But what happened to the days lived in childhood and adolescence? Where did those sumptuous summers go with the infinity of the hours? And the years and people? They are in a novel, “The masters of the sea” (Rubbettino)narrative debut of Bianca Fenizia, Avellino with a part of the heart in Calabria, and which deals with cinema and literature (as well as translation and nonfiction); In fact, she is a programmer for the selection of the films in competition at the Matera Film Festival and is responsible for coordination and communication for the Laceno d’Oro. He breathes and sighs the summer and the sea, “the masters of the sea”, in the dilated territory of Jonia, a symbolic name that unites various places of the Calabrian Jonio, where “the unrepeatable time of childhood was that band of blue that was waiting for every morning to be seen”.
And “he still did not know how easily it could be wasted” the narrative self of that slow universe enclosed in a beach flap, with a sensory concert of objects, of animal and human creatures, of natural elements that whisper from the early hours open to the dazzling light of the day, and above all to the blue of the sea, “an old relative we belong”, recalls the grandfather to his nephew. Nephew who discovers those enchantments with the complicity of an old disconnected yet alive summer house, in which the time of boredom is also wise. Inspired by the word-guide of three writers, Giuliana Saladino, Maria Teresa of Lasca and above all Fabrizia Ramondino (the Ramondino of “War of Childhood and Spain”), Fenzia paints with her dreamy word many shades “of the Calabrie”, lands on the border, as is childhood, in which everything can belong to different plans. Then, a moment of distraction is enough and the summer ends.
So, a possible place where to go is childhood and adolescence and summer?
«In my opinion it is memory. Living memory is a concern of mine, how to tell the territory, those years, a way of living the summer that is being lost, but without the conditioning of nostalgia, a feeling that, even if pure, transfigures and moves away from what was the real past “.
The memory to keep what in many places has been transfigured for the worse.
«That’s right. I was born in 87, after the Irpinia earthquake, and I saw how long it takes to recover what has been destroyed, without transfiguring it, thanks to the neglect of the ruling class that has not had the common sense of guarding a territory or its culture “.
Jonia appears to grandfather “like the only law to grow children”. Having landed in Calabria, or in Calabrie, as they said once, is it to tell the family mythology?
«The family was the channel for which I met” Le Calabrie “and had to be the initial point. But not only. Being southern, taking care of the south of cinema and literature I saw that lately there was a tendency to return a stereotyped narrative of the South. With Naples I think the maximum leaders of this trend have touched themselves and instead I wanted to return a multiplicity that is with the television channel and with a certain type of cinema tries in some way to flatten, not only trivializing but also by approaching what is a unique territory. Instead Calabria is very rich and also very different. What I was interested in was just meeting the territory and showing it for its multiple forms ».
Nice that the house so shaky and alive is compared with the so -called holiday villages or building complexes that have embrace many Calabrian coasts.
«Yes, in those houses in which we lived before this humiliating time of the organized holiday, everyone created the opportunity to live the emptiness of the holiday, then learn to manage boredom, to educate himself to reading, being together. Today there is not only the brutalization of the construction that defaces the territory, but the holiday village in a certain sense occupies all the time of the holiday. Summer gives the opportunity to build itself, the opportunity to discover yourself just like people. The summer belongs most of the memories and events that somehow mark us. If the Ortese said that “the sea does not bathe Naples”, as regards this novel I think it is a sea that bathes everyone. Writing, I found myself thinking about that sea that does not leave you because it occurs in your mind ».
