Cathedrals like chipped cups on an old table, a banquet of bones.
Northern blue majolica in a South American body, and a tongue incessantly intoning its prayer:
“obrigado, obrigada…” The young addict moves with the sound of silver in the glass, holding up an old woman (his mother?) with twisted legs and a young girl’s coat, which he gently pulls over her.
Iron tracery at the windows and coloured glass, teeth missing from the mouth of a rainbow.
I am hot in my coolest dress, red like the clothes in all the windows, against the blue of the houses and the churches, heavenly dwellings covered with stories.
In the vertical houses and in the horizontal eyes peering from windows and balconies.
In an ally I heard fado for the first time, in its real home, on the steps of a prostitute. Outside theatres of Italian velvet the music once again gathers its people, it witnesses, into its arms. Flakes from the loveliest houses fall onto the ground, the houses shrivel up and hang their heads, but in the gardens flowers resist and come back to fill untidy, overgrown flower beds.
Many people have their hands stretched out, and one dignified woman keeps on explaining why. She has no money because… but I can’t understand what she’s saying and I feel bad not to be able to offer her consolation for her need to justify herself.
There is a hot light that designs yellow shadows and grows azaleas as large as trees, and fat rhododendrons that spread their foliage in the parks, opulent as odalisques in French nineteenth-century paintings. There are daturas that look like yellow-streaked shells, and cornucopias and forests of greenery cascading from balconies.
On the facades, rough skeletons of stone with a smooth ceramic heart, a bracelet of enamel around the joints.
Faculdade de Belas Artes
Garden of acanthus and giant camellias losing their blooms and turning the earth around them into flowers.
An orchard of abandoned projects (like everything in academia), rough-hewn pieces of marble and statues sculpted in a single day; I can make out a past that is my own, a place belonging to the age-old dream.
Petals rain down from the locust trees, the teacher pointed out this miracle, the most common one for me in a park where everything else is gigantic and surprising.
I can see hope in the hand-died pants worn by the students, the clothing of academia, my by-gone uniform of freedom, now passing.
Sulla rua
The old lady uses iron wire to strengthen the stalks of cut flowers in the dark, narrow entrance-way. She sits between metal vases full of gerberas. From within can be heard strains of a distant, secret music, intimate as a lament. She smiled at me sadly when I asked permission to take her photo. I calculated the risk of hurting her feelings, putting her in my showcase of souvenirs… But I wanted her look when she saw me pick up the queen of hearts on the street in front of her, a card lost from a deck scattered over the city.
La Sé
Organ music marks the rhythm of my footsteps.
The severity of Templars in the square lines of the porous, grey stones; more worn-out bones.
Witches’ stripes in the wine chalices of the Sé and flowers clinging to the walls like bunches of butterflies. The stone portholes have sharp teeth to frighten away pigeons, and cloisters are like Chinese boxes that open new doors, paths and squares, chapels that bud and lead to a landscape.
There is a corner where the roofs of the city are inscribed within the cut of the wall, and suddenly I can recognize directions. I, who always lose my way, can find it here, where nothing constrains me.
“Secretum extraneo ne revele” In the painted wood ceiling, allegorical paintings. I am stopped by the figure of a woman who is more feminine than the others. A red drape bandages her naked body, gripping her up to the neck. Mounds of flesh are revealed in the forms of the fabric. A thin black bandage bars her mouth, large enough to block her tongue but not enough to keep her lips from opening.
Her blond hair is bound, gathered at the nape. The hair’s power to escape control, its loving pact with the wind, is the enemy of the secret.
Keep the secret…The mouth can. The hand, when it writes, writes it all.
Sabrina Foschini was born in Rimini in 1968. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1990 and has since exhibited in numerous public and private galleries in Italy, France, England and Germany. At the same time, she writes critical articles and reviews for catalogues of contemporary artists and contributes to numerous art and literary journals. In 2001 she published the booklet Andare per il sottile under the imprint of ‘I quaderni del Battello Ebbro’ (Porretta). In 2002 her collection Il paragone col mare and the long poemInno del corpo ricostruito were published by Raffaelli Editore (Rimini). In 2003 Medusa editions of Milan published her collection of short stories, Due mani di colore, written with Paola Turroni. She has written and illustrated a children’s book, Nove gatti, also published by Medusa. She has also created and staged several poetic works, both individually and with Paola Turroni, including: Cinque dita, Ibrido, Pescatrice, Nodo, Cerchio di passi, Del corpo.