Once upon a time, Cesare had a fishing boat, the jewel in the crown of Sestri Levante. Lean and yet rounded, just like a good-looking, juicy woman. Teak planking, light blue flooring.
There he launched it, in a heart-rending morning. In Sestri Levante, delicate and unmistakably shaped masterpiece. A bittersweet memory of Segeste and her thin hips, a mermaid from a distant time and yet still present. Still today we can hear her wiggling in petrified anxiety and tragic love, heartbeat and desperation, with her eager longing for the sea which was always hers and always will be. Unbearable conviction and imprisonment, and yet love, dream, vocation.
A modern traveller might absent-mindedly say that she put on some weight, judging by those proudly curvy hips of hers. And yet, out of generosity or lazy tolerance, they would then turn a blind eye on it.
But, believe me, this has little or nothing to do with the awful protrusions covering the land far-removed from Segeste’s tragic heart, unimaginable, horrible wasteland made up of dreadful, ever multiplying and intertwining fragments of tasteless, impersonal towns, debris of human abomination identical to any other kind of debris, similar to all the other bits and pieces of towns, to each and everyone of us ever ferociously unknown and hostile – such atrocity might have undoubtedly hurt us, just like an infection would do. But it never belonged to Sestri, not a single inhabitant of Sestri ever perceived it as anything but an unfamiliar, sick lie, being this a feeling catching fire to protect something within ourselves and within the old soul of Segeste. And yet it was us (and this is the biggest fault and shame I secretly hold in my heart, which makes me shed heart-felt tears and blush, me!, a man who never shed a tear, who never blushed), not the blurry, neutral time, but us, brutal, immoral heirs worn away by time passing by, who blindly insulted and indecently outraged her with our irreparable stupidity. But this was never just about outrage.