Nanni Moretti
Caro Diario

You shouted horrible things in your parades,

I shouted righteous things,

And now I am a splendid forty-year-old!

Nanni Moretti, Dear Diary, March 1994

I am connected to Nanni Moretti by a personal history.

Born in the eighties, in Sardinia, I am the second and last child of my family.

Having easily overcome all the dangers young people faced in the last two decades of the century, at the dawn of the new millennium I started riding my two wheels through the streets of my city.

On April 22, 2001, I was sixteen years old, and an unexpected, yet easily foreseeable, accident occurred. The consequences: loss of consciousness, delirium for a couple of days, erasure of recent memory, double surgery, and a joyful but slow return to life in the following months.

In one of these months, we watched at home The Son's Room. How could my family not feel connected to the Sermonti family, separated at birth? For those who haven't seen it, the film shows a father, a mother, and a sister dealing with the difficult and devastating process of grieving a loss, namely the death in an accident of the second and last child.

The screen in front of us seemed to be a mirror, not black as in the TV series, but broken: on both sides of the mirror, the events were eerily similar and then, reaching a watershed, fortunately took different paths.

As it happened, for some years thereafter, I decided to explore many of Nanni Moretti's films.

I discovered the other films that were... different; in particular, I recorded two on VHS: Ecce Bombo and Dear Diary.

Inverting the order of release, the first was Dear Diary.

Dear Diary was simple, it was an autobiographical glimpse: it rejected the safety of a story with its final resolution, it rejected rich casts, stars; it was musical, poetic, and satirical.

I liked it so much that I decided to write him a few lines. Today I reread them, and here they are:

Dear diary, you were romantic and moving. You were romantic when you sang Rome in the summer, when you sang the deserted streets, when you sang the houses that tell a great past, when you play Pasolini who is the end of this past.

"I love this bridge. I have to cross it at least twice a day."

Dear diary, you were satirical. You were satirical when you talked about cinema and critics, when you talked about parents and children, when you talked about deserted islands where one is supposed to find oneself but ends up becoming neurotic, when you talked about doctors and patients, when you talked about attics:

"Garibaldi, here, led the resistance," a homeowner recounts.

You are moving and satirical when you show Spinaceto.

Dear diary, you were musical. You were musical and shattered, in pieces, when a poignant piano took us where Pasolini was killed, when... your author sang off-key and danced for a dream, when Leonard Cohen with his deep voice accompanied us through the deserted streets of Rome.

You were musical, romantic, and satirical...

You were disorienting, delicate, and... when you sang off-key in a square in Rome or when you danced following the steps Silvana Mangano made on a bar TV in Lipari...

Dear diary, goodnight.

Meanwhile, years have passed, the love for Nanni's new films has been lost, but those old ones, with each new viewing, resonate the strings of my soul in this way, as if it were always the first time.