someone argued that a police state isn't very different from another more gentle state. that all the states are equal in being tyrannical in a way or another-- because a wall has two sides, they said, because war and violence are everywhere and were there before, and before the worse got started, another worse was there. they said we always were on the outside of the walls. but today those who are eagerly working for the police states, for the total surveillance, for the liberties washed into the fears-- they don't see how they're putting themselves --and ourselves too-- inside the circle of walls were graffiti aren't allowed.

It was not raining anymore, and we found ourselves in a small uneven square, filled by few parked and running cars and covered by rich-colored, large, political murales. I didn't like them much to be political, but that was the only reason for most of them to be, the reason for Orgosolo to be that political symbol that it had been, emancipated from being just the most famous den of brigands in Sardinia.

Because many of the murales were also not political, I was always looking for them, and happy to spot the picasso-like figures of women, the shepherds with the sheep, the old ladies painted while sewing or waiting sat in front of the houses were they lived, more simple or warmer images of life that could actually be filled by any sort of thoughts you might have in mind walking in front of them.

And as I waited for Libi and Cedda to get an ice cream, a salesgirl inside of a clothing store looked at me, from trough the window, and we smiled at each other. Her eyebrows lifted half annoyed, half cheerful so as to say, "I know you like it, and I am glad you do, but it's no big deal. I'd rather live somewhere else". And so my eyes answered "we all feel that way, so I think I can understand".

Then I turned to look at the square once again. I tried to look at it as it was the zillionest time I was doing it. And true, it was no big deal. The old houses were much more beautiful than the new ones, but everything was marked by an ancient, irremediable poverty. And the political murales, about the Vietnam war, the Gulf war, the fights of the workers, the leaders of the old communist party, the folk singers, the last century thinkers, were just there repeating their message forever and I, for the zillionest time, could not avoid it. It was like the whole weight of the world had collected in this town, for all the indifferent towns to keep on with their lives.

As a salesman later kindly explained to us, everything had started back in the sixties with an advertising graffiti of a clothing store. "You come as a shepherd, you go as a gentleman".
Still the paintings, redrawn over and over when needed, really looked alive. Even with their slogans, or their rhetorical visions, were alive. More than in any museum. Just because folks, unknown to me, were there, asserting them, often repeating the words of famous dead.

Like in that murales that quoted Lev Tolstoj: "All the plans to attenuate the misery of the masses with the charity of the riches are hypocrisy and imposture".
So true, and somehow more poignant drawn on a wall than written on the pages of any book.

It was pouring, a film of brownish water was rolling down from the steep pavement riddled roads, nobody was visible around as we proceeded upward looking for the graffiti at what possibly could be the center of the town.

Orgosolo, in Barbagia, middle of Sardinia, appeared at first as another disfigured italian town, were the need of houses during the seventies and eighties had enlarged and renewed and reshaped the old settlement, turning it into an oversized collection of soulless cement cubic houses, many of which were inhabited unfinished, bricks exposed, waiting for the money and permissions and remits to be completed.

The need of houses was probably over already, but the frenzy of building new modern cheap houses seemed to be the only goal for the people there. This is what happens everywhere in Italy. We didn't expect anything different.

Then approaching the center, through old streets bearing misspelled names, and among old houses, the first paintings appeared and the town looked different.
Many of the houses looked much older, lived through for a longer time, and with much more good taste in mind at the day of their birth; colors around the old stone bricks were beautiful, the murales enchanting, and people was around in the streets, not only men, but also women, and girls chatting and strolling in the Sunday gray light at the side of cars scattered all around.