Ottaviano and memories. A life through the windows of the house
by Claudio Toscani
At the turn of the forties and fifties, Alberto Ottaviano, publicist and journalist, lived as a child a bustling street of the old city center of Brescia. "Only that my first house had two windows that opened directly onto the street." From the window of memory, if not the heart, the soul mature author reviews his life, his story, if not his destiny.
How many writers have taken the momentum, to unravel the tangle of their existence, a house, a city; a family, a relative, a friend? Ottaviano starts from a rented apartment at number 52 in the course of the capital orobico Mameli, four flights of stairs to the skylight, a large kitchen, a theater room of games, the bedroom of the parents, his and his siblings.
It is not the machette of an estate agent but a genetic map of the topography staff, those who print the tract of an individual, the coordinates of a spiritual land registry. Spaces that have established ways of living together, cultural and moral trends, the shared habits: "Leave and doubles," Sanremo Festival, radio soundtrack, tv as a domestic cinema.
The rhythm of the prose is swing: after all, a senior journalist certainly not taught how to hold the reader. If then the "piece" regards his own life and the memories of many years fill the pages so as to oblige the balance between waves and wave returns, then the experience of writing takes the reins of the story. Parade screened friendships remote but still alive, high schools, the feminine and the first "soft" (that were not soft drinks ...). So with a wise use of time intervals (recent songs that comment on past ones) come the time of the "Mille Miglia" (with a capital of Brescia big race) and its samples; the adult film adapted to the case of the "sacred cows" of celluloid; of football matches, to the magnetic episodes of the war of the father and mother to the descriptions of the work at home and away.
And there is also a regret: "Too many words unspoken between my father and me, between me and my mother. I know next to nothing about their life from youth. Questions not asked, untold stories or just mentioned. "Then, after the book was made genealogy of the family until the holiday teenagers, the "news" of the journalist Alberto Ottaviano recovers first loves and first bereavement, almost aware evictions of war and economic crises. Conclusion: "I feel the weight of the body (...) Perhaps it seems to me to be like my parents when they were old people just because they are now too old. Old, well ... ".