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

– Jago Noja

(…) as you’d know Milano is under a white gray sky and the streets are Christmas lightened up and wet of peeing rains. The angry faces of the citizens know no repose. Clothes are forgotten hanging out of the windowsills. The radio says that an ATM conductor talking on the phone run over and killed in Via Procaccini a woman crossing the street. The woman was young. I wonder whom the conductor was speaking to? Instantly I think: a woman who was pestering him or whom was pestered by him.
It’s all about the living, any thing visible on earth, except maybe certain portions of art. The world disgusts and never satiates. The speaker of Radio 3 rants about soundtracks and says ‘indemuddforlovv’ and must be turned off. I think about death but it doesn’t help me to live more intensely because I can’t believe it it’s all here even though I repeat it every morning. Etcetera.

But the best of Taranto’s life is outdoor, at the wharfs, between the old bulwark and Mare Piccolo, Little Sea. It’s one of the liveliest places of southern Italy, and I could not compare it with any other. It seems to be illustrating an oriental tale, one of those where fishes talk and precious rings pops up. Possibly because the goods are exposed and sold according to the old ways, there is here a communion between the port, the yelling folks and the depths of the sea. Seafood, oysters, mussels, dates, nuts squirting water, real walnuts from which is sticking out a strip of coral, and the fishes, rock-fishes, flatfishes, sea breams, other tapering fishes, emerald green with ruby-colored blazes and with a popular name which cannot be repeated, get humanized, become individuals, take on precious lights and colors… This small oriental harbor, this population of fishes and clams, it’s one of my best Italian memories. And so, by and large, is the memory of Taranto, terse and light sea town, so much that walking into it seems like breathing in time with the music.

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

The thing about the Italian food is that it used to be an excuse to be creative and to represent oneself. When the sea is sterile and the cities are turned into garages, the creativity isn’t but an excuse to sell something to eat. And when everyone is convinced to be finally rich, it’s the most irreparable sign of poverty disclosing itself.

And by the way, what about Afghanistan? Our very self-satisfied Foreign minister stated that Italy’s military presence in Afghanistan “must be maintained”, because after all,“it’s not a military mission” (whatever you say, minister).

So Prodi is pulling out of Iraq, but has no intentions to pull out of Afghanistan. They get away with such nonsense because — like everywhere else — people here consider the Iraq war the ‘wrong’ one, and the Afghan war the ‘right’ one, the one really motivated by terrorism and so on.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. In Afghanistan heroin production is soaring like hell, Talibans are on the rise, Osama is nowhere to be found (and by the way Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are much more involved in international terrorism schemes) and more importantly, conditions of democracy aren’t anywhere in sight.
As with Iran, the main reasons for this war seem to be those meant to keep the Russian influence out of the area.

It seems to be that the great game is still on the table, or whatever else we should call it (shitty game?).
I suggest the captivating and exhaustive book by the same name (in Italian, “Il Grande Gioco“) to those interested in understanding something of this very very old shitty matter.

So it comes down to finally, all the Italian soldiers coming back home from Iraq. 32 of them died in action since 2003, with 7 other Italian civilians (journalists and other agents).
39 is a little figure compared to what the Iraqi people suffered (in the order of half million people killed since 2003), so it’s fair to say that we are, as a nation, coming out quite unscathed by this ‘mission’.

Considered how unjust this war was in the first place, based on lies and motivated by greediness and imperialism; considered how the ‘peaceful’ mission of the Italian army consisted basically in garrisoning the prospect of two million barrels in Nassyriha in the name not of our democratic constitution but of ENI, the Italian energy agency, it really was about time to put an end to this shame.

But the shame does not end here, obviously. It never ends. Who will now defend the Italian interests there? What sort of deal ENI is striking and with whom? Mercenaries? Foreign armies? Local mafia? Terrorist groups?
And what about the Italian constitution which states at the Article 11:

Italy repudiates war as an instrument offending the liberty of the peoples and as a means for settling international disputes; it agrees to limitations of sovereignty where they are necessary to allow for a legal system of peace and justice between nations, provided the principle of reciprocity is guaranteed.

I mean, why are we getting out of Iraq now? Because our leaders said that the war was ‘wrong’, because we never managed or even tried to favor a ‘legal system of peace and justice’ there.
And who is going to pay for the mistake? Who bypassed our boring old constitution?

I bet the politicians who voted for this war are convinced that the price has been paid already, by those 39 fellow citizens and so they’re even. I wish they were wrong — although they are right of course.

¹ you can’t be away from home without having your falling country still falling in the background. Either this tragic truth comes with you wherever you go or its consequences expect you when you come back.

² whoever you talk to will try to discourage you. Whether they are slow-food-organic farmers, hotel-agriturismo-pensione managers, restaurant-bar tenders or plants nursery technicians they’ll tell you how escaping to the countryside won’t save you from getting strangled by bureaucracy and the stupidity of the apparatus. All the contrary. And everybody will sing the same song, which goes:
we fight everyday against one hundred seventy thousand laws and rules
we succumb to china because our sclerotic state is a sinking ship of fools

me: “It’s amazing how, with the corrupted apparatus of the communist system on its shoulders, the Chinese manages to engage in new industrial or commercial activities better than we do. I guess their average bureaucrat is easier to bribe”
the hotel manager: “On the contrary, I bet they are less corrupted. I believe it’s all in the seven thousand people a year they send to death. We should learn from them.”
me: “…”
the hotel manager: “don’t get me wrong, I believe in democracy. But we just shouldn’t misuse it.”
me: “right. We really must be going now. Nice hotel and everything.”

³ sex in foreign beds can be better, if it keeps the imagination going. Especially when you are charged with the unsound Italian prices (cf. “unsound methods”, Heart of darkness). This fuels the customer/whore fantasy when you’re still climbing the stairs to your room.

Coming out of the fog after Cesena it’s like coming to see again, the sun a white white disc behind the haze. Now I see everything, every little detail. The items attached to the tarpaulin of the trucks, the tricolored rectangular reflectors and the bands of flat rope waving in the air pushed forward. I see the exit signs and the farms near the freeway, the dark gray of the renewed concrete below the white stripes and the quarters of driver’s faces squinting in the new light, and it’s all here, Italy on the wheels. I relax my back leaning on the seat. There’s nothing else to see. The radio says Berlusconi fainted and I am sorry for him. And it always seems so stupid to drive.

Roccaraso in the darkness seems to be about it. There’s that air of the villages in the wrong season, empty streets and closed stores by the childish names. I walk in the desert of vacant spaces and abandoned activities, dark before six PM Here the air is clean and cold and the heavens are filled with layers and layers of stars.

The perfumery called “love potion” disguises itself in the void of a prestigious lane disappearing where the lights are off. There’s smell of burning wood in the air all around the town, and the fragrance of damp leaves coming down from the forests.
In front of bar del corso few idle and talk against the yellow light of the tall lamps. All the faces in the conic glare appear to be friendly, warm, lonely. All the voices here have the musical sweet sound of Campania and I adore this dialect, especially coming from the throats of women, resounding with sensual consonants and motherly vocals.

I walk up to the first woods where a trail goes deep into the mystery of Abruzzo but my sight is too bad. I’m unlike my cousin who sees perfectly in the dark like a bat.
I get back and slope down to a restaurant on the other side of the town, where I am the sole customer.
Certain of doing me a favor, as I sit at the table the lady in charge raises the volume of the music above my ears. It’s the usual southern pop Italian music going, and once again I marvel at how much certain Italian pop songs seem to be really singing the stupidity of love. Without figuring it out though.
At the other occupied table the owner’s family is dining too. I must be early. There’s a little girl, 5 years old, drawing in her book instead of eating. She asks to her very attractive teenager sister what color should the sea be filled with. She proposes purple, but the attractive teenager replays, “the sea is blue”.
Yeah, I remember. That’s how it begins, the mortification of imagination imposed by scholarship.

On the walls of the restaurant I watch myself in the mirror. My hair are long to my shoulder, my beard is thick. My shoulders come down like my father’s. I make an effort of eating upright, and slowly, because I feel observed. It’s always so when I eat alone at the restaurant and suddenly my looks aren’t in the local norm.

The moaning pop songs go on above my head protesting love and nothing else. Boy it’s so sad to think that it is impossible to find a single restaurant in the whole peninsula where you are allowed to have your meal without any music in the background, and nobody even noticing.
The radio says it will be a lucky year for my sign, and I feel the benevolent ray of Jupiter making people smile in my direction, as I smile back. But it’s an illusion. I am old enough and years are short enough and I envision already the day when Jupiter will leave, and all the lost occasions will run after him like happy little dogs left behind.

I try to draw in the notebook the face of the attractive teenager. Luckily I’m no good in rendering the resemblances because she notices.

I think of all those who know me and don’t know that I am sitting here, in the village of Abruzzo where none of us ever came. Italy keeps falling and sometimes it seems it cannot be used up, consumed or spent. And I love and hate her just the same.

How’s your life in the middle of this silence?
“Different every day. It’s like being at the control tower of the airport: deadly dull at certain moments, terrifying at others. Sometimes the ship is filled with fishes, sometimes you look for your wedding ring at the bottom of the ocean, sometimes the wind blows so strong that it almost rips apart the skin of your face, sometimes you sip your lemonade at the edge of the swimming pool. Sometimes you party, some other times there’s famine: in the middle nothing. Sometimes, as we Americans say, it rains dogs and cats, sometimes even bulls, cows and mice. And some other times my life floats on a petal of lily.”

(Tom Waits, interview with La Repubblica. Reversed translation by italyisfalling.com)

Of the bastards, the brawlers and the bawlers, none is the perfect or more accomplished one: they all are bizarre creatures, ignorant of the world of which they grasp the sole part life has assigned to them. That’s why all their voices are small as little stones, colored in the inside and smart enough to travel their way like bullet rounds scattered in the widest yard. Or something like that.

Coming down I entered a tavern. The green air, reflected by the sun-wrought forests, invaded the bare little room; precious was the wine on the bar, precious the basket of bread on the floor wherein the eggs glittered. In a corner a little girl, with a red dress, had a greenish-pink maybug on her shoulder. I warned her; the little girl raised her arm, showed me a white thread disguised between her fingers. Tied with one leg to that thread, the bug was her toy. She took it from her garment, and dangled it like the pendulum of a dowser. This little country woman, character of a picture more than a human being, playing with a gem-colored bug, remains in my memory. On the beginning of our journey to Umbria, I see her as a sign of its alarming grace.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by italyisfalling.com)

My father told me once, in a rare moment of intimacy, that when he was a kid he used to tie threads to the legs of green maybugs to play with them. They flown and walked tied to the thread, for days. It was in the fifties, in Naples.)

Apparently some reactions to the story of the possible 2006 election fraud in Italy: justice is investigatiing, the parliamentarians are fighting over it, and Berlusconi is accusing the communists. Everything is OK.
What will actually happen? Nothing, of course, nobody is kidding here.