FRIENDS
INDEX
POETS
MYSPACE
Giovanni Gabrielli (right) and Giovanni and his brothers and sisters in order of age: Giovanni, Angelina, Elena, Federico, Florinda and Francesco (below)
The Gabrielli family left the hills of Eimilia Romagna, Italy to flee the Mussolini fascist regime. Giovanni Gabrielli and his five children came to London where they encountered hostility and political trouble: Giovanni is said to have been detained in a prisoner of war camp for some time. He was led to return to Italy periodically and was reputed to have two families, one in Italy and one in London.
I first lived in the 17th by Parc Monceau, later Porte Maillot, then Motte Piquet Grenelle, now Saint Germain whenever possible. Nomadisme.
I sometimes managed to get three or four films in a day. Whole mornings spent thumbing tomes in bookshops. Auditeur Libre at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. Derrida at the height of his influence. Commentaries.
Croissants and baguettes warm from the oven at dawn; steak tartare frites and a glass of young burgundy; Chinese prawn noodle soups in the Mirama on Rue Saint Jacques. Gourmandises.
Saturday morning with my dear friend and documentary film-maker Alessandro Rossetto at ethnographic film sessions at the Cinémathèque under the direction of Jean Rouch. Endless, passionate discussions. Les maitres fous.
Diaries of seduction. L’infini.
I had to wait until my next stay three or fours years later at NYU, when I set up digs in the East Village and jazz crashed into my joyful existence, to begin to express this mosaic of differences. Then the words came incessantly for three years. Poetry lived and authenticated, street-walking night and day, notepad and super 8 film camera to the ready.
Deconstruction held the campuses. The end of history. Multiculturalism. My bedside table read differently: Artaud and Céline, Sollers and Cendrars. Angry voices in style rather than intellectual constructions. I embraced Deleuzian thought who no one at university in those days strangely dared to consider. I understood what it was to be a minority of one. Avenue A and 7th Street, that’s where, tucked up with India.
From the biting cold and snow drifts of the winters to the glaring, vertical summer heat;
from music on every block to the clutter of street people;
from overpowering women and their opinionated recriminations to the Nouvelle Vague at art cinemas;
from debates with film makers to comical fights with lesbian activists;
from melancholic friendships to delightful and passionate encounters;
from Chinatown to Little Italy;
from Tomkins Park to Central Park;
from Alphabet City to Harlem;
from the deep bowels of the subway to the rusty yellow cab:
Now when I come back to New York, it is as if I am observing a part of myself from across the seas, looking on with endearing amusement at one who was, who dared to be, a dear friend one meets once every ten years because anymore would spell havoc to one’s newly acquired stability.
I have always had a secret quest for the south, for the darkness in my skin, for that vibration in my melancholy which brought joy out of sadness.
It was during a trip to Sicily in the mid nineties that I began to seek out my southern hideaway. The more I travelled the more I realised it had to be Italy.
The mafia prevented me from buying in Sicily.
I knew nothing of Puglia when I landed in Brindisi on a work trip in late October sun. I was soon to travel the Salento extensively.
It was the dry climes of the county of Leuca, known as finibus terrae where the Ionian meets the Adriatic, which attracted me.
Large stretches of country remain unimpaired, almost pristine with their dry stone walls and pajare (the Salento’s equivalent of the trullo), plurisecular olive groves and green, translucid seas and palms.
I embraced the contadino in me.
