I grew up in a small village. The region where I was raised it the flattest of the whole country, with almost 60% of its surface covered by flatlands. It is also a region with a very poor history, a past of emigration and relatively recent and fast economic growth. These last two factors, if you are any familiar with the history of economy, would lead you to understand how its population is like. People living in the countryside are still very connected to an agriculture environment though of the proper rural habitat not so much is left. The territory has been devoured by the last 50 years industrial development and it looks like a mixture of small enterprises popping out like mushrooms in the middle of soy and corn fields. Every small town owns its own church, or even a sanctuary or tiny pilgrimage sites (yes, I am not exaggerating). So try to picture it: a person who was born and raised in a rural habitat, catholic but recently and quickly got rich. This is the kind of people I grew up amongst. When I was a child, before the internet revolution but at the beginning of the videogames era, a kid’s life was only built upon home, school and church. There was no social life disconnected to any of these three pillars. I will skip the whole it’s-oh-so-hard-to-grow-up-gay-in-the-fucking-nowhere because it’s something old, or I will probably just postpone it, to another time. Since I was the second boy born in my family all the manly attentions and expectations went on my brother. It’s probably the only thing I should be grateful to him for. My second-born status spared me the experience of facing football training and a sporty life, which only arrived too late when my body was grey and bony enough to feel awkward and unattractive. I mostly avoided situations to socialise and, except for the very first years of primary school, I didn’t have any friend and I was quite ok with it. On the third year of elementary school I attended an English course in which I mostly learnt animals name (and I still kick it at it). I remember at the end of the year, at the recital, my class sang a stupid song about a happy hippo and a happy elephant… and I still remember it: dammit! This was my first approach to a foreign language, although to be perfectly honest, I should mention that my mother tongue it not Italian. Everyone at home and in the village spoke dialect and if you did not, you must have come from the city or you just wanted to sound posh. Everywhere dialect was the lingua franca and everyone who wanted to get in touch with any of the inhabitant of the village had to accustom to it and speak it! The funny aspect about my relationship with languages is that when compulsory school started at the age of 6, our Italian teacher wasn’t a native, she came from the south of Italy, which means, she didn’t speak a word of dialect and we were not supposed to do so during her class. The tyranny started and the tyrant pronounced her words in a very weird way. She had dyed brown-copper hair, pale wrinkly skin, she wore a lilac uniform and the word ‘brown’ had a sceptical French accent when spoken by those dry purple lips. When I think of her, she reminds me of Skeletor from He-Man, though he was much sexier, with all those muscles and a leather thong. Everyone hated her and was very scared of her. In 5 years, I am pretty sure, she managed to make all of us cry at least once. She punished us frequently since to her we were just a bunch of scum unable to do anything good (we were pretty savage, I must admit it, not me, but many of the other pupils were) and she did it by giving us extra homework that kept us indoor or far from the telly, I am pretty sure you can tell which activity between these two I liked the most. The punishment usually consisted on conjugating verbs in all the tenses of the Italian language: if you are not familiar with Romance languages, you should know that in our language there are 7 moods, 22 tenses and a total of 102 ways of conjugating every single bloody verb, no joking! I think I should thank her somehow because my knowledge of the Italian grammar is decent after all the extra homework she gave me. As kids we often shouted in class, that’s why she found what in her opinion was the best means to make us shut the fuck up and sit still: one year for art class she made us paint a big stone in green with flowers on it, glued a tiny stone onto it and drew a ladybug on it, it was supposed to be a doorstop; well, she kept the biggest stone for herself and on the chaotic moments she hit it onto her desk to make us all shut up in terror. It was the sound of a thunder mixed with fury and fear. After the sound ceased, silence used to follow and then the witchy voice rose as if it had been hiding in a dragon’s lair, waiting to attack her victim. My mum kept her doorstop for many years even after the ladybug flew away.
