At the start the Sicilian climate helps: perfect sky, sun going down, light that enriches faces.

Faces… here's the first.
A handsome young man, sports shoes, who collapsed in Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. He reads and on the other side of the glass, while the sun dives between greenhouses, fields and carob trees, the dry stone walls are disappearing to make way for unlikely highways forgotten by planners.

Catania.
The night air of the station is the same everywhere. Left, gives rise to the most classic of non-places.
Compare, disappears, a woman aged between 10 and 10 reappears 20 and i 50 years, indefinable for his crying faces.
What is madness? Nothing but a mind defending itself.

The train arrives with 20 minutes late.

The cabin looks like my idea of ​​an operating room: straight lines, visual as well as sanitary cleanliness. Noia.

A matryoshka is created: me inside the train inside the ship.
And to think that man, author of all this, it's always the smallest doll. The ferry always maintains this engulfing charm.

The ship is deserted, only the euphoric shouts of students on a trip can be heard.

There are also sailors, the service personnel on the ship. People who live, who lived, that he knows, who has angel wings and a devil's tail in his eyes…

Calabria. Just a caress for my beloved land, then I will fall asleep, I hope not with its poisons, but with hymns to its splendors, with the poetry that only she can give.

Roma. A friend I met at the station confessed to me: “If I found a job down there I would leave immediately”.

Jana, Instead, it's just what you expect from a Brazilian woman: colourful, solar, energetic, positive. But also open. He's from Rio, he loves the sea and cooking under the sun in complete relaxation.
Jana is traveling with a friend. The tour of Italy organized by an agency includes a few days in the south, some in the center and several in the north. Here we go again.

The Tuscan-Lazio countryside is wonderful – perlamordiddìo – but I don't understand what they have more than the Sicilian ones, Calabrians, and bells. They definitely have something less: the dry stone walls, the sea, the mountain, l’Etna…

In the Italy I travel through, there is therefore not only the commuter, the student, but also the tourist, people who come from other lands.
Lands that, as happens in Italy, they see tourists in certain places rather than others.
In short, Italy is not just spaghetti; Brazil is not just Samba!

I approach the north in a cloudy mood, after all, it couldn't have been otherwise with whoever he got involved with, took me relatives and friends.
In complete contradiction, the flowering fields of red poppies also bring me closer to the north with a new energy.

Towards Prato. From Florence an urban continuum, no campaign in between.
The gentleman in front of me, in response to my terrible sandwich, carelessly scaccolates himself; I eat even more disgusted.

Prato.
This has always been an area famous for the textile sector and textiles are synonymous with almond-shaped eyes, always give.
Rains, it's fresh. In the waiting room. Everyone shut up… everyone, Three.
A woman reads a newspaper. An adult couple chats, she barely holds back her laughter.
Quattro. Two almond-shaped eyes with long black hair. She's very Italian. Scratch… and lose!
Cinque. The lady seems to have missed the previous train or that the timetables have changed. He goes to Bologna like me.
At each station I met some possible travel companions before departure, without ever meeting him though.
Be. The room seems to be completed with a leopard-print woman and large suitcases from which, after great noisy vicissitudes he takes out a jacket to cover himself with.
The leopard wins. Chatter, subject: temperature.

Towards Bologna. Some women talk about great adventurous journeys to distant countries. In the next seats a very Italian girl studies Chinese ideograms and repeats without a voice.

sleep. Dream.

I wake up over the Apennines… I can smell the destination.

We arrive on platform 1est, same track from which I left Rome. I'll leave later 20 minutes from the platform 1 west. Just in time to buy the ticket and walk about a kilometer inside the station – we know whoever takes the regional is willing to suffer – and then leave again.

Towards Mantua.
I chat with a Romanian gentleman. He doesn't want to be photographed, we don't even talk about it.
He works in electronics, but also in construction.
I also meet a boy with whom I share chatter and taralli. He lives here, I am the stranger between the two. I think. I smile.
What beautiful fields there are.

On the last train, diesel. Even up here then there are these obscenities: the fuel train!
And then two different faces and so close, how far away they are still… there is a long way to go.

Finally a ray of sunshine that warms, which brings the mind back to the beauty of the departure. This arrival can be beautiful.

The return journey and the days immediately preceding are marked by pleasant encounters: cousins ​​and friends, all of whom emigrated across the country.

“Of course I'll host you in Bologna for one night!” Obviously a horn! And the 20 May and in Emilia the earth shook for the first time. The next day I had to leave for Bologna. It wasn't easy.
Bologna is raining. It is increasingly continental.

Towards Prato.
Newsstands will all disappear. On the train a woman browses the newspaper on her tablet.
In front of me, a man with an improbably long nail on his left thumb sees and listens to the video of a small child.

On this side of the Apennines, in the station, there are people peering through the rubbish.

Italy is still very slow.