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Rating: The darkness, the real kind, the kind of streets surrounded only by fields. That fog, always the same, whether it’s December or May, whether it’s six in the morning or three at night.
Whatever your destiny, expectations, feelings. It’s there, for millennia. It’s the Via Emilia. It’s the state road that connects Ferrara, the beautiful hometown of Vasco Brondi, to Bologna. The province to the city, to everything, to the world.
On the Via Emilia, desolate stretches alternate with the small towns it crosses, isolated, almost lost in nothingness. As if they were constellations of a universe, of dialects and stories, tradition, and with it the immobility of a world. Small lights in the dark.
Constellations with planets, increasingly distant, increasingly lost in their orbit, in their alternation of phases, winters and summers, revolutions. Those of drugs left behind, of Chiara, and her life as an aging expatriate, now tormented. Her Via Emilia is platform one of Bologna Station, the intercity train to Caserta, the removal of that unconscious that transports her to her land, in the awareness of abandoning roots, the kids dying in her province. A bit like Sara’s. It is not the interpretation of dreams, it is the harsh reality of a nightmare, that of "Le ragazze stanno bene". The years that pass, the responsibility, the clash with the desire to live life like a party, even when it’s over. Even when it’s a cruel, ruthless epilogue.
Small towns that host stories of distance, that of "I Sonic Youth", a distant love due to work, which separates, and with it the memories of those little adolescent isolations, study, the Smiths to keep in the drawer of intimacy, far from Bar Sport.
Places where it’s not rare to find bars lost in nowhere, as if they were meteors scattered in the middle of nothing. The red lights outside, inside stories of removal, alcoholism, celebration. Outside the drugs, among the cars parked in the mud, the boredom that hovers in the smoke of crack.
"Costellazioni" fades in the finale, into memories of the recent past, before the black holes of the modern bulimic media’s Our Father absorbed everything, leaving a white noise in the background, the nothingness of opinions, of our chats, of our messages, of 200-character news. What was there, so apparently distant, yet so pure. The Ciaos racing on the Via Emilia, and with them the utopias, the tenderness. Years of innocence not yet lost, despite drugs and teenage mothers, stories of little love escapes, along a Via Emilia that tied loves and hopes, the Saturday night parties of now-lost groups. Tomorrow not as a threat but as the wonderful mystery of the future. To face, to discover. Without fear. In an album in which everything seems lost, buried in the dark of a road. It’s a world that disappeared, leaving room for the desolation of villages with bars filled with elderly at videopokers, sambuca, that one narrow street.
An artist who shows he has found his niche, in this more descriptive dimension, from another time. An hour and a half, and you’re still there. Still breathing the dark side of that reality, far from the unbearable rhetoric of Bar Mario. Vasco Brondi tells us about his moon and his bonfires, his universe now lost in the solitude of contemporary daily life. What once encompassed the entire world is now just a suburb. Yet another one. Nostalgia as morphine for our anxieties, isolated, intangible to others. Like stars, like galaxies.
Light-years apart from each other. Streches of kilometers in nothingness. A roundabout. Four shops and it’s a city. Some houses. And then again, nothing. And a lot of fog. Like our hearts, at another rendezvous with ourselves, with our fellow man. Like planets, seemingly close, yet so far away. Unique.
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