Apart from not being able to go because of fever at the birthday party of a classmate Bulgarian in eighth grade, one of the few things I regret Like a nostalgia-not an end in itself-is no doubt that that I lost city of the sixties, the Rome of the "terraces, songs, holidays, parties with disks and whiskey "that Christian De Sica recalls, among other things, in his entertaining autobiography (" Daddy's Son ", however, the reading more enjoyable in recent months - perhaps to be read together with " Brothers of Italy " , to try to reclaim the zeitgeist without taking itself too seriously) and that often arises in conversations with my father and his friends. Like the time, shortly before leaving for Madrid, a lawyer told me that the naturalness with which we now live abroad students go to surprise him, for his generation because Rome was the center of the world, the place where everyone wanted to live, because the world has moved to Rome and everyone in his way, he wanted to Part of that environment ("When I was your age, in the afternoon I went to study Schifano, c'aveva not a penny, we talked, it was a pear, maybe they passed other artists of pop art in Rome, made me see his paintings, and just managed to put together two pounds I brought home a ").
But nostalgia is not just for this mundane environment, cultural and authentically Parioli who came less. And 'that life, at least in Rome, at times there is the idea of \u200b\u200bhaving complicated and it has been vulgarized, has incafonita, we wanted to do contemporary, and there was no reason. Gradually, modern times have killed the illusion, optimism, the joy of discovery, and with them have become anachronistic and no walks in the enchanting center of Sunday morning, reading the newspaper at the cafe, bought the miniature in pastry for lunch on Sunday; stage three in the afternoon aperitif frivolous conversations, all the subcultures. Very simply, you are lost-when-not stigmatized as "expensive habits" bourgeois admirably symbolizes De Sica in "pastarelle Sunday" in a memorable passage from his book, which is worth quoting in full:
" were fun years. [..] you can still feel a bit 'of energy post-war films that Aldo Fabrizi, 'Hey, it's Sunday, there is the chicken!'. Chicken. pastarelle of Italy was the Sunday [..].
an Italy was wonderful. My father took me by buzzing Singer, who was a pastry shop where now there is a jeans shop in Piazza Colonna, driving down Via del Corso. Where there were only, as was the course of a Roman sun flooded Turin, the chocolate , stores and fabric hats, elegant shops. Stuff that rivals Proust.
Today the street is like a souk East, dirty, noisy, forced. Then there was the Chocolate Fiat. It was a very elegant way. My father took me with a wheelchair, went down, bought the "braid" was a sweet bread with candied fruit, a kind of pudding, then brought her home.
When approaching the Christmas mistletoe dad always bought for my mother. They were simple rituals that mark the calendar that Italy. Mistletoe is a word that today does not use any more. Stuck above the door, like the palms for Palm Sunday.
Small propitiatory gestures. Care practices. The pasterelle on Sunday. That good. "
years in which it made sense to read that" the driver, Luciano Neptune, ennoble for Vladimiro called himself ", or an actor and an American writer, the young and the damned (Montgomery Clift and Truman Capote), "were enjoying the ancient Rome, the kids and the paparazzi, the Countess and tricks, afternoons and nights in a sauna, stories Arbasino or refusal to go to a breakfast worldly because" I'm going to Civitavecchia for me, I do un'etruscata, I enjoy it more ... "Today, no one does more to call Vladimir Maybe tone (except for transvestites), American actors and writers spend their days with Veltroni, and the Etruscans are only those that are done with school.
Instead, it would be nice to recover the sense of traditions, rituals, of course. The spirit of the time. I am reminded of the wonderful "Tatranky" of Offlaga Disco Pax:
" And here it is the soul of the eighties Czechoslovakian: happiness and his video of the sun and those who speak of ' Italian love while everything is still in Bohemia, Bohemia while everything is still. But even now there sadness absurd, nobody is having fun, which will be Monday evening, is that people will be cold, it will be that there is no sea in Prague. And then I wonder how long the children will want to watch cartoons Bohemian mole rather than the Americans or Japanese. "
afresh from Sunday, for example, if one day the weather was skinned knees, the ancient ice-cream pastel golf course and adult sitting with the Corriere della Sera in Villa Balestra, Piazza Siena or at the restaurant on the Tiber, now rests on the comforting rituals of post-casualistica futbol: printing sports betting football, sandwiches, the stories of his grandfather, the radio, the Ponte Duca d'Aosta, people from the stadium, the game, the matches, the decay of the second week. More: recover the sense of the city today , find-or create-something that is worth being part without falling into lazy and adolescent repetition-more wax museum of old and vintage-movements of the past, and sending to piss off the "i-generation touch," as my friend calls it a read, because it now has difficulty even press a button. And do not think that you wasted the opportunity of the transition fin-de-siecle to organize a secession.
It would be too easy, and therefore approximate, identify the cause of the malaise in the current crisis. The crisis, in fact, can only do good in this sense. The years of smelling the dissolution of the Viennese Secession, the sixties are the children of Italian post-war period, as well as Movida Madrilena says the same friend-as-is but the "stain to the civil war." Rather is right who says that the point of no return has been sixty-eight. There was incarognito, and a little 'is over, everything, because people started to take themselves too seriously. And despite the ebb of the eighties, the Socialist party, the count of three hundred million sandwiches left by De Hotel Raphael Michelis, optimism has not been back. The "Rome Model", television commercial and pizza in the center did the rest.
De Sica also see it that way, and it is interesting how this vision has also influenced his choices:
"bestial There was an optimism in our country, until '68. Adventurous, picaresque, done. After the years of lead has become a shit all started with complaints, protests, struggles in pain soon turns somber commemoration of the dead, but until that time, Italy was full of confidence. [..] I started doing the magazine, Variety, for a sessantottino by birth as I was, inconceivable experience, something totally against the spirit of politicized time, culture, commitment, choices, capital. What a bore, everything Marx, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara. I preferred the terraces, dances, songs, holidays, holidays with the disks and whiskey. Today it seems not only obvious, but even an unconventional choice. But then, I almost felt ashamed. Yet I am convinced the irony, lightness and light varieties. I was wondering, 'Why do I think myself it's a shit only homologous to the other?'. And so I began to love not only the shortcomings but all of Dad that young people criticized and hated .
The thing that most intrigued me immediately of Spain is his candor, because here there was sixty-eight, and the sixties ye-ye are hours, or were recently finished. The society is still divided into classes that do not hate each other because each has its points of reference to aspire to, the poor do not envy the rich and the rich do not despise the poor because all that really matters-is-as it should be able to sit with friends on the terrace of all life with a beer and a pincho de tortilla, the good guys have a line on one side and wear pastel sweaters ralph lauren, timberland type and wear loafers; those who consider themselves left-wing intellectuals and can afford to do the same things We are ashamed that we have done or have heard they were so immature-to-school assemblies to fifteen years (for instance, he can say when he speaks in tv Jovanotti) homosexuals are only visible coffie machine 
Ietto leading to Walking around the small little dogs Chueca, respectable ladies do not work out in the afternoon and run errands with the jewels, the long hair, makeup, the smiles, the lawyers take their shirts blue with white collars, neckties and loafers with Hermès nappette; Carampane leave the old coat to the waiter at the coffee and tea while waiting for the comment on the service that is no longer what it once was, on Saturday morning, the parents bring their children around the neighborhood, after being strictly identical clothes, and elegant English, and on Sundays you can buy the pasterelle. In Barcelona, \u200b\u200beven you in line for the chicken - as in a film by Aldo Fabrizi.
Ietto leading to Walking around the small little dogs Chueca, respectable ladies do not work out in the afternoon and run errands with the jewels, the long hair, makeup, the smiles, the lawyers take their shirts blue with white collars, neckties and loafers with Hermès nappette; Carampane leave the old coat to the waiter at the coffee and tea while waiting for the comment on the service that is no longer what it once was, on Saturday morning, the parents bring their children around the neighborhood, after being strictly identical clothes, and elegant English, and on Sundays you can buy the pasterelle. In Barcelona, \u200b\u200beven you in line for the chicken - as in a film by Aldo Fabrizi. What I like about Spain is that Pasolini would not be here as a useless, would never become a master of thought, would not be even dead, he worked in an office all his life and today would be just one of many old people who spend their afternoons wandering through the beds of Puerta del Sol and the advances of the board touch the pea blacks.
least, is the tenderness and irony read Arbasino, that Brothers of Italy (published in 1963) you can enjoy (and tell) the best years of Rome and Italy from a privileged perspective (that of Who does not know the future), and can afford to speak to an American friend this reprimand against a fearful side of the Italians, or if you will, against pastarelle Sunday:
" Certainly, the British come in different countries and there are many adventures in even years, without a moan of longing for her grandmother's fettuccine or espresso. [..] The Italians, however, nor ever adventure travel, and even friendships and great loves, great attachments. Nothing at home. Satyricon is really the most that you do not go around on the road, no laughs, no jokes, no broom, it is getting late, you eat only the stuff prepared by their mother only sleep in his bed, and not because it refers not to be male, no one has ever learned on a boat or a tent. Never somewhere else interesting. Only cunning and straight under the house. And behind, only food. If you leave a few feet, now the regret of cookies or the Mago for bedside ... While most Americans in those films naifs where are all so 'butch', almost always unconscious anxiety which is not a meal in the kitchen and coffee bar and 'a person who will never forget: Grandmother' ... .
