2019 - Italy
Ashes
A man looks back on a life shaped by fate, ambition, and the relentless pull of addiction. From his father’s unfulfilled dreams to his own rise as a footballer, he is torn between expectation and desire. As political passion turns to self-destruction, he spirals into darkness, losing everything: friends, love, and even himself. Haunted by the ghosts of his past, he fights to escape the grip of addiction, finding solace in storytelling and the echoes of a life rebuilt. Now, standing where it all began, he faces the winds of destiny, a survivor of his own destruction.
The story here begins with my father, in the 1970s. We had a grocery shop, in Via Manzoni. My father decided to open a chicken farm, so he bought this land, called 'demanio delle forche', because here there is a tree from which people used to be hanged. Cursed land, blessed land.
I was a little champion, I used to play with the big teams. My father didn't want me to play football. He wanted me to study.
Every now and then he would say that his friends had all become doctors, but him, who was better at school, had not. I was good at football and it just didn't work with school. So much so that my mother sent me to boarding school.When my father bought this land I was 16, on Sundays he would bring me here to pick stones from the ground, to build a wall. When we finished building this wall, my father decided to build the chicken sheds, and we needed some stones, to put under the buildings.
We destroyed that wall, to reuse the stones.
Later my father got sick, the doctors said he would die.
I found myself alone having to keep this business going. I had just come out of boarding school, I spoke in Italian, or at least I thought in Italian. I was stuttering, I learnt to speak properly at 23.
I was enchanted when I went to listen to the rallies that party representatives gave on the dusty streets.How did these people manage to put so many words next to each other?
I became a militant. I travelled around Italy to set up a political party. From being a stutter, I found myself doing rallies.
That was going very well until it wasn’t.
A lot of drugs arrived in Italy in the 70s. I wrote an article against heroin, against the hard drugs.And then I found myself a junkie, from one day to the next. I started to abandon everything, even this place. The very place where everything was destroyed.You have to get away, to see yourself better, to be a spectator of yourself.So I went to Venice, to get out of addiction.
My grandfather came here to clean the place. My grandfather lit the fire, a blade of fire entered the room and it burnt it, it burnt my whole past. When I left, I left the chimney of my room not closed properly. When I was back I opened this door, and there were only ashes and the wrought iron bed on which a friend of mine died of an overdose. Almost all my then comrades, friends, died of overdoses.
Heroin sedates you. It doesn't make you suffer. It's a very bad drug because it only does that to you the first week, when you become a junkie you're screwed because you only have to use that substance to be a normal person. The message is clear, from hard drugs no one is saved, you have to die and if you are lucky enough to be born again, good for you. My whole family knew. I wasn't ashamed to tell everyone I wanted out, to say I was sick. Death has never killed anyone; it is life that kills us. To be able to be reborn from an addiction means to start giving value to things. Today I know so many people who, without ever having done drugs, are addicts have all the symptoms of addiction.
I remember one year, I met a very important person in my life in Venice, Gabriella. She helped me and put up with me. She gave me the strength to start a very difficult journey.It was important to start working and asking yourself what are you doing, how much will you earn? This relationship with questions and answers was like a rebirth, being able to feel your brain sedated. The death of a person lies in the sedation. I lived 10 years in Perugia, my escape from addiction was long. Gabriella went to Altamura without me to see my hometown. One evening, in the middle of summer, we were eating leftovers with the other waiters. I went up to Paolo’s house, and I started again. I had been there to get out, away from my love, but instead I destructed myself again.
On my birthday I realised that there was no point in staying in Venice, earning money to start taking drugs again. I got on the train and decided to go to Parma, to some friends who had offered to help me. There were three girls on the train. They decided to come with me because they realised I was not well. They accompanied me to Parma. When I arrived at the station, I saw my friends arrive, and I realised that they were stoned. I immediately told them to get away from me. And I left. I went back to the station and decided to go to Assisi, I didn't have a ticket and I got a fine, paid by my mother.
My mother paid all the fines, she went out of her way for me, she believed in me, she prayed for me. Today I find myself in this place with a serenity of soul, thanks to life.
Life teaches us to be wanderers, available to the wind.
