Ferrara, December 27, 2005
My book on Ferrara - "The Ferrara streetbook - in the steps of Giorgio Bassani" -is almost ready to be published - have to do a final check on mistakes and errors and to get an isbn number.
In the next days I'll show you a preview of Chapter 6 - A corridor in via Colomba
A corridor in via Colomba
In one of his essays, that is included in Il romanzo di Ferrara, Giorgio Bassani describes how he composed his first five stories.
He observes about "A walk before dinner", that the structure of the story itself tells that the past is not dead. It is just that each moment the distance increases. So, if you really want, Bassani says, you can retrieve that past. To do so you have to walk into some kind of corridor, that gets longer with the passing of the time. At the very end, in the point of light, where the black walls of the corridor converge, there, the past lives as intense and vivid as if it were the present. So, eternal? Eternal. And yet, further and further away, more and more fleeting, increasingly difficult to grab.
I tried to photograph this idea in Via Colomba, a charming little street, that doesn't play a very important part in Bassan's work. It is almost mentioned between brackets, as the street where you could find brothels.