English
The book Li mejo autibus (The Best Busses) StreetLib Eds. 2019
This is a collection of 22 travel stories on public transport in and around Rome. They are chronicles of events that actually happened on city buses, on extra-urban buses and on urban trains that circulate every day in and around the capital; facts of which the author was a direct witness. Some of the stories are outlined in a dry and rapid tone, in an almost compendiary style, others are enriched in environmental descriptions and illustration of moods; but almost all of them are marked by a good-natured irony that targets everyone, starting with the narrator himself. However, the playful cut should not be misleading. The amusing is often taken as a pretext to underline serious problems of contemporary society in an epochal moment of historical passage. There are several themes that are analyzed: superficiality, selfishness, carelessness, massification, cultural leveling; but also the dedication and attachment to one's work and to one's community.
In reality there is a more or less flashy alarm that transpires in all the stories or almost: the urgency and the importance of a reappropriation of one's own personality. In fact, we often run the risk of a common leveling; risk conveyed by moods of boredom and self-cancellation "of flock kind", but above all by a strong hammering by the Social. This risk is then favored both by the communication tools in general and by the technical means that we now use from an early age.
There are in fact two transversal and fundamental messages scattered by the author here and there in the book. The first is hidden but emerges from a careful reflection on the contents: the invitation to use public transport also for one's own physical and spiritual well-being. And this is a real call, by SIMONE TARRONE: “Getting behind the wheel of a car is like masking. Let's stop moving like children dressed for carnival inside our toy cars that are nothing more than protective masks under which we feel free to make explicit the worst sides of our self! Let's move with bus, with trains, to realize how our neighbor is, to mirror ourselves and confront ourselves with him, to discover the reality and to come down from that olympus of selfishness that distinguishes us!"
The second message is instead explicit and repeatedly stressed: the danger of unconditional use of the smartphone. Dangerousness on a psychological level, but also on a material level, which is affecting today's society in a way that is so striking that it would be a subject of study for countless scientists in the coming generations (if they will still be there).
The book is currently available both in ebook and paper in the main online book sales websites.
Il Sogno e il gelo (the Dream and the Frost) StreetLib Eds. 2019
The book The Dream and The Frost tells a story of love that is born between two distant people, who live physically separated by hundreds of kilometers. A love fueled daily by the long letters that the two exchange by e-mail, telling each other about their adventures, their problems and their concerns, confiding feelings and opinions, helping each other to overcome moments of crisis. This physical distance helps to create in each of them an image of the other that slips into the illusion. Fantasy creates an imaginary lover with all the features you want in the perfect companion. A castle of dreams and fantasy. A suffered love, lived in the distance and in the separation, considered as causes of suffering and pain. But who is it that imposes this distance? A hierarchy of self-imposed responsibilities that sees as a priority the family bond and respect for parental ties. The attachment, the sense of duty, the feeling of the exchange of maternal love, constitute an invisible wall that opposes to spontaneous fantasies and desires. The story of love, which is born between dreams and illusions, develops into a suffered love, lived in the distance, bound to respect priority responsibilities in a dynamic daily tension. A love of expectation, seen as the promise of a better future, of redemption, of hope. But suddenly, after years of sacrifices, the wall collapses, the doors open and the long-awaited future life seems to be at hand. But, when the two lovers face each other, they make a bewildering discovery. In reality they cannot stand each other, they are strangers, their fairy-tale castle of dreams was just a house of cards and it took only a gust of wind to make it collapse.At this point it is the cold that takes over, which grips and gradually risks reaching the heart. Frost, which is about to dry up and cancel everything, which is about to transform living matter into a solid mineral. Whose fault is it? The consideration of the causes, the instinctive need to re-examine the facts, lead to an internal resolutive confrontation. The fault does not exist, or rather, the truth does not exist. All that has happened is the result of a pure mental construction that was decisive for overcoming difficult moments of existential crisis.The sense of emptiness and despair remains for a promise of the future that has vanished into thin air. But even these feelings are overcome by the capacities of the mind: once again the imagination; dream and memory. The protagonist sinks into the re-enactments of the past. His mind unconsciously develops new creations. Remember and dream: where is reality? Is there a reality? This question arises spontaneously compared to the immensity that surrounds it.
Sometimes, with infinite patience, a life that seems to be destroyed can be recreated to measure and can be cut out so as to live in it comfortably, or at least passably. In how many are we to create ourselves a prison and then live on dreams?
The book is currently available in ebook and paper format in the main online book sales websites.
