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What you see here has nothing to do with
the place where we are.
We close our eyes, we can only imagine.
Places may coincide with memories, this means everywhere, always, but
here it's special, anything but universal.
We stop in front of what had to be the entrance of a summer camp, the
place where for decades childrens of modest families went to stay at least
for one month, in summer, by the sea.
Of all that was, of thousands of little souls on vacation, remains only
stones twigs, scarps, and the silence, the sound of the sea.
What we see here has nothing to do with the place where we are.
These long corridors are cold, now it isn't summer, a pale light come
from the sea through the broken windows, almost everything has been stopped
since the last smooky bus took away the last parish group. Who know when?
Who know why...
Today, all the children of parents I know go on holidays with their parents,
small or really cool holiday together, as it should be.
A few years ago, almost all the italian children spent part of their summer
holidays with their peers, staying away from home for some time, it was
a shock and a joy.
They came in these places, someone crying lack of his mother, then the
last day crying because they did not want to go home.
Also the first innocent, visceral loves were born in these large establishment,
where boys and girls slept strictly separated in dormitories.
The days were scheduled by the rhythms of the Catholic religion: prayers
in the morning, before eating, toward evening, songs and activities were
in the name of Christ and I've always hated having to stop playing for
pray.
But that was, and so many of us grew up this way.
What
I see here today has nothing to do with the place where I am.
Today these buildings provide shelter for the street vendors, during the
summer they sell their things on the beaches.
Then, the sound of those little hearts form the sixties, the seventies,
from the eighties is mixed with the words i don't know: Senegalese, Moroccans,
Nigerians, clandestines, their scared, lonely, tired, exhausted heartbeat,
and if I at last open my eyes, I understand what place I am.
Over this broken window, the sea.
Bushes grown in the sun and rain, without any rule of Christm, without
the rhythm of the nuns, a large snake standing looking at me, then takes
refuge in the rotten boards of the ground.
Nature, this ingenious machine, that's all comes back to her, because
all came from her.
What
I see here today has something to do with the place where I am.
Antonio, Gianni, Laura, Maria, who are you? where did you go?
Do you remember this place?
Someone wrote with his fingers: "we were here too".
Then, I'm not alone standing hearing to their heartbeat, and the sound
of the sea that takes everything away.
We change our habits, the old pay phone becomes a delicious peace of "modern
art", and it is likely that this abandoned, vandalized area will
be more suited to our today's tastes: villas!
So, I do my part, I take some small pictures and I close my eyes listening
to the sea.
It is clouded, a thin rain mixed with salt falling all over me.
No soul is quite alive here to our hectic everyday life - shame.
Our everyday life, that loses history this way.
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