Hey there, hey there…
It feels like everything is so damn far from here.


I’m laying in a double bed alone in the loft room of a huge house in Carrara, that’s right, where f***ing Michelangelo used to get all his whity-smoothy-crunchy (aeow) marble stone… and if I look a bit more towards the North, I can see the gulf where Percy Bysse Shelley died, and the beach where Lord Byron and Mary found his dead body.

I have windows on every side and nothing to do, except the fact that if I wasn’t too terrified to stay in this place, I should, in theory, try to sleep some hours.

From one window I see a hill with all the olive trees burnt down years ago in a fire which left just black skeletons and raw rock, from another I can see the mountains with the small medieval villages clinging to the tops lost in the woods and the massive white walls of the marble quarries… one shows me the alley with the cypresses and the vineyard on the side, another one shows me the town sleeping in the valley, reaching for the sea.
I don’t see it now, ‘cause it’s dark and everything looks the same, but I’m sure it is there somewhere, as it was this morning, when I woke up. Maybe that’s what I should think about, that even if I don’t see things in the night, even if every corner of this side of planet is drenched in silence, whispers and heavy breaths, things are actually the same as they are in daylight, so I shouldn’t fear the unknown.

I think it’s something around here in this room. I think this house is vibrating with souls that don’t want to leave it. I feel it in my bones.
I heard them walking around tonight and tapping on my bed the night before.

The only night I managed to sleep some hours it’s been yesterday, ‘cause I was so damn tired since I’ve been walking all day around Florence, dribbling the fruit-coloured-shirts- tourists and their micro cameras trying to get a picture of the fake David in Piazza della Signoria… I hate Firenze… I understand why people wants to go there but at the same time I wonder what are they getting from it.

I bet for them is just like going to Disneyland for grownups… lets go and see a Giambologna, lets go and stare at the Brunelleschi dome ‘cause, hey man, I read it on the brochure I found on the plane.
I hate crowds. Yesterday I wanted to kill myself when I got to Ponte Vecchio.
All I wanted was just to get alive to Palazzo Pitti and get in the bloody gardens to see what I went there for… and there I discovered some news… getting in Palazzo Pitti now is no longer as it was last time I’ve been in Florence… now its like checking in for an international flight. And plus: you have to pay to get in the gardens !!!

I remember when people used to tell me stories about how great it was to skip school and hide at the Boboli gardens… just stay there and play soccer, lay behind the Italian-cut hedges with your boyfriends and girlfriends, climb the trees (and get a stone thrown to your ass by the guardians) , or simply read a book under the oaks listening to the sound of water gushing from the triton fountains.
Florence is no longer for Florence people. Its like a huge theme park , and so it’s whole Tuscany, with its little stone walls in the countryside, with the hills and the trees, with the villas and the vineyards, with Middle ages and Renaissance peeping from every corner… I felt raped when I got back home.

But at least I managed to rest.

Tonight is different… I know I have to wake up early since tomorrow I’m going visiting the Lazio region, far from Rome though, I’m going to the Etrurian tombs in Tuscania, but especially to Bomarzo with the regal garden and park and the mouth-shaped caves… that’ll be fun.
I remember my set-building teacher showed us some pictures of a Mozart’s “Magic Flute” representation they had at LaScala theatre, where he had to recreate one of these caves on the stage.
This will be the first time I’ll see them for real.
I’m trying to think about something else, since sleeping it’s impossible.
I can hear the clock ticking from the bathroom (I had to put it there ‘cause the sound as torturing me and I’m not able to turn it off)… I feel tension in the air. Someone doesn’t want me here, and I don’t want them here for sure, but, hey, this is not my house.

I should think about the sea that I saw this morning out of my window and what kind of joy it gave me to know it was there.
I wonder where the hell did my cat go…