts in chain who wants to watch at it from its human side, and brings instead a great lightness of spirit to whom is content to watch its beauty.

_{1. Two masters: Tradition and Mafia}

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

Compared to today’s, 1953 italian Mafia was a joke. Piovene even imagined, in the optimism of the post-war dreams, that the Mafia was about to disappear, substituted by a more modern partitioning of people: “the deathblow will be the diffusion of political opinions in Sicily. When all Sicilians will be divided according to political beliefs and not according to Mafia groups, the bonds between politics and Mafia will be severed.”
Instead, starting right in those years was of course the contrary process, so that politics could turn themselves entirely into mafia to survive and prosper in the falling country.

— In picture, above: Ralph Steadman, Tempio di Segesta, thanks to the wondrous blog “Il giornale nuovo“

Entirely by chance, only because sometimes I browse for fun search sites to find blogs dealing in english with Italy and Italian topics, I bumped into this. It is a regular touristic blog report, like many. The person who wrote it seem to be a nice, curious traveler, not necessarily conventional. To economize on lunch she makes sandwiches out of hotel breakfasts, just as I do. So the present post, which is going to scrutinize certain wrong impressions Rome left on her, is not *against* her, at all.

Nonetheless, I am fascinated by the totally misleading impressions people get from my country. It’s the undying misunderstanding that Italy is a country where even the ugly has a romantic beautiful reason to be although it makes everyone’s life miserable.

As a disclaimer, I put beforehand that obviously my impressions of foreign countries are probably equally fascinating in their being totally wrong. So, there’s nothing personal here. For me it’s just an occasion to further bash my country, that’s all. I love it when travelers are innocent and when they innocently notice everything that is different, convinced to make discoveries out of the oldest crap, hopefully feeling there must be something behind they don’t grasp.
We should create a website and call it something like editedcommonplaces.com. There we could share and correct our wrong impressions as travelers.

1.alimentary impressions:

“…when I saw the sign saying ‘Spizzico’ I didn’t just dismiss it as crappy fast food… I got a quarter of a margerita pizza – and I mean like a quarter of a very very large pizza… Possibly the most exciting fast food discovery of my life – and I pride myself on being a fast food authority”

Spizzico. The insulting birth and spreading of the Spizzico chain dates back to more than 10 years ago. I remember it. Our amazement in seeing pizzas sold in a fast-food set. Depressing. What must be known of spizzico’s pizzas and alike is that they are considered toxic on a sanitary level after just ~30 minutes they have been served. That’s because they are congealed pieces of half-cooked pasta that pass from below zero to 350 centigrades oven temperature in a jiffy. So not only they are served fast, but they must be consumed fast. Also, they may give the wrong impression of being tasty but their ingredients are an enigma. What kind of cheese decorates them? Certainly not mozzarella. Thus, they are not pizzas and should be avoided without afterthoughts. Even if you’re a fast-food authority.

2.vehicle impressions:

“Their love of scooters, for every one motorbike there must have been 50 vespas… Their love of tiny tiny cars,”

Scooters and tiny cars are not used in Rome because people love them. Scooters are incredibly popular because Rome is not only a gigantic garage, the most crowded garage of Italy, but it is also one of the most congested, disorganized and risky garages in the world. Therefore moving from point A to point B is not fun at all and can go on from minutes to hours out of schedule. To park a vehicle is not fun but the most frustrating and suicidal task ever conceived by human beings. Scooters are not repositories of love, but means of subsistence. They can grant up to two hours more of life each day to their bearers. They are a sign of the end of times and the end of civilization and as that they must be looked at, with horror and respect.

3. archaeological impressions:

“Their inability to destroy any old historical stuff.”

Right. I am not even going into this. Post ends here. Busy sobbing.

Everything was fine yesterday. Awake at three and a half AM– sipping the tea in silence, only the occasional flapping of lips around the hot suckled mix of air and dirty waters.
I put myself at work at the green table in front of the window in the dining room (which is also the other room)– the hour is acceptable, the city asleep in the finally-cold darkness never dark of it. My favorite hour– when the street washers are going back, the orange turret flashing lights singing hi-ho.
Morning arrives, the sky’s odd and unexpected and the chemtrails bright and inclined as if hand printed in the sky. Chimneys are billowing smoke into the exhausted city’s lungs– people appear and disappear at the chilly windowsills. I write and draw and listen to music and everything is fine.

Later I receive four marvelous pairs of socks for my birthday, all stripes, and a compass and a small vase of arbutus wood where to keep the erasers and the sharpener in (I scheme).
It is my birthday but it feel fine, although I expected to feel depressed and lonely –as this usually happens on the occasion.
Later my productive mood isn’t fading, my mother calls (she needs help with the PC but surprisingly remembers the occasion) and anything I want to use seems to be at reach.

Then my sister calls, we talk about a number of things– like she buying a house, and me reassuring her it is a good idea to buy twenty miles from Rome– “you’ll be in the woods!”.
Then I ask about our Christmas reunion.
The Christmas reunion is something that nobody wants really to do except my father, who expects from it I don’t know what– the digest from our separated lives –of which he knows nothing about and at which he looks with a deformed lens, like we were the people we were years ago or never was. As a result, the reunion regularly turns into a series of clumsy efforts to be sincere– followed by an equal number of efforts to hide the truth and avoid pointless criticism. Unwelcomed hypocrisy like a plumber in the house– all sounds sounding fake.

–sister: “I talked with our father and he said that, since you never called him this year, there won’t be any Christmas reunion this time. So I booked to go away with my boyfriend that week and we–”
–me: “What? Wait a fucking minute.”

Shit. Sure I hadn’t heard from my father since when I last called him on his birthday, last February. And everybody knows our relationship is fucked up. And sure, I didn’t think very sympathetically of him lately. And notoriously he never calls or shows interest whatsoever but always expects me to look for him –acting like he is forgotten and misunderstood big time.
And yes I haven’t looked for him lately -although that would be the simplest solution- because every time I hear from him or spend time with him I feel like shit for days. But these are no reasons to bury me under the guilt of screwing his only day of the year.

I tried to explain in the past.
–me (years ago): ‘it’s not that I have something against you. It’s that being with you is something I don’t usually have the energies and the optimism or the indifferent superficiality to do.
–father (years ago): I see, I see.

Oh, father. What does he do with what you give him, be it tears, hugs, self-criticism or good will? He puts it in his big pocket — it is a dime squeezed from life –and do nothing else about it. His major drive in life –desperation for love which in his book has nothing to do with giving something in return. This can be bearable sometimes but these last years evidently wasn’t.

–me: “Thanks a lot sis. Couldn’t you patch things up instead of instantly taking the occasion to jump the reunion without feeling guilty?”
–sister: “I guess I didn’t think about it. Anyway it’s too late because I booked.”
–me: “…couldn’t you say something like, ‘Ico never even dreamed of jumping Christmas, even if you two didn’t call each other I am certain he’d be surprised…’ Couldn’t you? uhu?”

It is too late. Words are hollow. After a while I am almost hysterical and desperate. That’s my sister. Dozens of time I interceded with my mother or father to save her ass and she hasn’t the slightest instinct of solidarity.
But I know it’s not her fault– That’s how my father brought us up. One against the other. Everyone in the family– his wife included– eager to turn the others in for a bit of father’s respect, which after all is a typical Italian family outcome, although ours was more violent or exposed.

–me: now all I should do, all he left me with, is to supposedly call him to humbly apologize for the turning out of things and swearing it wasn’t my intention– that his sacred reunion– it shouldn’t be touched– something like this. Only I can’t do it and besides it is useless, ’cause you won’t be there. Thanks a lot.
–sister: He’s an old man. You just should be more normal with him.

Just an old man. That’s typical.

–me (mad): what, are you prizing on the sense of guilt my father just set up for me to fall into? Besides not all old men are innocent and harmless simply because they’re old, sister. They are just persons and they can be disloyal and dangerous like anyone else.

When I hang up, suddenly I have a bleak day in front of me. In that moment I actually feel the positive energy getting drained out of my hands– I sit at the table and do nothing but cursing and breaking the lead pencil tip and then I get out –knowing I will spend the rest of the day hoping in vain from a call or an email or fucking anything from my father– which naturally won’t come. I love my new socks and I wish birthdays didn’t exist.

There’s something else, therefore, at the origins of pain, which isn’t at all the brutal game of an instrument indifferent to life and for each the same. In truth, this instrument is tighten in a well different way for any of us. And we will never know what in reality is physical pain if we ignore what makes the individual, in a system morphologically identical for all.

(RENÉ LERICHE, La Chirurgie de la Douleur – 1938. Quoted today by Guido Ceronetti on lastampa.it)

At first Libi wasn’t ready for it– she had never tried, she had tried once, it was unbearable pain– This is why now, when I ass-fuck her, I direct her with orders like keep quiet stay still hold it now shut.
Once trying to– I said something like that, in a brusque way, and her body suddenly relaxed and welcomed me. She became silent– swallowed– I smiled and thought: women. My mother would kill me for that smile– but that’s how it went.
I couldn’t see her face and I wondered what was going on with the pain– I pulled her shoulder, her hair but nothing happened. She was resting her cheek against the pillow– her eyes undetectable in a haze of hair and lashes– ‘t was like she was buried in a book– I am a selfish lover and went on.

Does this instinctive masochism have something to do with not feeling guilty and letting go– because– for a second, the body is convinced that there is no way out, no escape from it?
Orders and rough manners, that’s for her– how the pain is suddenly bearable, tidying the room for the arrival of pleasure.
Sometimes I wish I could feel the same when I have sex– not having a way out. The recurring forwarding of moments of exit from the moment –taking decisions– can estrange you– It is more about being an individual than being a male.

So mistreat her, call her names. I know it is like a comment –to the solitude of the bodies that are having sex– tangled together but isolated– like nearby teeth in a mysterious mouth.
The mouth is chewing our feelings putting them together– but the manducating tooth above doesn’t know the first thing of the wave of pain or pleasure passing through –the tooth below.

–In picture, above: when she reads, by italyisfalling.com, 2006

We argued for the second time about that Billy Wilder’s movie “One, Two, Three“. I flatly stated that the movie was sheer propaganda of the cold war. Russian are represented with the usual demeaning stereotype of the illiterate, greedy, corrupt thug. Or as naive idealists easy to buy. Nothing very distant from the representation of Russian people in any other western Hollywoodian movie of the last sixty years at that.
“Let’s imagine they’re not russians, but jews, or black africans,” I argued. “Wouldn’t you be ashamed and disturbed by it?”
“No. It’s a comedy,” she defended, “and well done too.”
“True. I am not saying you couldn’t laugh with it. But There is a comedy which after all starts from the things as they are, even if it ends by overturning reality completely. And a comedy which just destroys reality from the start, without appeal, with commonplaces, burlesque, caricatures. That’s even worse than a serious propaganda movie.”
“I can appreciate any kind of movie for its artistic values regardless the politics or the propaganda involved in it.”
“Me too, mostly”, I said. “But at least let’s take some points away from the valuation we make of it”
“But why?”
“Because it allowed politics into arts!” I said. “It tried to play tricks on us! That’s not good art in my book!”
“Uff, I hate it when you talk politics!”

At the end of this conversation, which could easily apply to the movie ‘Borat’ too, I wondered a little about my relationship with politics.
I am very sensitive to politics. I am not saying I have a great understanding of it, but I know where it can be found, how it operates. I can recognize it even if it’s very well hidden behind different means, pretenses and results.

So what basically happens with politics is that I start talking about it not because I enjoy to, or because I have my idea and I want to be in the arena. I start talking politics simply when I feel attacked by it. When I perceive propaganda hidden behind informations, arts, entertainments. When I perceive aggressive politics against my rights or others’ rights. It’s more a reflex than everything else, and in fact the results are not very brilliant, since I am the first one who gets bored of arguing about politics.

As with the movie “One, Two, Three”, nothing bores me more than seeing a form of art I love prostituted by politics. But what really makes me snap, is to see folks persuaded by it as if the politics or the propaganda were completely absent.

That really puts me in a desperate mood. Because I think there’s always a struggle between arts and politics or religion, and in that moment I see the arts losing the battle.
In fact, Ideas always want to enslave Arts, and Arts always have to find new means to disclose their intentions beyond Ideas. This is always a result obtained with Form, because Ideas are not the essence of Arts. The only essence is Form.

An example? Take any religious picture of a master of the renaissance. No matter what any Scholar of Arts will tell you, the most important thing into it are not the allegories, the subjects or the ideas it conveys. The most important thing instead are the colors, the light, the way surfaces juxtapose, the composition, the design, etc.

Another example? What Kundera said of George Orwell’s novel 1984 (I paraphrase): 1984 is not a good piece of art, not a good novel, because politics dominate the novel and not the other way around. This is true even if you agree with Orwell’s visions and ideas, because it’s a formal problem.
The simple intention of seeing a political idea prevailing in a work of art makes the work of art tinkle, like a bad coin.

Just like the other one, this pope is stupid. He keeps coming out with stuff that has no sense, hollow words only full of the masonic meanings that few initiated can use to recognize each other.
When I lend him an ear, it’s always like I’m hearing elaborated phrases about nothing: “hi ico, didn’t you know it that today the purple hare flew to the castle of dung?”. and I: “sure Ratzi, and the finned ship of pure rotten desire just sunk in the sea of radiators.”
We can convince anyone that we know what we are talking about, since the hare and the radiators are a dogma.

One of the most gigantic idiocies we are forced to listen to over and over it’s the one about the ‘Christian roots’ of Europe.

“Virgin Mary full of grace,” asked the pope, “…be an ever vigilant keeper of Italy and Europe, so that from their ancient Christian roots the populace will be able to get nourishment to build their present and future.” (from AGI)

It’s the old polemic about the European Constitution not mentioning the Christian roots in its preamble. The pope speaks about the Virgin Mary full of grace when in fact he’s speaking about politics, God knows if the Virgin will forgive him.
I’d rather have him going a bit into the details of the virginity of Mary, but that’s what we deserve.

Now, I have nothing against the Christian European tradition. I spent most of my wasted life of student and teacher studying the Italian arts of the Renaissance and the middle ages. I can’t think of anything more beautiful and living among the dead things of this country than an altarpiece painted by Tiziano or Bellini.
If it wasn’t for the restorations (that’s a too painful argument).

What would have been of that long moment of our history without the spiritual milieu that pervaded this land, which is the christian culture? If you go into the Basilica of Frari in Venice, and look and the mentioned Virgin Mary rising in the marvelous Tiziano’s Assumption you must recognize immediately the power of spiritual faith, and the deep connection between the reasons and the energies of those pieces of art and the Christian culture.

That said, this pope is really stupid. There is no such thing as “Christian roots”. And I am not even going into the pagan origins of our culture, from the Greek to the Romans to the dozens of other people and religions that made Europe what it is or what isn’t anymore.

The point is that the History of a continent it is not shaped like a tree or a fungus: it has not the roots at the beginnings and the branches at the end. In fact, what are the beginnings? Where is the end of the branches?

It’s the wrong metaphor.

The History of a continent it’s like a slowed down gurgling tempest, or a noisy hurricane. It certainly comes down from some altitude and ends up smashing things at the bottom end, but that’s about it with the similarities.
It is a sequence of countless contradictory events that only temporarily have the aspect of a path or a growth. And only because humans are small, busy or blind they cannot grasp its entirety, which is probably for good (we have limits)
Didn’t the Romans had the same sensation? After all their tree was taller and their roots deeper.

Tomorrow we will have to hear the stupidity of muslim or jewish roots, or orthodox roots. They’re all the same hollow wrong metaphors to me. Like it wasn’t true that there isn’t a single idea which hasn’t be growing from another idea.
I’m not like Dawkins, I can afford to have a religion in my world. A religion is a poetic idea, sometimes even intense and alarming, or fruitful as the History of Arts can prove. I for once, am not at all sure about the origins of anything and I am open to the suggestions of spirituality.

But the religions of the popes and the churches it’s not about spiritualism. It’s about the privileged politics of determinism, and that’s really depressing. And stupid.

There I am, playing and playing with the interface of this blog… like in a very neurotic game.

I know it is all because, since when I started to write again here, I worried and felt insecure and inhibited all over again. I mean, because of some pretty though things that happened in my life during the months when the blog was closed, I thought I could handle again the thing, like, you know, who cares? Why open a new blog? Why stop writing here?
And because it was already obvious after a week I couldn’t endure to write on a blog solely about politics or social problems, and that the only thing I really wanted to write about was my experience, for limited it could be, I felt rather optimistic about it.

And then suddenly it’s like I can feel all those misunderstanding looks on me again and it kills me.
Oh, I really can’t stand myself sometimes.

But do I have any alternatives? I know the contradiction is all mine. Wanting readers and not wanting them. Putting myself to write and to write sincerely, and also hide.
Everything bad that happens to us can be an occasion to learn something about our limits and weaknesses, I guess, so the reason why I felt I had to come back here writing was basically to solve the contradiction, one way or another. To find the courage to write stuff even with all the misunderstanding looks. After all, maybe that’s the good of blogging. Or maybe it’s the bad, because there seems not to be that long interval wherein you can write not hearing any other voice but yours, before submitting to the world the result. With blogging it’s like there are always other voices.

On the other hand, the voices are anyway in my head. They’re voices of parents, friends, enemies. I make them up all the time and they always inhibited me, even before the Internet existed.

ps. by the way, does someone have a preference between using the sidebar (as in the tradition) or the footer (as in a neater innovation of some blog) for the lists of index links? I just cannot decide. Push me in one direction there and I’ll be grateful.

There isn’t a day going by that we don’t read on the news about some Italian citizen somewhere in the world being kidnapped. The numbers are quite impressive, as this search in Google proves. The cases are countless between 2005 and 2006.
Why this happens? According to the media, they’re all accidental stories from the third world with nothing in common one with the other except the Italian nationality of the victims. They seem to be all criminal acts and not political or terrorist acts: their sole purpose is for the band of kidnappers to make money out of it.
From Venezuela to Nigeria (today), from Afghanistan to Yemen or Palestine, it just so happens that Italians constantly fall in the hands of kidnappers.

The truth of the matter (or, better, my opinion) is that some voice must be circulating among criminal or clandestine organizations today: the Italian government pays good.
Troubled by a scuffling and weakling political oligarchy, insecure on the international scenario, the average Italian government nowadays pays very good money to have its citizens back.
The result? Italian citizens are being kidnapped and released, more and more.

Mind you, it always happened: but now it’s becoming kind of alarming. So let’s ask: how and when this trend began?
Well, apparently it all began in January 2004, when Silvio Berlusconi was prime minister, and in Iraq two Italian girls working as volunteers were kidnapped. Some times after their liberation, someone leaked to the press that the Italian government, down with popularity and in a hurry for some good news, had paid one million dollars for the liberation of two girls. At a certain point Berlusconi even tried to make us believe he had pledged the million dollar from his own pockets. Which is ridiculous because the guy is a notorious closet stingy.

What is paradoxical, is that in Italy a particularly cruel law exists against kidnapping made by local criminal organizations, which ‘freezes’ the money of the family of the kidnapped to discourage exactly what today on an international level is happening, the diffused sensation that kidnapping and Italian citizen is rewarding.

Finally, I believe that this instructive story proves once again that when someone in charge is addicted to popularity, and would do anything to keep it, very often the highest price is paid by everyone else. The post ends here. I’m not very satisfied with it but there you go.