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Rating: The city appeared exactly as it did in the whimsical parade of Mr. G, "full of streets and shops and shop windows full of light," physically and conceptually too overwhelming to allow that reckless boy I was to understand the limits of an enthusiasm that by its nature could only fade during the first encounters with reality.
A new life experience had emerged, and with it the brand new house with a hundred rooms and the precious living room with the red sofa with ancient silk trimmings. In the likewise paroxysmal contradiction that this new course could not avoid, in front of the countless antiques scattered throughout the hundred rooms of this strange house-castle and the crazy brocades that adorned the windows on the huge terrace with beautiful Caltagirone ceramic tiles, the most dazzling wonder was certainly the new television, imposing and with the abundant cathode tube that vibrated with every bass: it was a magnificent Sony Trinitron KV 32-inch with brilliant brightness enhanced by the eccentrically cylindrical curvature. There were no more curtains or precious antiques to enchant me - what could I care about so much old stuff in the years when I was entering life, the real one - but only that divine device with a thousand and one functionalities that I would invest with the sacred task of marking the times of my coming-of-age novel, between Dribbling at 13:30 on Saturdays on Rai 2, Fuori Orario with the beautiful Dita laughing to the notes of Springsteen, and the erotic commercials after midnight on local channels.
It was precisely then that, during the boom of private broadcasters systematically offering fortune-telling columns and long marathons during lottery draws, I discovered that in the boring routine of Rai broadcasts, there was a way to break the unconscious flow of sordid afternoon programming by accessing what must surely have been the invention of the century, the endless sequence of Televideo pages, which then appeared as the most complete source of infotainment of the era of the first cries of the Internet still in the throes of the browser war between Netscape and the increasingly cumbersome offshoots of Internet Explorer.
From the page of the General Index to the test pattern of the Page with all the symbols it was immediately love: in the unfolding of the long sequence of pages and subpages (the kaleidoscopic Sony Trinitron was one of the few models then able to allow navigation between subpages) I developed a morbid form of fetishism towards the magnificent instrument, lingering hours on contents of curious interest such as the sequence of daily weather forecasts for Italian municipalities from pages 402 to 409 (where for years I wondered about the meaning of the presence of Sarzana, Tarvisio, and Monte Scuro among the locations destined for meteorological detection) now repositioned three hundred pages further but still pleasantly intact in form and content, the elusive Auditel data of the previous day on page 533 with the fierce struggle between RAI and Fininvest's afternoon programming (it was the time when Beautiful managed to garner almost six million viewers glued to the TV at two in the afternoon) and the legendary Horoscope section on page 600 now in a reduced version under the curiosities section of the Almanac (page 401 and following), where fortunately still survives Accadde Oggi with the historical anniversaries of the day.
But it is useless to beat around the bush: my adolescence between abundant applications of Mercurochrome on grazed knees, Lara Croft tangled in the underground passages of Aldwych in the third Tomb Raider, Teletutto with promotional releases of the nude starlets of the moment was marked by the long afternoons consulting the pages of Sport starting from the Football news index at 201 to the necessary insights of Other Sports with tennis, motorsport, basketball, and volleyball at 260. That religious and eternal sequence that wanted page 202 to have the results of the last Serie A round, 203 the standings, 204 the next round and 205 the scorers' rankings was for me the cue for an immutable ritual where I could spend hours in meticulous consultation, as for more than three decades no newspaper or internet page has shown the Serie A standings in such a perfectly dry and punctual form, with the ad hoc colorations for the final placements and vacant matches. For more than twenty years in the progressive life path that has taken more and more time from my time, the ritual is intact and there is no day that ends without the due consultation of the entire Sport batch without forgetting the Brief Football on page 229, results and standings of Serie D from 251 to 259 and foreign championships from 295 to 298. And then on Tuesday there is the unmissable appointment of Best 11 with the rankings of the best players of the day and the championship.
Certainly, I would be lying if I said my honeymoon was only with Football and Other Sports, as there was no zapping that didn't systematically start with the titles of the Front Page to move to Other News on page 120 and end beautifully with the columns of the Third Page at 140: here, in a certain sense, times have changed as the contents have been reorganized in a different order and overall enriched, but today as then this selection of contents consistently replaces the print newspaper where the dispersal of news does not allow focusing on what is needed, so when it's time to inform about the news, Repubbliche, Corrieri, Stampe, and substitutes go down the drain: with Televideo in a good ten minutes, I exhaust all the knowledge of what happens on Earth and also feel an irresistible feeling of freshness within my limbs.
I returned this summer to the new brand house taking advantage of a long trip southwards, and I stopped to listen again to the crackling of lizards on the scorched ground. Since the time of my first life experience in the city, I am sure many years have passed now, and everything has necessarily changed: Teletutto has long closed its doors, Lara Croft has lost at least two bra sizes, and the wounds on my knees have perfectly scarred, almost imperceptible. In the old living room with the darkened white fabric sofa and frayed curtains, there is no longer the old Trinitron but one of those Full HD Samsung models with an integrated CI+ module. I turn it on and yes, in the same house-castle of almost thirty years ago with no more than ten rooms and the small terrace with scarlet gres tiles brightened by the sun, the Televideo is still there, certainly different in content but still functioning on time with its démodé graphics and seven-color test pattern. On page 101 the Breaking News reports rising oil prices, while an ad about a bank's loans flashes at the bottom of the screen. These modern TVs enhance colors in an almost unnatural way, exaggerating warm shades so much that I realize flashing is actually nothing more than a false impression dictated by my faulty vision. In the long night lashed by the August heatwave, the ritual of reading the 800 pages is completed and after the accomplishment, it is four in the morning and on Rai 3 Ghezzi has just opened the dance.
I wait for angelic and smiling Dita to appear in the hallucinatory gaze of Jean as he swims in the furrowed river of Atalante, but she too, with her blond hair tossed by the wind and dazzlingly white teeth, no longer exists.
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