Totò
Parli come badi

For ages, the bathroom has been the place naturally designated for reading.

I know many of you will turn up your noses at this statement and think "John, what the heck are you saying?!" but you are the university commuters, those who voraciously read Dostoevsky in a train compartment and isolate themselves from the surrounding reality. I hear someone down there shouting "LIBRARY!", but even that doesn't work, let's be honest: everything has to be as proper as a tea room, and woe to anyone who speaks. There's also a minority that shamelessly admits to reading wrapped in a blanket in front of a warm fire in winter, but it’s known: this is the privilege of spinsters between 16 and 40, not to mention that blood sugar levels go through the roof when they manage to meet a bookworm through book dating.

No contest, the bathroom wins hands down: it's the ideal place to unwind after a hard day’s work or, why not?, to kickstart it in the early morning and begin with a light (and lightened intestine) heart; can you compare? The personal freedom dimension created in this particular environment is unmatched, everyone can feel like a King on that particular white ceramic throne, forget about Saclà olives and the Savoyard company. University intellectuals will stone me with Devoto-Oli volumes because all this is too low, too close to the heart of the people, not elitist enough, but let's be clear: when we look inside our soul, we would like to say there's John Lennon or maybe George Harrison, but if we squint a little, we'll find a little Ringo wanting to come out, it's inevitable.

And then, what to read in the bathroom? Let's discard something challenging or committed right off the bat, the little time we are granted does not allow us to indulge in such delights on the throne; let's also discard any book with a minimum logical structure inside: no fable, no plot, nothing at all, just fragments.

Parli come badi is the bathroom book par excellence: an anthology of jokes and maxims of that all-Neapolitan genius Totò, officially known as Prince Antonio de Curtis, divided by topics ranging from family to the eternal North-South conflict, from insults to the praise of madness, from love to politics, and many others. A book, or rather, a collection of this kind is meant to be flipped through randomly: open a page and have a laugh, that’s its intent. Not a frenzied reading, at best an occasional "consultation," like a phone book and a dictionary, only that, where one is useful for prank calls and the other for quelling your ignorance, Parli come badi will return to your hands more and more often on your own initiative, for pure personal pleasure!

A book like this belongs in the bathroom as much as the Bible belongs on the nightstand: it cannot be missing!

If, on the other hand, you persist in believing that you do not have a little Ringo inside you, keep reading Dostoevsky, you don't know what you're missing.

«Found a corpse in the bathroom? And what do you want to do about it? Go wash in the kitchen»