A question of manners
I was sitting with some friends at the Nofara café, just outside the back gate of the marvellous Ommayad mosque in Damascus. It's a historical place standing in the vicinity of an old fountain, which explains the origin of its name. Its walls are hung with old pictures, traditional calligraphies and beautiful designs. The story-teller's raised stand was still empty, but he would come soon to rejoice the evening for patrons and first-time visitors alike, attracted by the fame of this institution.
The so-called hakawati, wearing a red fez on his head, comes to recite stories while people chatter and sip pitch black cardamom-flavoured coffee. For more serious tales, he enhances the performance by wearing an elegant white robe and even brandishing a sword to highlight outstanding passages in the narration.
I’d already been to Savogno, but when Diego proposed the trip I didn’t mind going again. The village is awesome and the weather was expected to be so good and warm that I would’ve done a hike even by myself rather than spend Sunday in town.
For the third consecutive Sunday we’ve gone hiking in the mountains in a weather that’s got better and better. This time it was cloudless, if not perfectly clear, and I’m very glad it wasn’t, because the sun shone already bright enough to scorch our faces. We had planned to leave from Valgoglio and do the five lakes trek, which, with hindsight, would have been too ambitious an aim. In any case we couldn’t walk further than Lago Nero because we didn’t bring rackets, and our weight made us sink knee-deep and sometimes even groin-deep into the heavy snow. In those conditions walking was particularly tiring, so we eat our packed meal on a dry knoll overlooking the dam. The basin was half empty for the winter, but the bottom had a residue of frozen water covered by snow that along the curvy edges of the mountain took on a magical bluish tinge. Cracking plaques of snow covered a steep slope opposite in what looked like a natural amphitheatre of gigantic proportions.
As I was crawling up and down the lane during my weekly training, I realised how many moments of my life have been marked by this swimming-pool.
My grandfather built a low-rise block of flats in the early 1960's, soon after moving to Bergamo from Milan. He wanted to invest money from his own leather handbag firm he'd set up in partnership with his brother and embark on a building project with the help of my father, a construction engineer. After the first building was completed, the plan came to a grinding halt owing to the council's scheme for developing social housing in the neighbourhood. Part of the land was expropriated and the rest of the planned buildings never saw the light. Instead of selling the first one, my grandfather kept it as an asset. The flats were soon rented and now, of these historical tenants that moved in during the '60's only a few remain, as some have died and others moved out. But Mr. M. is still a tenant.