Page 25 - Milano Periferia

THAT WORLD

The outskirts, as a metaphor of the "indefinite" and the "vague" (to use
the two famous expressions of Leopardi) applied to the town, a living body
which, while growing, slows down in its volume and space, almost
worn out with its too feverish centripetal turgidity, evoke in my mind -
perhaps because I belong to the mid-war generation - a world not depri-
ved of some aesthetic pleasure in catching poetical allusions, but immedia-
tely brought back again to a historical frame, to an ideological significance.

The suburban somewhat rarefied and decadent poetry, reminiscent of Pre-
vert’s poems or, as regards the colours, of the pictures of Montmartre and
Utrillo’s small houses, looking like wavering wings on closed timeless
streets, or on alleys full of the shoutings of the boys of "Pal Street",
ever-recurring reading, - I tenderly remember you, fair-haired Nemecsek
coming out of your board-columned Scee doors to meet Mirmidons diffe-
rent from those sung by Chio's blind poet - fills up, as soon as I linger
over it, careful not to be attacked by lonely and haunting nostalgia, with a
"cultural reality", once well characterised with typical and returning fea-
tures, as well as with a milieu perfectly consistent in its slow osmosis bet-
ween the outside and the inside, nature and town, dialect and society, tra-
des and people.

I hope the readers, especially the youth with a rational and sociological
turn of mind, will not object if I, only for one moment, dwell upon those
boundaries which marked a sort of pause in the urbanistic advancement,
a break-the-ranks in the houses already bordering with the meadows, the
trees or the steaming duck-scoured canals. Never definitely settled, those
boundaries gave a certain dimension to the spirit, not yet disturbed by
psychological shocks; they offered a pretext for unusual experiences, as
though the "suburban" were to embody the mysterious area of repressed
feelings, which, through it, found a way out with a ringing of almost
joyous freedom.

It was not a mere escape from the circle where one daily dies; it was as
filling oneself with new blood, snatching from life a more acute taste,
releasing its dialectics, and at the same time, breathing an unusual air
made more vivid by the feeling of detachment and passing-away.

No longer mother’s darlings, in the warmth of the cosy rooms with the
familiar coming and going in close-up corners. Away at last! Away, to
meet stray dogs along nameless roads under fiery suns or run by long
lonely shadows, the dark inns full of the songs, the smells and sweats of
hodmen and craftsmen, the bowers spread over bowling alleys where
players silently chiselled their games amid the swearings and jokes of the
lookers-on, the orchards secluded by hedges or fences, the red-brick farm-
steads with big open doors and yards as large as parade-grounds, scrat-
ched by fowl and pigs, between the silo towers and the high-galleried
hay-lofts; and then, not to speak of anything else, the horizon streaked