I was born in Cagliari, in 1970, the legendary year of the championship, but I grew up in Rome, a yellow-red-blue heart. My mother is Sardinian even though she was born in Brescia, my father was born in Torre Annunziata, even though he fled to Rome, to chase my mother. He was a professor and had erased all traces of his accent, to teach in the best Italian possible. But he resurrected the dialect every Sunday morning to call his brothers and sisters.
I am Roman even though I was born on the Island. My mother was the last of five children, and she had me late: so my maternal grandfather, Erminio (who died at 96) was born in 1887, and he told me about when he saw some crazy people, on the Giara plateau, who claimed to learn to fly. My father’s mother, on the other hand, like in a play by Edoardo, was a foundling who had been adopted, an almost unbelievable fact for the time, by a family of fallen nobility. My paternal grandfather, on the other hand, was registered at the registry office with the curious name of “Felicio” (instead of “Felice”) due to an error by the municipal official. My father, lost in a philological frenzy, wanted to pass on the name and the typo, but fortunately my mother opposed it. The onomastic inheritance, unfortunately for him, went to the first cousin who came after me (but we still call him Felice). Grandpa Felicio died very young of a broken heart, and so Dad found himself the head of the family of eight other siblings at the age of twenty, and a large inheritance of debts to survive for the next thirty.
The first neighborhood of my life was Monteverde, bourgeois and carefree. Then, a family cataclysm parachuted us to the extreme outskirts, to Cinecittà Est, a Martian neighborhood where I had a little room with life on a high-voltage pylon – bzzzz before falling asleep, every night – and the ring road. I went to school downtown, every day, by Metro. And I fought with the old ladies, at the terminus, to find a seat. For this reason, every day for ten years I read for half an hour on the way there and back: practically an internship that the rich kids in the center couldn’t take advantage of. To get to the Anagnina subway I crossed a mud meadow that in the winter became a lagoon: when it rained you could spend a quarter of an hour wiping the mud off your tank soles on the steps of the subway.
And then I was like a Cinderella who at 11:30 pm saw her last carriage leave to go home. After that time there was only one night bus from Termini which made “We Children from Zoo Station” look like a Disney theme park. After that, I ran across the lawn in the pitch dark like a madman, I confess, because I couldn’t see anything and I was shitting myself with fear. When I came back from bed my mother asked: “Did you pass by the lawn!?”. And I said: “Nooooh….”. In the morning when she woke up she went to check the soles of her shoes and it was a mess (but all internships have a price, in life)…
