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.

One thing about beauty is that it can't be planned. Or at least it shouldn't. What I believe happens, is that beauty comes about despite planning, and more often than not, beauty is in the unplanned accumulation of elements that are not meant to be essentially beautiful as much as they are meant to be useful and used. So is for elegance, and for writing (words about things and not the other way around), and so is for architecture.
Venice is the perfect example, the product of a sort of irrational individualistic development, never planned, where structures like the houses for the Arsenale's workers, the churches of the monastic orders, the street markets, the palaces for the aristocracy all stand next to each other, in a sort of awesome conversation that nobody saw coming or wanted to happen in the first place.
And so obviously is for New York, whose beauty is really in the palimpsest of growing and decaying and renovating and reusing and reinventing that made the colors and the solid forms of this incredible urban island. And I know that every word about the city is trivial and has been said already so many times.

I am into its changing light today, the confused feelings of a guilty morning in my steps getting back to the hostel, thoughts of wrong doing and unrelated worries, the day of the reading closer and closer, not prepared, not deserving, not prepared. I am amazed by all the roofs and the tanks against the moving clouds, and by the faces and bodies of the people walking with me. We drive the trucks and we wash the windows and we sing into the iPods and we bite the bagels and we drag the dogs away and we swear, we are humanity, and we don't have a clue, that's what we are. Beauty isn't there for a reason and into this unasked answer is all I ever wanted anyway.

I first met Rulla in Venice, on a day of exams. We were both waiting to give one of the many at the department of fine arts. She used to wear certain kinky tigerish glasses back then and always a black short skirt, obviously her long curly straw-yellow venetian hair were all about her. She was fun and carefree and lighthearted. I was already this grave boy but more sociable back then. I think we fell for each other, life was about to give us a great passion... we ended up moving together in a little apartment in St. Polo where we lived for almost three years, although the real passion was alive for the first six months at most, before we even moved in together.
Later the passion developed into something different, equally intense but totally self-destructing and perverse and crazy. There were fights, objects thrown, threats, cheating, promises, cries, fake suicide, slaps in the face, reconciliations, kinky stuff and more cries and resentments and self-destructing choices. We were always broke and always behind with the exams and always sad and unsatisfied and stupefied by all the unhappiness. It dates to those times the insane habit I grew to bury myself into the computer to overcome my sadness and the feeling of being out of place.

I finally got the job at the university of Milan and left Venice, because of Rulla-- and I knew the city wasn't going to be a place for me anymore.
As often happens with the wrong habits me and Rulla never really completely moved on... we sort of kept in touch in the following years. Mostly it was her calling me, and since I was --like her, but in a different way-- badly wounded by our story and weary and selfish, sometimes I ignored her calls, worried to get more of her cries and reprimands and desperation.
But we never really let go the thing. The sexual attraction never really faded, and instead placed itself into a particularly scary and sometimes attractive place inside our minds. For a while we also had moments of getting together to fuck every now and then-- as sometimes happens.

Then strangely all the mistakes and the things never told faded into the past and left nothing but the pipes and wires of some sort of edifice we once had had and that was now nowhere to be found, like a razed construction site, footprints of the old structure squashed and deformed in the dirt by the following plans, as we loved and re-loved other bodies, and our bodies were loved, declaring different things with similar words and tones, making new errors and choices above the old ones.

Recently me and Rulla started to hear from each other more frequently. Now one can call the other, normal day, and we just talk about our lives. I learned to listen to her without being scared or self righteous as I used to and I finally saw, how strong and brave and generous she had been during her difficult years. How in different ways we both managed to overcome the worst aspects of our characters, and all the craziness that we experienced when we were together and afterwards. I came to feel that it really had been one of those unique things in life to witness, this twisted path we had jointly followed and separately.

Today Rulla called and said she was pregnant of her boyfriend, with whom she has been living for a year or so. Because of some surgery she had to undergo in the past the news were two times shocking, and the minute she said "I'm pregnant" I wanted so badly to hug her and make her feel how happy I was for her, how great it was and it was going to be, so much that I felt my eyes on the verge of tears. I mean, I think it was sheer happiness for her --I still can feel it right now as I write, if I only think about it-- although I can't rule out other kinds of feelings I might have felt (maybe I stupidly wanted her to hug me too).
The more evident of these feelings could be that our paths are really separating now. Our two lives are going to be growing so differently and on not contagious levels now. This is "right", and inevitable and this rightfulness is what makes it sad on a certain level, I guess.
Also, many of the women I have been with and loved are becoming mothers, so much that I am becoming an expert on the matter. But I am a man, and I can't be a mother no matter what I do. This is no little thing. It is one of the many way life actually has to tell you that your gender not always works for you. At most I could become I lousy father, and the only time I got close to that, with Libi, it was hell at first and then unbearable pain and later on only a memory hard to swallow.

Libi... she came home that I was still talking with Rulla on the phone. She found me in the bathroom sitting on the edge of the tub rambling about names and silly fears. Later me and Libi got to the mall and I told her about Rulla and after a while Libi said she had nausea all day. I thought it was ridiculous. I hoped life wasn't going to be that ridiculous. Or maybe I didn't hoped, I just wondered if.

years ago, when I lived as a student in a microscopic studio apartment in Venice, I had for a while a very strong Milan Kundera phase. It had started a little before I camped in Venice for the first time, but it just grew exponentially when I left the last shared apartment and began living by myself.
It went on for few years, during which I read and re-read everything from him, always finding his books amazingly perfect for me and for how I wanted my life to be (what a sucker).

There was this half-hidden sottoportego near my house: a short underpass cutting through that multi-centenarian complex of buildings and coming out to the Tana canal behind Arsenale.
I used to pass from that underpass every so often, so one day I took out one of my keys and carved a wall of the sottoportego with the writing you see above here ("W Kundera" means "long live Kundera", "go Kundera" or something).
It was a polemic gesture probably, or I just wanted to enjoy the effect of seeing such a writing with all the pro-soccer-teams writings and against-lame-people writings and stupid-political writings and other tags that passing by I had to decipher.
Afterwards, for the rest of the time I lived in that apartment, to see that small writing down in the sottoportego among the others always gave me a little pleasure.

I was in Venice a couple of weeks ago, and I passed through that same sottoportego again and I don't know about the other writings, which ones were the new and which still the old ones, but my pro-kundera writing was still there as the picture shows, even though my trip for him had long ended.
Honestly to see it there didn't really gave me any pleasure, only a feeling of tenderness and slight dizziness for the person I was, someone who is now so unknown and lost to me almost as that other guy or girl who on another given day under the shades of the same sottoportego wrote I love you Franco.

Venice. In San Pantalon a seagull is yelling as it lands on an eaves of an house near the bridge. Soon as it settles the yell is morphed by the gull into a sort of meowing lament, so strikingly similar to that of a cat that an old man, crossing the bridge ahead of me, mumbles "here, kitty kitty" by himself. On the other side of the small campo another seagull has started meowing the same way now, apparently answering to the first one.

A little boy and his father enter the picture crossing the bridge, directed to school.
"what's that!" says the boy.
"A seagull, mona", answers the dad.
"what's he doing!"
"He's just bragging that this is his territory and all", explains the dad. All the documentaries are working. "They do this with their voice all the time", he says.

Down the bridge we enter the large campo Santa Margherita. Few market stands are setting up their display of foods here, the air smells like chimney smoke and is damp-- above the gray gray sky is rugged and broken.
Behind our backs the church bells of San Pantalon start blaring, and halfway to the other side of the Campo, the bells of Carmini start blaring too, very loudly.
I don't know if the little kid is ever going to ask his dad what's that, even thought it is, not metaphorically but literally, exactly what the seagulls were doing.

I pass the italian border in the early evening, surprised to see how Italy looks good and well-kept after all the eastern urban landscapes, even the richest ones. The first railways stations look old and burdened with a rich, intriguing past. When I get off the train in Mestre, though, in the hope to find a connection that isn't there, the inexplicable dirtiness of everything, pavements, seats, windows, wastebaskets, lines; the loud noise of the city traffic; the triviality and violent indifference of the people: it all suggests me what I was missing from the train window. Italy is always a bluff.

So, anyway, no good connection at this hour, I jump on the first train to Venice from Mestre, to do once again that good ol' 10 minutes ride. I'll have to find an accommodation in Venice, something I obviously never did during the years I lived there, and it feels weird and wrong. A sad sign of my having lost contact with the city.
But it's incredibly easy, I must say, to just step into a two stars decent hotel near the station of Venice and get me a cheap room with bathroom, with a window on a narrow calle from where venetian voices come. It's the cheapest hotel of the entire trip, actually, which is kind of stunning.

How much I love this town, I can't say. Tonight the sky is all starry, as very often happens here, the streets are filled with tourists, the air is windy and pleasurable. Clusters of italians outside the bars are watching the championship match, and later I will find them partying in the streets, where improvised musical ensembles play loudly. Venetians, sometimes so boring or rude, seem magnificent tonight, in their being always the same, a little greedy, a little absent minded, full of life and pride. Doing business, making jokes, wandering about, alluring tourists into restaurants, they always have that air of knowing better and caring less. I never actually liked them, with their sing-song accent, a little childish, their women always angry at something and disappointed. But it's good to respect them, tolerate them and being accepted by them. This is a small city, it's one of the most beautiful and incredible city in the world, it's a rotting-down museum, and people still live in it, collecting garbage and selling fruits from the boats as they did for centuries.
I feel at home in this city. Maybe it's because of all the tourists, because they don't know. I wish this was a homecoming and the rambling was ending here tonight.

I take all the shortcuts to St. Marco square. I want to see the basin and hear once again the foolish orchestras playing. I take an actual round of the city, passing the Accademia, Santa Margherita square and some of the other places where students meet at night. I drink glasses of wine here and there, eating the so tasty venetian tramezzini. I look at the girls, all of them. I sit on one of the benches in San Polo square, near where I lived once. I lay down on it because of the starry night and I remember many things I don't want to remember tonight, not in detail. They just show their faces in my mind for a while, their old smell and that air of having irreparably happened.

I just lay there for a while, looking at all the endless variety of human figures strolling the streets of this city, glowing in the yellow light of the shop windows. I think at some of the people I've looked at around during this trip.

The fifty years old woman who picked flowers from the beds in front of Budapest Keleti station, making a bundle with them in a piece of colored paper she had with her; Always at Keleti station, the guy endlessly singing his song with a guitar and a powerful, moving voice, unconcerned of all the drunks fighting and arguing around him, as the swallows flew by over people's heads crying their high calls, above the open grave of the metro station; The old crazy lady dragging two armchairs down the streets in Budapest, stuck against the obstacle of a high curb, whom I helped out, without a word, while she kept thanking me, with the word I couldn't recognize yet; The bookshop in the center of Budapest where a hungarian writer was presenting his latest book, and as I stopped to look at his back on the other side of the shop window, everyone among his group of listeners looked at me until he turned to see who it was; The young B. whom I met on the train from Trieste, and who relieved me out of my dark thoughts like a random, casual angel, and with whom I talked of loves, delusions, dreams and accidents (I lost your email, B.! Write me!).

And together with the people, during the trip were the birds, the many trees, and all the memorable smells that won the smell of cars and cement, like heavenly gifts, like the smell of fishes and vegetables at that indoor market in Budapest.
I haven't taken a single picture or a single sample from all of this, and as I lay on the bench in St. Polo square I know that all the souvenirs in my mind will be fading soon as if sunk in a big sea, or in the Venice lagoon, and that I will be able to get hold of just bits of it, as it must be. But that's the way I like it. I think the rambling really ended tonight, after all.