Un giorno di guerra

The time of reality is only one day, because reality is given only one chance, and it is a day of war: the war that the living fight from birth to stay alive, the historical wars of yesterday and today, the war of choices and emotional relationships. From this real time, limited and incessantly dialectical, and in particular from the conflict between object and gaze, poetry is also born. In the section Rome 1944 / 2024, the dwarf Elia from Piazza Armenia, killed by mistake by anti-aircraft fire, is invented, as is the little girl who meets the partisan in Via Rasella. The partisan, on the other hand, really existed: he was Rosario Bentivegna, the courageous perpetrator of the anti-German action that took place in that street on 23 March 1944. The expression “ibn sharmuta”, which recurs in the poem Soldati, is the ultimate insult in the Arab world (“son of a whore”). Other obvious allusions to contemporary reality scattered throughout the book can be easily picked up by the reader.