The house by the sea

"They tell me: if you find a sleeping slave, don't wake him, maybe he's dreaming of freedom. But I answer: if you find a sleeping slave, wake him and talk to him about freedom." These are the words of the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran who compares life without freedom to a body without spirit, because captivity erodes the banks of hope day after day, leaving resignation free to spread without encountering obstacles. The only lifebelt to avoid drowning in the depths of emptiness is the mind, which allows you to escape from solitude even for just a few moments.

In his letters from prison, Nelson Mandela dedicates poignant words of love and struggle to his wife Winnie, also an activist and prisoner. What a simple and powerful means writing is, capable of crossing the sea around Robben Island prison and preserving the spirit of the man who would one day break Apartheid. If Dostoevsky states that the degree of civilization of a society is measured by its prisons, the news pages of our days increasingly tell of overcrowded prisons, of prisoners who see suicide as the only way out from a condition of non-life, dramatic data also confirmed by the latest report of the Antigone association, which every year analyzes dozens of penitentiary institutions throughout the country, indicating the need for timely action. The latter is the task of politics, of course, but we can all generate a wave of collective solidarity towards the last of our society. Maybe flying on the wings of a simple guitar, until reaching a cell from which you can only see the sea and a white house in the middle of the blue. With La casa in riva al mare, published in 1971 in the album Storie di casa mia, Lucio Dalla gives us a real pearl of melodic pop, making us immediately love the protagonist, a prisoner who for his entire life, looking at the sea from behind bars, lives an imaginary love with the woman who looks out the window every morning and whom he decides to call Maria. Every day he dreams of being free and of reaching his beloved, letting his imagination run wild on the border between hope and madness. In silences as long as the years, he repeats his promise: «I come to you, Marì». His life is consumed like this, confined within four walls, until almost without realizing it he finds himself old and alone in the middle of the blue, his eyes no longer able to see beyond the bars.

Perhaps the singer-songwriter was inspired by the beloved landscape of the Tremiti Islands, which returns in several songs, one above all Com’è profondo il mare, one of his unforgettable successes. Certainly in La casa in riva al mare we hear an introspective and delicate Dalla, sensitive as always to listening to the society that surrounds him. And that ultimately we are all the same, inside and outside of prison, the Dalai Lama reminds us: «We are all potential criminals, and deep down those we put in prison are no more evil than any of us. They have given in to ignorance, desire, anger, diseases that we too are affected by, albeit to a different extent. Our duty is to help them heal».


Mauro Tabasso
with Valentina Giaresti
NP November 2024