If Madrid were an animal for me, it would be a coccodrillo.
The mind comes from the zebra.
It's a wolf with the skin of a lamb.
What animal would it be?
For me, Madrid is a cat.
I think Madrid could be a bear.
It's a gremlin.
It's not really an animal, but...
Madrid is a city that has accepted us
in the sense that for the work we do,
which is a theatre, we are a theatre company,
it has become a city that is much more open
from the artistic point of view compared to Rome.
We have been working as a company in Rome for 10 years,
with many difficulties in survival.
We have collected the luggage and escaped.
It's not that we have escaped, we have decided to leave.
We are out and out.
Because after so many years of work in Rome,
we have realized that it was no longer the case.
I arrived in Madrid at the beginning of the 1980s
and I left a country in Italy at a time of reflection,
at a time of a bit of sadness,
to come to a country that was reborn in a certain sense.
Franco had died 6 or 7 years ago,
and Spain was living a moment of cultural effervescence,
a moment of change.
The country was changing and there was space to do new things.
There was space to participate in a new cultural life,
of a country that had the most young political class in Europe,
a country that was transforming.
Well, at that time you started working with young people,
with people from the move to Madrid,
people like Pedro Almodóvar, the director of cinema,
that no one knew at that time.
I have been in Spain for 47 years.
I came here from Fiat to export,
as the head of the commercial section.
I made some money, but it was a life that was not satisfactory
from its point of view.
In my social relations, even if I was handsome, etc.,
I felt uncomfortable, I felt that I really didn't do anything.
There was a factory in the United States, in Cusbey, Oregon,
that gave courses, more or less, for several months,
to become instructors of the art of happiness.
I stayed there practically a month and a half.
I learned, what I had to learn as a personal growth technique,
and I was able to apply it.
I arrived in Madrid with the hope that the first year was for studies,
but I didn't have any intention of continuing to be a doctor.
My aspiration was to join a small dance company,
independent, and start working as a dance teacher.
With a group of friends, people known in various courses,
we set up a small group, so we present ourselves to the competitions.
Here in Madrid I am a lot of people,
the choreographer and the marathon dance,
which is like 24 hours of non-stop dance.
I came to this conclusion at the age of 30,
and I say, poor but very happy.
I came to Madrid because, well, as many people do,
I came for a girl.
I have been working here for three years in IBM,
and I take care of business partners,
which are the distributors who sell their computers in Italy.
At the same time, I take care of art.
I try to do something that allows me to express myself.
I have created a series of illustrations,
I am creating a plot of Italian artists,
because I want the Italian art to have some scenarios to express itself.
It is called Complotto 39, because I like the idea of the plot,
because the plot has a bit of a bias,
and then Complotto 39, because it is our preface.
I am in Madrid because I am part of a historical fact,
part of the Civil War.
My father, who was an officer of the Mussolini Army,
was in Africa and was sent by Mussolini to help Franco in the Civil War,
and he came here to command a platoon in this war.
After the war, he decided to stay as a consul,
and he stayed here.
He made his choice to live in Spain.
Life is very strange.
I often joke that I ended up here,
trying to escape from the military service.
If I were to go to Spain,
which I could have done,
because I was 20 years old in Spain,
they would send me to the military service,
which I absolutely didn't want,
and I was there.
At some point I found a place in Precario,
what is today Precario,
in the consulate of Allora,
which was already in this building.
I come from a family of gallerists.
I studied philosophy,
and at some point, thanks to my studies,
I moved to Europe,
to live first in England,
then in Germany,
and so on.
I was studying,
I was still working in the restoration,
where I had to live in some way.
At some point my father told me,
he asked me the question,
what do you want to do in life?
So, at the age of 23, 24,
I set up my first restaurant.
But at the end of two years,
I was a bit stupefied about pizza,
I wanted to progress on restoration,
so I decided to set up the Sicilian side.
After a few months,
I went to do a master at Turin,
at the end of the master,
I did the stage with which they took me
to work as a graphic publisher
and a co-writer.
I worked there for six months,
it was going very well,
because the city,
the city,
the city,
the city,
the city,
the city,
the city,
the city,
the city,
the city,
the city,
the city,
the city,
the city,
I went there for six months,
because the city was fun,
the job was going very well,
but,
the problem was that there was a job
as a precarious person,
so,
since every three months
I had to renew the contract
and had to live under stress
with a normal scholarship,
in the end,
and at some point
a train passed
which was a study bag
to do research at the university
of Madrid,
for six months.
The thing is, after finishing the study,
I find a job in a marketing company
with a certain contract at a certain time.
And from there, the situation starts to move.
But Madrid could be the city,
because in the end they grew up in a generation
so a certain contract at a certain time
seems to be something you can't have,
while in the end it should be a right for all of you.
Our family starts a relationship with Spain in the 1950s,
because my Italian grandfather came to Spain
and started working here, with a job I had,
a seafood factory, export of seafood in the United States,
and also import of machinery for the industry here in Spain.
So when they ask me what I feel,
if Italian or Spanish,
I remember that, since I was little,
they always asked me questions.
And I always answered politically correct,
because it was like asking who I liked the most,
the father or the mother.
I said, all two are the same.
What do you feel the most?
Spanish or Italian?
All two things.
But now I have to say that with the age I am now,
I no longer feel politically correct,
I have to say that I feel Spanish,
but I feel more Italian.
I was curious because I spent all my adolescence
and all the years of my youth
trying instead to get away from the Italian community,
here in Madrid, because I wanted to be independent,
I wanted to follow the family culture.
But instead, with time,
I felt the need to find this
lack of love, which is actually culture.
I think that there are two countries,
Italy and Spain,
apparently similar, but very different,
but even the language is very different.
If a reality thinks of us,
Italian is the language of the Vatican.
It is the language of diplomacy.
Instead, Castilian is a much more direct language,
much clearer.
I think that the Spaniards are much clearer in this sense,
they are surprised by this kind of surrealism
of things that happen in the beautiful country.
Surely, the impression that we have in terms of Italian
arriving in Spain is that of having
that the Spaniards are much more direct than us
in the way they express themselves.
They are also physically more direct,
they are also visually more direct than us.
The first image of Madrid that surprised me
was arriving at the university,
the fact that with all the professors
we had a much closer relationship,
that you were talking,
giving your arrival, and you said,
good evening, can I introduce myself?
He answered me, how do I call you?
Like, this is my fault,
and he said, no, you can introduce me to you,
I am your grandfather.
I also notice the linguistic level,
that when I have to talk about something
that I like or that affects me,
I speak Spanish,
I dream in Spanish,
I make the list of purchases in Spanish.
I can think in Spanish and Italian
indifferently.
It is work in English,
so my mind is practically divided into three.
My success was almost immediately to dream in Spanish,
which is one of the strongest experiences
that can happen,
but I was always in the middle of a dilemma,
so, like that.
My father, from a good Sicilian,
he continued to speak Italian
with strong Sicilian fluency all his life,
and he was able to establish a balance
that is difficult,
so he continued to speak Italian,
we responded in Spanish in Spanish.
The Italian was losing,
relatively, to be losing.
So I decided to keep him strong.
I bought the parabolic antenna,
I put it on,
and every day I feel
faithfully two hours of television in Italian.
I remember that certain parts of Madrid,
in fact,
Madrid was a city in the 70s and 80s,
in the 80s it began to explode.
In Madrid we find that the structures
were made with current creditors,
because they were made some 10 years ago,
5 years ago.
Clearly this makes a big difference
in the quality of life you can have in this city.
It is a city where, even if there is a lot of chaos,
I think it is a city where many things can still be done.
There is a lot to do,
and it is an open city,
with changes,
with positive changes,
sometimes negative changes,
sometimes they lose very important values,
they throw down houses,
architecture with a huge ease
and with great dissatisfaction
for those we call
tradition, culture and art,
but it is positive that the structures
are able to move,
and I think it is a place where
many things can be done,
a place where you can
have your own action.
The Spain I lived in,
from the student,
combative, from the left,
was a Spain
that had not yet made the accounts
of its own past.
It is a Spain that does not understand
well if it has overcome
the hatred and hatred of the civil war
or not.
Towards the end of the 80s,
Spain has overcome this thing.
Today,
today it has actually overcome it,
it has made a step forward,
but measuring in terms of
social advancement,
Spain has made the discussion
on accepting homosexuality,
the social marriage,
a modern vision of adoption,
of the protection of women,
of the protection of minorities,
of the accounts with the protection
of racial, ethnic and cultural diversity,
then it can be more or less agreed on
how they have solved this problem.
But otherwise, there has been a discussion
and there has been in Spain
a social decision
on what kind of state they want to have.
I see Spain as a country
with a very different political class,
perhaps closer to the citizens,
closer to the civil society.
It is noticeable that it is a nation
that has come out not very much
from a dictatorship.
Although we have been there for 30 years now,
people continue to like to be on the streets,
to live in bars,
to live on the streets,
to live life in the sun.
Without a doubt,
what struck me since the beginning of Madrid
is the people,
the open people,
the people with a lot of desire to live.
And images like those of the old man
who left the house,
going to take the cane
with the lid if it is difficult to see in Italy.
One of the points of Madrid
that I still have close to my heart
is the heat of the field.
The field is a magnificent park,
where I used to go every morning
on horseback before going to the office.
They had lent me a horseback,
I knew what I liked,
a horseback.
And so coming down to Madrid,
galloping in these lanes
that were there then,
I still think,
it was really magical.
The city of San Nicolás,
which they still called,
they still call the Italian city,
where an Italian priest
had read our matrimony with his wife.
What do you want from this calmness,
from this cold body,
from these years of pain?
Sure, I normally serve the table in Spanish,
the Sunday, in Italian.
Now it is not that I do so distantly for myself.
I also remember more or less the Italian table,
because I had to learn it,
not the one in Spanish,
which I always had to control the table.
The Italian one sometimes makes it easier for me.
And then here we basically had the possibility
to have more time to reflect,
to plan our future,
because we didn't have it in Italy.
Italy is a bit sleepy.
It's beautiful.
As an Italian,
who sees Italians a bit from afar,
I'm sorry that sometimes
their image is not as positive as it should be,
because I believe that Italians
continue to be a people
with a great imagination,
with a great ability to invent,
to give many ideas
and to change the course of history
in a positive way.
We all laugh at the Italian political theater.
And at the economic level,
we are a great nation
that supports the work of
small and medium-sized companies.
We leave a big mark on the big company,
but we continue to raise our heads,
because in general,
Italians are always used to
working as a worker,
to keep working,
to keep moving forward.
A metaphor of Italy,
in my opinion,
is a beautiful Ming vase,
very well made,
it's stupefied,
but it's completely empty inside.
I see a lot of images in Italy.
In Spain, I see a nice piece of creta
still to be modeled.
I see Italy as a country
with difficulties,
where it is very difficult to live
and to arrive at the end of the month.
And above all,
I see my city,
where there is no one left,
of the friends who have worked with me
when I was in my age.
There is no one left,
either in Milan or abroad.
Who, as soon as he left Italy,
is often very critical,
whereas who,
who has been missing for a long time,
has a completely different idea of Italy,
is much more benevolent,
much less critical.
My husband has left America and he doesn't write to me.
Maybe he went to America,
if he found him in America.
I have found him in the country.
America is no longer called America.
America is the ruin of this house.
There is no double nationality legally,
which hurts me a lot.
But there is a legal vote.
There is no double nationality,
but each country
independently recognizes the citizenship.
I am sorry,
and I hope that I will never get into the situation of having to choose.
The fact of voting,
unfortunately, it's true,
we lie to each other and then we don't go to vote.
The last time I voted I was 19 years old.
I have not voted anymore.
As for citizenship,
I have never been able to change it.
I have always thought that
that one is born what he is,
and he feels good for what he is.
I feel good for Italian,
and then in Spain there was a lot of citizenship for Italians.
Other than that, when you arrived in Spain at the beginning of the 80s,
there was a very small Italian community,
we didn't have many Italians who were in Madrid,
so people looked at you with some sympathy.
Listen to the 10 dialects,
listen to the Venezuelan one,
which uses the S instead of the F.
Listen to the croquina passing by,
and you write to me, ok, like this,
Swedish, of course Spanish,
of course, Italians, an Italian casino.
Anyway, today the situation is very different,
because there are always more Italians who escape from Italy
and come with us to live in Madrid.
So, in the end I deal with some relationships with the business partners,
that is, with the...
Well, I'm surprised.
The business partner is like that, in Italian.
Good morning, good evening, good night.
I'm going home,
and again on the same day it's worse than I imagined.
I'm bored,
I'm bored, I'm bored.
