"Italians are good at art, because they are surrounded by genuine works of art." This is what I told my friends in China when I first came to Italy.
When I first came to Italy, I heard a story about Napoli: a Chinese student worked for a Napoli shopkeeper. He was about to graduate. He resigned. When the salary was settled, the one who took Boss Polly pointed his gun at him and said, "I won't give you a penny, and you have to find someone to replace you."
It’s been six years since I heard this story. At first, I thought it was a bit dramatic. After all, the Italy I just saw (in fact, only Milan) is a very civilized and safe place. At that time, I was studying languages at the University of Milan. I lived on the edge of the city of Milan because the rent was cheap. At the end of the yellow line subway, Affori station (it may be misspelled over time, but the pronunciation is still correct). After going through the language test, I went to Venice and applied for a postgraduate at a local university. Unfortunately, the professor who interviewed didn't like me. After the coordination of the secretariat, I was assigned to the major of urban planning. In the end, I was young and frivolous. Feeling this is an insult, I chose not to continue school.
I moved to Genoa, another city in the north, where everything is much cheaper than Milan or Venice. The universities here are also easy to accept students. I chose the philosophy department. From then on, I saw There are other things that international students who have gone to school smoothly don’t usually see. Those people who are busy going to school every day, I’m a little bit self-defeating. In this city, the former Kingdom of Genoa did not allow people to connect with everything nowadays. This is a dilapidated city, with yachts staying in the port. On the opposite side of the port, there is a gathering area for people of color. Going further inside is the university. I remember that my first philosophy class was in the basement. The bus system in Genoa is broken. There is no ticket checking system. The tickets are very old-fashioned paper tickets without modern anti-counterfeiting. The Wenzhou people I lived in for the first time used soapy water to soak the potion on the paper tickets and used them repeatedly. , Until it was crumpled, and from then on, I never bought a ticket again.
In Genoa, this boring and dead city, the first Christmas I spent in Italy, my best friend and I were walking on the road, carrying all kinds of discounted food in the supermarket, the gray road, what There was no car, only a street sign advertisement, a big Santa Claus, sipping Coca-Cola.
The Italians we know live here normally, don’t want to go to work every Monday, don’t want to go to work every Wednesday, Friday is almost Saturday, and don’t even want to work, Saturdays and Sundays are off, for a week, those Italians with small businesses People generally only have two and a half days in class. I envy them. At the same time, I feel that I am similar to them. I go to class if I want, and I don’t want to go to class. I am very lonely. I didn’t know until the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Italy knocked on my door on Christmas Day. The same loneliness, otherwise, it would not be necessary to write another Bible for whether Jesus was nailed to the cross or on a pile.
At that time, I had a friend who was studying in Naples. He came to see me by train during the day and arrived at night. He said that there are very few people there, no one can be seen on the street, no one can be seen in the city center, and everything is empty. I am very moved. In Genoa, why not? Two years later, I returned to Milan, where I had been away for a long time. In Milan where the euro fell from 9 to 8, I felt the feeling of Genoa for the first time, and the rumored Napoli. I have heard people being shot in Chinese Street and girls being raped in the Yellow Line subway... The shop where I bought glasses closed down, and the Turkish kebab shop that I loved most has changed. The water is smelling. At that time I saw the newspaper saying that the Napoli gang burying nuclear waste in the land, saying that a family of three Chinese traveling in Rome was shot and killed under the broad sky. Among them were babies...
I think When I first came, the story was not dramatic. In Italy, it was very realistic.
When I was in Florence, I rented an Italian house. I went to paint every day on weekdays. Later I met a Hunanese. He said that in order to paint with ease, he rented an Italian house as a studio and a Chinese shop. As a resting place, one day, the Italian changed the lock of his door. He called the police. The police came and said to the Hunanese, why don’t you go back to China?
Whenever I discussed with him that China and the West would never be able to communicate in depth, he always had a positive view. Every time I couldn't help thinking of what happened to him, but didn't choke him. Later, he really returned to China. He was cheated by the Italian landlord not long ago. On a dark and windy night of a month, my landlord called me and asked me to pay her the rent. Before this call, I had just met the real owner of this house. . I saw Florence at five in the morning for the first time, and I was carrying two large suitcases in a hurry. Oh, the landlord who pitted me was a Napoli. Later I learned more stories about her. I once found someone to beat up a Greek girl who was also pitted by her.
When we first came to Italy, we often joked about the mafia. The Italians told me that they didn't think the mafia was funny, nor did they think the mafia was as romantic as in the movies. I just think these Italians are sensitive.
But I didn’t know at that time. In Sicily, when the mafia was most rampant, how much the country paid for the gang every year. From the people to the government officials, it’s hard to escape those who offend the gang, so they don’t like to open it like this. It’s a joke, they don’t find the mafia black interesting.
When I came to Milan again, I was twenty-five.
Then I went to Venice again, and that season when I left Milan, Milan was posted everywhere, not wanting Mafia ads.
Last year, Venice posted an advertisement to expel the Mafia. People say that the boat tickets in Venice are so expensive that it shouldn't be, but the industry is dominated by the mafia and there is no way.
I am unable to analyze one by one. In this movie, how many things are romanticized and how many things are actually adapted, but I think that all of this happened in Italy without being abrupt and unsuspecting. The economy here is getting worse and worse, and the security here is getting worse and worse. Two months ago, a female student died at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. She was killed next to the police station.
This is Italy.
I once joked with them that we Chinese live in surrealism, and our country has an extremely absurd reality.
But later, I felt that the people of this group of free democracies were the audience in the surreal. They finally overthrew fascism, but made the mafia even more rampant. In the history of Italian gangs, the only era of fault is that The era of Mussolini.
From being a cynic, I have become good at seeing all these absurd realities. At first, I never read the speeches of public intellectuals or read books that seemed great. Because one bloody reality after another has happened in history, my country has been ruthlessly shuffled in history, the underworld is gone (the ground snake and the mafia are really incomparable), and Italy has been democratically liberated. Then the price of democracy comes with it. I don't recognize everything in China that is known to criticize. For everything here, this era of the spread of the Mafia, killing police, killing officials (the most rampant in the last century, the highest level of death is generals and justices), killing civilians, all this absurdity, I think everything in my mind Everything has changed.
Italians are good at art, because they, yes, they are in such a land where weird and strange things happen all the time.
Yesterday there was an older sister from Beijing. She married an Italian and lived happily. But she told me that Italy is a fucking country. Have you ever seen a law like this that prevents you from hurting the gangster when you are about to be murdered? I said, are you not happy? She replied that she loves her husband, but she also thinks Italy is a stupid country. She advised me to go fast and not to stay.
For a while, this movie was nothing. I saw a corner of sentient beings here, which is already very absurd.
Finally, let me tell a story. It was told by an Italian. The real Mafia is Chinese. Because, in Italy, a man was killed by a Chinese man. The method of death was quite miserable (I forgot whether he had his throat cut.) )
Oh, forgot to say, the Chinese man was a father, his daughter was an Italian gangster killed, but no death penalty, so the father with the world's most traditional legal form - revenge. Italians think this is very uncivilized.
In this absurd world, I don’t know what civilization is.
I have been married, but I want to let my children escape from here. My sister in Beijing said so.
You also go early.
Yes, I'll leave early too.
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