Removing Polyurethane With Acetone

Interview with Gabriele Del Grande

Luca Leone

© Infinity 2010 edition - This allows the free use of this material clearly citing the source

The traveler Gabriele Del Grande - so to speak, the author of the excellent Mamadou goes to die - back in the library with a new job. Another trip but this time really where you would not expect it: in the bowels of the social capital of Rome, which excludes, among the more than 6,000 homeless people who, in the general indifference, the living and suffering on their skin.
Del Grande has lived twenty days with them, the homeless, and with each other, sharing everything: pieces of roads to sleep, rare showers, little food, violence, cold, scared. As a result, Roma homeless. A trip to the city of outcasts: a book that touches to the core. It opens a new and unexpected insight into the most beautiful city in the world and its limitations and plays deeper. A report is simply not to be missed, as he explains in the preface il giornalista Stefano Trasatti, secondo cui questo libro “restituisce identità, storie e corporeità a chi, pur non avendole perdute, è come se non le avesse più. Il libro di Del Grande dimostra che un giornalismo umano e del tutto privo di cinismo è possibile”.

D. Gabriele Del Grande, quale sentimento prevale quando si vive per strada, da homeless?

R. Bisognerebbe chiederlo a un homeless. Non a un giornalista. Solitudine, frustrazione, rabbia? E perché invece non anche amore, gratitudine? Di sicuro freddo, d’inverno. Davvero non credo ci sia una risposta. Dipende dalle persone e dalle situazioni, dalle storie. La strada è un luogo, non è a social category. A suburban home to many of humanity. My way was to go on a trip to the humanity, to meet her and tell it. I've never been a homeless, houseless than one. Why the difference is not the absence of a roof, but that of the hearth.

D. What are the dangers in this life?

R. The road is not an easy place to live. It is violent, as indeed is the city that excludes, that which we inhabit, but violence is more grim, more physical. Risk of being stabbed for a bed, brought him from being a drunk or robbed by someone who has to make a dose. Yet as the despair generates a kind of struggle for survival, so also generates its own social life, a revival of the affections. I myself have had experience of both. In twenty days on the road I took a header on the nasal septum and at the same time I was welcomed as a guest of three old sea dogs of the first track of the Termini station so that they have protected and guided me throughout my journey.

Q: Why and how, suddenly, a person - sometimes a family - finds himself living as "homeless"?

A: Suddenly not so. The first consideration is to do that is related to loneliness. Easing of networks of family solidarity, friendship. The job loss is the latest problem. The problem is when you no longer have a place to return, which leads to a knock. This is increasingly true in our cities, where rents often makes solidarity a luxury. The rest just add a moment of weakness, depression. How many fifty separate at risk? Then there is the most dramatic chapter of those suffering from addiction. Back to problems created upstream of the road. Alcohol dependence, by legal or illegal drugs, that sooner or later make you make a clean sweep of social bonds and you find yourself sitting on the tarmac without really knowing how. However, anyone born on the way there.

Q: What about you? Why?

A: Well I do it's job. To travel. As Calvin said, if there is a hell of the living, and that's what we live every day. It's up to us to try everything that is not hell and make it last as long. Here, for me humanity I found the road to hell is what is not hell, and the only means I have to make it last is the written word. I was fascinated by that world when, during college, I worked as a social worker in a dormitory of Bologna. Why is looking at the edges, but it turns out the center. And throughout the elsewhere where you discover your own. And it is telling the city except that maybe you understand something which excludes the city.

Q: Now do again such an experience or do you think it was the recklessness of youth to have you moved to make that choice, however brief?

A: Judging from the experience that I continue to look for me I would say that is not an issue of age. I insist on that point. It was a trip. A recount the city from its basement. And now as then continue to travel. Indeed that was one of my first trips with the notebook in your pocket!

Q: Are you still seeing your fellow adventure you speak of in the book or you have lost sight?

A: Unfortunately I have lost all respect. Even two years because I no longer live in Rome.

Q: In the afterword of the book the writer Maksim street Cristan writes: "Gabriel has become a bum, although if you asked for it. (...) Gabri has been a bum, because that's how it works and it does not handle him any more .... " What is it?

A: You should ask Cristan ... Aside from the art of getting by, but it was prior to this trip for sure ... I was looking tramp. Sometimes slow. I remember whole hours passed on a bench watching the world go by. To see the details. Or listening. In the evening, after dinner at six at the table, we stayed until one o'clock at night telling stories of life. Here is that listening, that look, that aspect will also carry in my work I do today as a journalist.

Q: What has this experience changed your life in a tramp?

A: Not much has changed. I mean it was not a fall on the road to Damascus. Paradoxically, it was a step of continuity. And while a trial. How we could move from working in partnership, or from my training as a social worker, a job that narrative, however, stemmed from the social, in that case from the road. Already had experienced in Bologna with a photographic exhibition on the lives of road a year before my trip. Then I decided to go with the sleeping bag. Today I continue on the same street. Meet the other, far or near it, and returns the word.

D: Upcoming projects?

A: I'm very busy working on a book on the Mediterranean. Which tells the story (with a capital) in recent years through a rich mix of stories. Stories of fathers and fishermen, exiles and trade unions, and cages of cinema, of spying and mobile phones, smugglers and tourists, oranges and tomatoes, sea and desert. In a few words of the same generation that lives in the two shores and the sea that lies between.