TEAM

TEAM

Jun 28, 2025 | STORIES

The 2025 Bisarca Competition by Il Perdilibri has come to an end.

You know by now that the Bisarca Competition has become a pleasant tradition.

The theme chosen this year is water. 

I recommend you don’t miss the short stories: Silvia of Come cerchi nell’acqua, Luisa of Words and Music and Stories, Massimo of Orearovescio, Francesca of Tersite,  Camu of Due chiacchiere. 

The winner was Luca Manganelli’s short story: L’orologiaio (The Watchmaker), which tells of a very peculiar workshop.

And then there’s my Team 🙂

Incoming call for colleague already on the phone, hello, good afternoon, busy at the moment, can I help?

Voice-over and also a bit out of place: no no, come through, I’ll take it.

I is a charged mixture of verbal robustness and self-referential intensity. She likes everything she wants to follow to have her signature, so much so that she reconsiders the concept of marking territory.

Peculiar spectacles around a face stingy with smiles, black curls and that sort of eccentricity that oscillates between strictly trousers and mercifully never a suit.

Temperament expressed in colour combinations accompanied by flashy necklaces.

The curiosity to give an explanation to every single detail embedded in the nazi-grammar uniform, heavy with further various titles or further various titles, whatever.

Can I help and I have been working in the same office for two years of ups and downs, nervousness and biscuits, tension and self-learning.

At the top, but not quite at the helm, a determined good-humoured woman has arrived to counterbalance I, starting with the jaunty brown forelock that starts the downplay already from the look.

Determined is as prepared as she is competent, as friendly as she is skilful, as sober as she is contemporary.

Every day is Monday, every day the same dynamics repeat themselves as in a cyclic chain of relaunch manias, every day the roulette of the unexpected stops on problems, red or black, even or odd, big or small.

I and Determined never cross paths, they proceed like parallel tracks, chasing each other in bravura like horses on a merry-go-round.

I is maniacally habitual.

Determined improvises according to the situation.

I is fuelled by an inexhaustible vein of nastiness and pulverises.

Determined is at peace with all and contains.

Today’s Monday is taking a more critical turn than usual, the ball is spinning out of control: the incoming call is not in Italian.

I progressively flares up, sketches, rectifies, fails to understand, gets so fired up that she releases a burning smell.

Determined appears sparkling, even elegantly without mumbling, but the risks associated with the criticality of the moment lead her to overheat.

She offers the first response, which falls into the void like an arrow shot into the sea.

And still she overheats.

She proposes the second answer, which falls into the void like a feather escaped from a pillow.

And still she overheats.

She proposes the third response, which falls into the void like a plea for peace.

Determined is in danger of exploding.

I and Determined have forgotten Can I help.

Can I help is never the protagonist, her work is almost permanently out of the spotlight, but she is part of the team.

Can I help knows languages.

Can I help is like that element that nobody ever considers.

You can have the best blend in the world and the top of the range moka, but you cannot make coffee without water.

THE GIRLS’ FACTORY

THE GIRLS’ FACTORY

Apr 26, 2025 | BOOKS

The Girls’ Factory by Ilaria Rossetti published by Bompiani: take note of this title, I recommend it.

I am again grateful to Monica: I read it thanks to her and I enjoyed it very much.

The Girls’ Factory stems from the author’s research into work-related deaths, but it is much more.

It is a historical fact that has literally been erased, it is the description of places that I recognise as familiar, and it also is a proof for the theory of the six degrees of separation.

But above all, it is a very well-written book.

My compliments to Ilaria Rossetti.

The Girls’ Factory was established in Bollate, during the First World War, to meet the need for weapons, bombs and munition to supply the front.

That is why ‘the girls:’ the only remaining workforce, particularly suited for their small hands.

You know I don’t like to reveal too much, but I would like to emphasise the importance of spreading the story of people who were used and then wiped out because the war machine could not stop, then and now.

It even goes so far as to raze it to the ground, leaving only furrows in the earth and in the hearts of those who lived, waiting for the memory to die out along with the lives of those who knew the facts.

That is why it is so important that we keep going on telling this and all equally uncomfortable stories.

The first was a storyteller of excellence: none other than Ernest Hemingway, whom fate brought from America to Castellazzo di Bollate in the wake of the factory explosion, recounted in the famous The first forty-nine stories. 

All that remains on the site, completely overgrown by trees, is an electrical cabin with a very impressive mural. 

La Fabbrica delle Ragazze

Other characters in the book take the reader to Milan, following the route of the Seveso river, painting a journey through nature and time.

Have you ever heard stories of grandparents  your own or ‘acquired’?
Grandparents can become everybody’s grannies after all, am I wrong?

Is there a story to be handed down even in the place where you live?

NON-DEMOCRATIC DWARF TALES

NON-DEMOCRATIC DWARF TALES

Dec 7, 2024 | BOOKS

The last reading I owe to Mary’s Handbook is Andrea Francavilla’s Non-Democratic Dwarf Tales.

The short stories are dwarfed in terms of length but the author’s ability to evoke situations and contexts in the space of a few words by building characters through their dialogues immediately emerges.

The short stories are not democratic, how would you personally interpret this definition?

The author mentions a friend in the acknowledgments for this very title.

These Non-Democratic Dwarf Tales have a common denominator: a rainy night.

I don’t know about you, when I think of the words ‘night’ and ‘rain’ I immediately think of the very famous phrase from the film The Crow: It can’t rain all the time.

For me it’s like a kind of mantra in difficult times.

Do you like the rain? 
Do you like to go out when it rains ?

The book’s protagonists are what one might call a repertoire of varied humanity and well represent hardship, frailties, mistakes, doubts, imperfections, and all the varied facets of the difficulties of living.

My compliments to the author on how he has come full circle.

Non-Democratic Dwarf Tales is a first work but I hope we will soon be able to read more by Andrea Francavilla.

In his bio he says he is convinced that behind every problem lies an opportunity and I personally have only to learn.

TELL ME A STORY

TELL ME A STORY

Oct 19, 2024 | STORIES

Raccontami una storia – Tell me a story is an initiative by Maria Guidi, La tana di Aloiz  and Sandra Giannetto. 

Raccontami una storia is a game that consists of writing a story following certain directions and a theme.

The theme of the second edition: ‘drawing inspiration from a painting!’

I suggest you follow the organisers to discover interviews with the three winners.

Then, if you feel like it, you can read my story: 

Even this morning, I am watching the sun rise beyond the skeleton of the building opposite: since the soft orangey pink has begun to contrast with the grey illuminating the sky and hope, I don’t want to miss the colours because they are proof that it is not over yet.

I thought I would never see them again, I thought my punishment for not having exploded yet was to become a useless part of a single inexorable leaden gloom.

I regret that I was unable to count the days accurately, that I succumbed to confusion, that I did not even take care of my memory.

Had I done so, I might now know how much time had passed.

But I didn’t want to think any more, I just wanted it all to end. Each new day was just another skipped meal, another interminable darkness strewn with anguish, another series of exhausting yet unsuccessful efforts in search of an impossible solution.

Instead, the light has begun to mark time again and I now believe it, it is not just a dream, nor a coincidence, nor even my illusion: the sun still exists.

One enemy lurks, however: fear.

I have not been hit, I have not been crushed, I have not been asphyxiated, and I have even managed to hide from the incursions of the human jackals, but I still cannot free myself from the grip that presses on my brain and paralyses me.

I tell myself it makes no sense.

Then I relive everything.

The gigantic ball igniting the sky and suddenly bouncing upwards, and immediately the shockwave.

A macabre, accelerated domino that shatters everything.

Without my eyes having time to see, the heat was already on me.

Pain is not food.

But I must eat more of it if I am to find real nourishment.

And then Frances is at the end of her tether, and I want to do everything I can, just as she did from the moment she dragged me by weight into the cistern until she taught me how to climb down the shaft to the warehouse.

She held the rope and sang U2 to give me courage

You’r in the mud
In the maze of her imagination
You love this town
Even if that doesn’t ring true…

The first time I wanted it to stop but I didn’t dare shout it out for fear that some of the marauding Huns would hear me. Yet if it hadn’t been for those sung words ‘sky falls, you feel like … it’s a beautiful day …’ I wouldn’t have been able to find enough strength to climb back up.

The more things I could carry, the longer I could rest in hiding again.

And to think that on the various occasions when I had more or less tried, I had never managed to climb up a rope: my hands burned within minutes and the non-existent muscles in my arms didn’t even pretend to contract.

Survival.

A huge challenge to overcome in order to stay alive, even when staying alive seems like the worst of ideas.

Adrenaline, instinct, terror, mixing in a closed circle of pulsations bouncing between heart and brain at uncontrollable speed.

Survival.

Force that becomes flesh split between two heads: hope and despair. Like a Cerberus whose paws rest on the breath with all their agonising weight.

Survival.

Thinking that there can never be anything worse until existence turns into waiting.

Waiting for respite, waiting for food, waiting for mercy. Waiting for a miracle, for help, for a new day.

Like today.

The painting is Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) by William Turner.

THE LAST RIDE

THE LAST RIDE

Jun 15, 2024 | AWARD, STORIES

The Last Ride is the title of my story for the Bisarca 2024 competition organised by Il Perdilibri. 

I have already told you about the Bisarca  competition in past editions: but I quote directly: what do you win? The satisfaction of participation and eventual victory.

I would therefore like to take this opportunity to thank Il Perdilibri for hosting The Last Ride.

Habit is regarded as addiction, but asking questions is also a habit.

Eleonora, however, is not in the habit of doubting her schedule, starting with the alarm clock: for which there are three repetitions before getting up, every day, regardless of tiredness, weather, hunger, or stress level.

After that everything is calculated, including the delay, a luxury offered to her by an anonymous traveller.

A group sub-habit is created among the usual commuters: a kind of unwritten code according to which, occasional invaders aside, seats are occupied according to a kind of hierarchy acquired over time.

Eleonora remembers the day when the man with whom she shares the seat beckoned to her: ‘as of today the seat is free’ were the only words other than good morning and good day, which they exchanged over a period of what may be a thousand days now.

Eleonora arrives at six forty-three minutes, sure to find the seat reserved by her travelling companion, who, as always, rests his briefcase on the window side until she reaches him.

All she knows about him is that he travels daily to Milan, that he perpetually listens to something on his earphones, that he prefers classic, good-quality clothes in shades of grey, and that he uses a perfume with Vetiver as the base note.

Every morning they exchange a single good morning each, Eleonora sits down, takes the book out of her bag and starts reading. In these thousand days she will have read a hundred books, all in strict silence until she arrives at Porta Garibaldi, when her travelling companion wishes her a good day before gettinf off, leaving her for her ritual minutes during which she waits for the crowd to thin out.

If you want, you can find the rest here. 

But first tell me: what would be the last ride for you?

There are many examples: books, movies, on a personal level though, does your first instinct lead you to think of last in a positive or negative way?

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