The world at my feet

In the morning she’s an undergraduate who follows the lectures, at night she turns into a call girl who sells her body for paying studies. She’s Laura D., authoress of the autobiographical novel “Mes Chères Études” (My expensive studies), the new French literary case. The girl tells her experience, today concluded, with an abundance of more scabrous details. She found her clients on the web, the first payed her 250 € only for seeing . I stop here, I wouldn’t induce some damsel to do likewise. This story reminds me of Melissa P., an Italian Lolita who sold a pile of copies of her “One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed”, a very mediocre book, which owes its success to the alleged authenticity of the plot. In this case too, the rather trite topic of a girl’s double life arouses more interest with the “reality” label. Well, trust me, I’m a worldly person: Laura D. is an hairy fifty-year-old man with a fine pot-belly. Now, who is still ready to cough up 250 € only for seeing?

I read Roberto Saviano’s book “Gomorrah, Italy’s other mafia” and I didn’t find it disagreeable but, according to me, it isn’t even a masterpiece, like it often happens with the books too glorified by the media. However its strength is in the mix between fantasy and reality. It’s a hybrid of fiction and investigative journalism, with Camorra bosses’ true names and surnames. For his courage, Saviano lives under police escort: I take off my hat to him. But there was one name too many for the English publisher Panmacmillan, that asked the author to strike off that of an Italian boss moved to the UK, where lived like in a ivory tower, and arrested on 2006. Law is law and the publisher doesn’t want any legal trouble because in the UK doesn’t exist the offence of mafia association and the boss is innocent until the definitive sentence. Have we arrived at this point with the fear of  libel cases? If you are English and you want to know boss’ real name search internet or provide yourself with a bilingual dictionary English-Italian and translate this post, there is hidden the solution. I know it’s a real teaser, but he who solves it wins a supply of correcting fluid for a year.

Venice, what’s a beautiful city! Venice is one and only. But is it just like that? According to the new book “Welcome to Venice” there are 97 in the world! Edited and distributed by the syndicate Venezia Nuova, a ministerial institution which attends to the safeguard of the city, the volume tells all the Venices of the world, i.e. how the city has been copied, imitated, dreamed. The most famous is the Californian Little Venice, founded at the dawning of twentieth-century by Abbott Kinney, a dreamer self-made man who recruited also 36 gondoliers “made in Italy” who shot through the canals till the Great Depression. Then it had a gloomy period until the Sixties, when the hippies made it very cool. In the USA there are other 31 Serenessime: from the little village in the New York State where the old farms are built in Palladian stile to the mammoth, hyper-realistic, very kitsch Hotel The Venetian of Las Vegas. But also the Latin America isn’t badly off for these copies. There are more than 40 mocks Venices, creations of Italian immigrants’ imagination, one, Nova Venetia, built even in the Brazilian virgin forest, ringed by banana trees and orchids. The others are peppered in the rest of the planet. Perhaps the case more astonishing is the last: in August, in the Chinese city of Macao was inaugurated a gigantic hotel that is the copy of the Venetian. The facsimile of the facsimile. The globalisation to the nth power. At least, if Marco Polo lived these days he would feel at home in China, in the true sense of the word.

Photo credit: .arzan