Month: January 2013

When we were children, parents and tutors tought a simple lesson: do not look at other people mail.
It was a basic message, easy to understand: everyone has right to some privacy and intruding in other people life is not good.
These days, publishing in the newspaper telephone conversations among two persons seems normal. Furthermore, newspapers sell it as good journalism, as if searching in the garbage needed high professionalism.
I think that everybody as a right to privacy. I am not against judges examining telephone communications (or mail) when this is justified, but this does not allow exposing those words on the pages of a newspaper.
This is not journalism, is voyeurism.

My first jacket was part of a gray suit my parents bought for me in Potenza, probably on sales. I was about 10-12 years old and remember it with fondness.  It probably did include even a waistcoat with buttons, as peasants’ Sunday dress.

Indeed, the first jacket I purchased myself was a yellowish corduroy one, found at Latina second hand market and paid 2.500 lire, as far as I may recall.

Afterwards, I had another similar jacket that I still keep in Roma.  I was planning to give it to my nephew, but he grew up before I could pass it to him.

For a long period I kept buying second hand clothing, in markets or at a little shop next to Via 20 Settembre (but that seemed to me already a luxury). 

Reacting to winter inconveniences, I used stitching a button on the back of the collar, in order to be able to protect my chest (I always suffered of sore throat).

I bought my first new jacket on the occasion of my first regular job, when the President of that small organisation mentioned that my recently acquired position would have requested a more appropriate outfit.  I decided anyway to wait for my first salary (paid quite a long time after starting) before investing in fashion.  This model was grey, with little lines in colours; not bad but not exciting either.

Jackets are my preferred piece of clothing; fortunately enough, given that since that first job I am almost obliged to wear one of them.  Together with a tie (but this is another story…).

As bad as I can criticise national weaknesses and flaws, I still am an Italian, sharing with my fellow countrymen those same limits as well as the many strengths.
Living abroad, I don’t suffer for the distance, and when coming back I am stricken first from the many things not working properly than from the evident beauty and richness of this country.
Fact is that the positive factors seem stemming from nature, climate and ancient culture and history, while the shortcomings are a straight product of ours, contemporary inhabitants.
Probably this kind of extreme self-criticism is part of the problem.  We seem to be more ready to complain about our own faults than to contribute to their overcoming.
Italy for me is the language, the food, the history.  And, probably first of all, the genius represented by Giulio Cesare, Leonardo, Michelangelo but also Armani, Rivera, Caruso, Pertini and probably Al Capone.
And Italy is the landscape, so varied and intense, made of natural forces and human labour: a Pino Loricato, the Colosseo, Tuscany countryside, Positano, Venezia, Dolomiti Mountains.
Giorgio Gaber states in one song: I don’t feel as to be an Italian, but by fortune, or by force, I am one.

thanks to http://noizkrew.deviantart.com/art/Italian-Flag-158235515

A nice specimen of melo annurco, I would have liked to let it grow as much as it could, but it would have been too difficult to get the fruits, afterwards.