The school is at the end of a narrow gray road across a field, hidden in a bunch of ornamental trees of different sizes and colors. A smell of wet grass and soil pervades the air when I walk to it in the morning. I take a tram, the subway, and a bus to get there and it takes an hour and a half. I bring a book to read (these days is "The Deception" by Nicolas Born) during the three hours of commute everyday. The school itself is eight hours and boy I can be tired when I get home. Definitely not accustomed to it.
There was this quote on this blog since its first day, more than two years ago, a quote by Mark Twain that went: "Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for."
It seems funny how in the end I got to sawing wood. I am taught how to use brushcutters, hedgetrimmers, pruners, lawn mowers... luckily there are other major things to study --such as identification of plants, phytopathology, botany, design of gardens etcetera.
They say it is a famous gardening school. I still don't know if it makes any sense this me being there but I think I'm okay with the learning thing. (to be continued)

there was this check from the car's insurance company abandoned in the drawer and I knew I had to wait before to cash it-- with its three damn zeros. Now, wow, it entirely disappeared inside the subscription to what will be my task for the next six months -- going to school. And it didn't even covered the whole crap.
Awake all night... and my mind is fluctuating and dizzy -- my face as if pushing forward around the nose and distracting me-- ideas are made up in an approximate rational state -- occasional terror due to the shape of things to come-- but it is a cool sunny morning out, and one day soon I'll cut my hair again-- and nothing is all right, reasons, methods, conditions, covered portions of the truth in my life-- but che cazzo ci posso fare.

When I go to Milan, to fulfill that town's dream of a cultural centre, you should come. An interesting city. It's huge - and full of very ugly, common, repulsive people.
-- Ingmar Bergman, from The Passion of Anna

that night I slept at Carlo's, after more talking and boasting and drinking and walking around Venice, meeting people in bars, following girls down the calli, ending up us alone and stoned and bitter sitting on the steps of a deconsecrated church turned into a art gallery or a gym and talking about foolish things now forever sunk into a oblivion thicker than the waters of the canals of Venice. And I had that dream sleeping on a pallet on floor, a portion of a dream I still remember, where girls leaned on a table looking at fashion pictures in a magazine, whispering things in the ancient-looking room by a high ceiling but not large (just like a room of a old palace of Venice) and outside of a window, invisible to me in the corner of the dream was the world of the future that I was anxiously about to see but couldn't and couldn't and couldn't until I woke up.
I was in Carlo's garret. Looking up at the backside of the roof, wood and terracotta, atrocious white light entering from a squared hole through a opaque glass pane. Pigeons walking and talking above and not so far, the early boat acoustic signals said it was a foggy day. My disappointed snort for the bad weather. The rattling of the garbage trolleys going up and down the bridges.
I had slept too little, and felt absurdly awake in the sleeping house, bad taste in dry mouth and dizziness-- eyes hurting.
I got out without saying goodbye walking softly amid the snores, the streets were so cold, I could hear the noise made by my steps against the hard pavement stones. The streets were dark to the openings of the skewed squares, wide in comparison and filled with more white light under the low unfriendly sky, quiet, dirty of a nightly high tide now dissolved in a grainy film of stickiness made of guano and salted sea.
I was looking for a bar, at that time I still had the veneration for the italian bars and their stinking coffees and croissants with no imagination, that what Parise so beautifully wrote about, and I think I found one just down the Ponte de Maravegie. It's the bar with the colorful glass panes, not the osteria nor the pastry shop (that lane down the bridge being the typical italian three-bars-in-a-row) and so little room inside against the counter. A radio was certainly playing, but not loudly. The croissants were warm and good, the coffee probably good. Nice the people. I didn't know any better. It felt reinvigorating and so I extended my walk to the aimless route of the fondamenta along Canale della Giudecca (aka fondamenta degli incurabili) once again fantasizing of being Corto Maltese (before my brother robbed me of that fantasy too) or Brodskij (before my russian friend explained it all to me). Enjoying the procrastination of the coming back home, where more rest and the long awaited solitude were.
The humid sadness of the city in the thin fog, its casual beauty appearing and disappearing and morphing, the large unsteady waters of the canal and their uniform color fading out in nothingness, the few, walking the fondamenta like me with their hands well protected in the big pockets of their dark dark dark cappotti, and my eyes still hurting-- the day had begun but without a move, wanting to be admired in its pointlessness, it was quite beautiful to be there and alive.
It was near the end-- one of the last months in Venice, before coming back to Milan. And I thought I had had enough of Venice back then. I didn't know anything.

-- in picture above: waters, venice, etc.

[trying to write a less navel-gazing blog post] ...In my country every government pretends to reform everything and especially the things that should be consistent during the years, because by doing so each government can delude itself and its supporters into the fact that what is being done will last, when in fact nothing the italian governments do lasts except the things that really should be changed.
Be it evidence of this the umpteenth reform of the School system, that this government is enforcing just like all its predecessors. Anyway this isn't exactly what I wanted to write about.
I read that in the new system students in high school start off with formative "debts" that they have to "pay off" before the end of the five years. Yep, that's the metaphor. They have "debts". They come at school and they have "debts". Maybe it's nothing new. Previously they had "credits", I believe. Not that it makes much difference. At the University they still will have "credits" I think.
Well, whoever invented this metaphor is an idiot.
This notion is so sad, and a disgrace to the idea of education: but also is an indicator of what or who really leads this world and its present-day philosophical and material changes. And this is certainly not the political elite (for them it was "votes" to count at school, not "debts", right? To each its own metaphor.).
So who actually leads and rule? And not only in Italy of course, not only in Italy.

Today is May 5th, which is an important day for Italy. Why? Because it marks the death of Napoleon, year 1821, and is also the title of a famous Italian poem.

Napoleon has been a very important figure for Italy because his brief rule over our peninsula meant, for the first time in Italy after the fall of Roman Empire, rules and principles equal for all the cities in it, and some sort of dignity that the French Revolution's principles brought to us. This gave strength to the idea of a unified Italian nation, and its foundation, forty years after Napoleon's death, is certainly one of his merits. Or, demerits, whatever.

Anyway, our national poet and novelist, the reassuring, catholic, milanese, elegant, bookish patriot Alessandro Manzoni, wrote this famous poem about the death of Napoleon and called it "Il cinque Maggio", "The Fifth of May". You can read it here (in Italian).
The poem is unfailingly taught at the elementary or secondary school, and in theory should be learned by heart by any Italian pupil. Obviously very few remember anything of it.

Everybody knows the first verse, though, "Ei fu. Siccome immobile", which means roughly "He passed away. Just like unmovable". Well, "just like unmovable" is explained three verses below, when his unmovable corpse is paralleled with the "astounded land" that remains still like a dead corpse at the hearing of the news. What happened in our modern language is that the two phrases got linked together in a quite funny tautology that goes like "He passed away, just like unmovable", which obviously doesn't mean a great deal.
Anyway, since the Italian language used in poems and plays in those years is hardly recognizable as a spoken language, nobody can really "feel" a poem like that at the first read now, without making a not easy mental translation into contemporary Italian. Thus the verses are easily forgotten, and, as I said, as in this case very few remember anything after the first verse or so.

That said, "Il 5 Maggio" is still a very important poem, and the reason is very simple: aside of the first verse, other two catching phrases in comprehensible Italian that can be read in the poem are very well alive in our modern language as proverbs, or euphemisms.
"Dall'Alpi alle Piramidi", "From the alps to the Pyramids", is sometimes used to characterize some very long path or distance one covered during a task. And "Ai posteri l'ardua sentenza", "posterity will be the judge of it" is used everywhere there's some doubt about something that can be considered either good or bad.

This is pretty much all that remains alive of a poem that supposedly meant so much for our history given the fact that it's mandatory to learn it at school. I certainly learned many verses of it when they told me to, maybe even them all. But I know I recited them without minding their meaning at all, just like (I suppose, since I am not even baptized) some do with prayers.
Blah-blah-blah, blah-blah.

I wonder if, other that meaning that we don't actually learn anything useful from teachers at school, which is pretty obvious, this means also that the poem is actually not very good, not meant to last, because its language is too literary and abstract.
Actually, I found only a couple of verses I'd save, throwing all the rest away for posterity, you know, closed into some cupboard.

how many times, at the silent
dying of a inert day,
he stayed, (...)
his arm folded at his breast

it's the only moment in the poem when you can actually picture something in your imagination, other than ideas, and something "to see", to walk into, is all I ask to literature. End of the post.

-- in picture, above: mr. Napoleon