Stefano Beccacece

Where the city ends there is a wall that surrounds 3 million "square meters" of land. It was the border of the city, they called it Mirafiori, look at the flowers, a plain where starting from 1936 the concrete began to prevail over the green. The largest "Factory" in Europe was built around that wall, crossed by 60 thousand people every day.

For them the city was forced to move beyond the frontier of the "Fabbrica". The buildings (17 thousand lodgings) were built up starting in 1963, giving home to over 40 thousand people. These were intense years of a young population full of life, but also of struggles and defeats. With the "Fabbrica" ​​which marked not only the city, but was the epicenter of all the political battles in the country.
The characteristic of the streets that border the Fabbrica's wall is that they have given a home to groups of people who have come together and who collectively have built their place of life: their neighborhood, not that of the architects. A welcome that has remained as a sort of imprinting over the years: "welcomed to welcome".

Now there is less life, there is more old age and loneliness and the doors are boundaries that separate the submerged from the saved. Yet on those concrete roads the flowers have remained, albeit in other guises, they have flesh and bones, they are special people who are not easy to see and sometimes meet like Stefano Beccacece by profession radio critic. His house is at the end of the last street in the neighborhood that follows the binary axis of the "Fabbrica" ​​wall. He is visually impaired and has been living only for 4 months because his mother is hospitalized. But every morning he activates his radio app, opens his social page and starts looking for news for his radiomusik.

In recent weeks he has not even been able to go to see his mother because due to the coronavirus, non-family carers cannot enter hospitals, but without help he cannot get to the ward where he is hospitalized. He has a university culture, he passes easily from football to theoretical philosophy. His calendar is marked by football matches, for example he remembers that his mother was hospitalized on the day of the first leg of Juventus-Inter and has not yet gone out now that we are at the return match.

He is, as Francesco Marra explains, "a local", a great person. It is difficult to meet him on the streets, but on social media you can find him all day, every day. Ready to get involved because for him "every day is good to break through". Knowing that the years pass, but then it is the minutes that transform life. "Stay tuned".

Fabrizio Floris
NP june / july 2020