What were you working on before you met anthropologist De Martino, and what was your relationship like? How much influence did he have on your work, in terms of your thematic choices and approach to the different situations you were documenting? What kind of background research and line of enquiry led you to develop an interest in the south of Italy?

 

Some necessary premises: in this interview I shall often refer to ‘we’, to talk about myself and Lino Del Fra.[1] We have shared our life and films, our selves and documentaries, sometimes attaching both our names to them, sometimes not. I’ll be speaking about Lino, mind, not on his behalf.  

Stendalì (1960) was the third documentary I directed, after Ignoti alla città (1958) and Firenze di Pratolini (1959). Made towards the end of the Fifties – a decade marked by the agony, death and unceremonious burial of neorealism – these films should be interpreted, on the whole, as an early expression of the rejection of Christian Democratic fundamentalism (‘a great no’, as Ernst Toller puts it) which took root in Italy after April 18th, 1948. New heroes were needed to ward off the threat of a Cossack invasion in San Pietro, and these heroes were ready to sacrifice anything – except power – to protect the country. One such man was the young Giulio Andreotti, who held the post of State Undersecretary for many years, and as such was in charge of cinemas, theatres, dance halls and entertainment, since no specific ministerial role covered those areas, as is still the case today. Back then, he was far from the charming, accommodating jokester we have come to know: in the Fifties, Andreotti was a bold, arrogant leader. Disbelieve the public narrative of rehabilitation of Christian Democrats that peddles them as moderate champions of democracy: those were the years in which a Christian Democracy fundamentalist like Oscar Luigi Scalfaro publicly slapped a woman for wearing clothes that he had deemed too revealing; the same years in which the fundamentalist bishop of Prato excommunicated a young couple for choosing to get married in a civil ceremony instead of a Catholic one, prompting banks to stop trading with the groom, whose small textile business collapsed as a result – just as the groom did himself, killed off by a heart attack shortly after the events. They were the years in which Scelba, fundamentalist Minister of the Interior, coined a new word to describe intellectuals tout court: culturame, meaning a cheap, wholesale, contemptible commodity.

In this context, cinema represented one of the most contested battlegrounds: Mario Monicelli’s Con Totò e per ve Carolina suffered 85 cuts due to censorship. De Sica was publicly slandered by Andreotti for his inability to keep his family business behind closed doors, where it belonged. Pier Paolo Pasolini was brought to trial by fundamentalist Ferdinando Tambroni for his ‘obscene novel’ Ragazzi di vita. The same thing happened to Renzo Renzi for L’Armata s’agapò, a harmless screenplay about the love affairs Italian soldiers got into when they were posted to Greece during World War II; both Renzi and film critic Guido Aristarco, who had published him in Cinema Nuovo, did time in the military jail of Peschiera as a consequence. Even my own documentary, Ignoti alla città, which had nothing threatening whatsoever about it, was banned, due to censorship. It’s worth remembering, also, that the documentary form was held in higher regard back then, than the miserable cinematic subproduct it is taken for today: cinema itself had been invented by documenting a train making its triumphant entrance into a station and counted directors like Dziga Vertov, [Joris] Ivens, [Walter] Ruttman, [F.W.] Murnau, [Robert] Flaherty, [Luis] Buñuel, [Jean] Vigo, [John] Grierson and [Paul] Rotha among its founding fathers. The documentary’s genetic code relied – and still does, thankfully – on three cardinal freedoms: freedom of expression, of enquiry and of experimentation. We had these three freedoms, and how should we have channelled them, if not through the difficult pursuit of realism, as a reaction against those sentimental populist tropes which, through catharsis, depicted the issues in our society as inescapable, fatal conditions of living?

A little aside: my family, on my father’s side, comes from the South of Italy. Among the images I have carried with me since childhood are the dilapidated, forgotten landscapes of Puglia: shoeless children, trachoma, the broken backs of farmworkers, mourning women dressed in the black of grief, dialect spoken as a statement of identity and kinship. Did these personal memories play a part? Or did I only understand them, give them meaning, after reading Antonio Gramsci – a Southern thinker? What role did discovering the hegemony of the North over the South of Italy play? (The North as octopus, feeding on the South; the South reduced to a semicolonial marketplace, its bourgeois fortunes drained by the North.) 

I hope it is clear what I mean when I say that it was Gramsci who forbade us to produce folkloristic documentaries on the poverty of the South, the spectacularisation of rags, the extolling of farmers to the status of holy figures in a Neapolitan nativity play. Working with Ernesto De Martino was essential to report on the South of Italy. Our first meeting happened when Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico, the book that inspired Stendalì, was published; later, it was the turn of Sud e magia and La terra del rimorso. Nevertheless, De Martino’s teachings have had far broader effects on our work, beyond outlining the ethnological coordinates of a South that fascinated many among us documentary filmmakers: he provided us with an epistemological framework that exhorted us to peel back the layers of culture, he promoted an understanding of phenomena as complex occurrences and made us aware of the importance of interdisciplinary analysis. Though De Martino’s conception of magical phenomenon as an evocation of psychological protection in response to the malignant threats of daily life fascinated us, perhaps his most influential idea for us was his claim (with reference to [French anthropologist Claude] Lévi-Strauss) that an interest in ethnology arose ‘from the radical choice to challenge a system in which we are born and raised.’ This systemic challenge is at the heart of Stendalì (which I directed), and La passione del grano and L'inceppata by Lino Del Fra. But it was also the propelling force behind our choice to make films, to step behind the camera. In any case, our work on Stendalì, La passione del grano and L’Inceppata influenced what came after. The epistemological framework I’ve just mentioned was never quite absent from our work: to give an example, Fata Morgana and Come favolosi fuochi di artificio, shot by Lino in 1962 and in 1967, and my La canta delle marane (1962), Tommaso (1965) and Felice Natale (1964) all drew from that earlier experience. Though we did not produce any more ethnological documentaries, we remained essentially aligned to De Martino’s philosophy. Finally, to address Professor Gallini’s comments on the episodic nature of ethnological documentaries, I’d like to highlight that such an episodic nature concerned Italian documentaries on the whole, as a result of producers’ interest in short films that were likely to earn prestigious prizes.[2] Producers steered clear from pursuing any sort of linearity – either they did not see the point intellectually, or financially, lest it resulted in unpredictable, dreaded reactions from the juries of such prestigious prizes. One person who pursued that kind of linearity in ethnographical filmmaking across the whole of his career was Luigi Di Gianni – a merit for which he’s due recognition.

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"Did these personal memories play a part? Or did I only understand them, give them meaning, after reading Antonio Gramsci – a Southern thinker? What role did discovering the hegemony of the North over the South of Italy play? (The North as octopus, feeding on the South; the South reduced to a semicolonial marketplace, its bourgeois fortunes drained by the North.)"

 

What kind of relationship did you establish with the protagonists of your films, during production and following their completion? How did they relate to researchers and bystanders? Did you ever show your films in their villages? And if so, what kind of reaction did they elicit? Did you ever envision, following from Flaherty’s example, a greater degree of collaboration with the people who feature in your films? Why didn’t you focus more on their individual personalities, their experiences and day-to-day lives? Was this a choice or a result of production limitations?

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With some hesitation – because I don’t think this is about naming names – I’ll go forth and say that these ‘protagonists’ do exist and have their own paths in films. At best, they are the focal points of a story; at worst, they are modelled on pre-existing tropes essential to achieving mainstream success: the cowboy, the outlaw, the cop, the fat-ass, and so on. The latest iteration of the star-system, following the Scorsese-Spielberg model, has further narrowed the field of creative play: stars have become icons, models upon which film protagonists are articulated, with few variations, in most Hollywood-based productions.

On the other hand, a documentary focuses on an event; it is entrusted to characters who are witnesses to themselves, in the context in which the documentary filmmaker has chosen to tell the story, as an idea, a discovery, a form of protest, out of love, interest or necessity. The filmmaker needs that person – that woman, this boy – because of what they symbolise. What relationship do we have with them? It’s hard to tell: there is love at first sight, tension, intimacy. There is also, of course, an instrumental aspect – but this isn’t just on the part of the director: on both sides there is always the knowledge that the relationship between filmmaker and subject will end the moment the shoot does. There’s a mutual awareness of the unusual nature of the transaction, that it has an expiration date attached to it.

Getting to the heart of the matter isn’t easy. Let’s push the question in order to understand it better: does the documentary filmmaker exploit her characters for her own purposes? Objectively, no. The filmmaker is merely pursuing her own project, which she has begun assembling from her very first visits to the location, structuring it around facts and characters and later developing it as a subject. During this whole process, her environment ‘acts upon’ the documentary filmmaker just as much as she ‘acts upon’ the people who step in front of her camera. 

Insofar as I know there was never a showing of Stendalì in Martano, or of La passione in San Giorgio Lucano. This wasn’t due to a lack of willingness on our part, but to the dead, deadening timing by which bureaucracy operates. We’d present a documentary to the Ministry so it could be submitted to prizes, and it would be held there, in a sort of hibernation. It wasn’t unusual for a couple of years or more to elapse, from the time we presented them with a documentary to when it would obtain approval from the censorship board and a rating from the judging panel. In the meantime, we would begin work on other things; we’d be shooting a different film, or working on the postproduction of another. And even if we’d wanted to hold those screenings, there were no cinemas in Martano or San Giorgio. I have a question for you myself, in fact: do you remember how little time ago VHS players were invented?

Flaherty, bless him, had 15 months on Nanook – 15 months! Sixty-five weeks! Fifteen months under extreme conditions, fighting hostile weather, sharing everything with the Inuits on that slippery pane of ice, in arctic temperatures, eating unfamiliar food. I’m not surprised he made friends. It was only afterwards that he discovered he’d marked a historical turning point, making the first film in the history of cinema shot entirely on location. And not just that: he’d invented a genre which had made him a famous director all across the globe. I am sure he felt, at the very least, a sense of gratitude towards those people.

To conclude: to give more weight to the individual personalities of my characters, their experiences and day-to-day lives would have meant shooting an altogether different documentary. One which might have raised the opposite question: why did you give so much weight to the individual personalities of the characters, to their experiences, their day-to-day lives?

 

"There is also, of course, an instrumental aspect – but this isn’t just on the part of the director: on both sides there is always the knowledge that the relationship between filmmaker and subject will end the moment the shoot does. There’s a mutual awareness of the unusual nature of the transaction, that it has an expiration date attached to it."

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Are all the events in your documentaries staged? How much of what’s recorded on camera was still happening at the time? What elements did you choose to foreground in your cinematographic renditions of the ritualistic?

 

The events in Stendalì, La passione del grano and L'inceppata are all staged – or rather, re-staged, after much research and careful study, in which we foregrounded the elements of stylisation that are central to all rituals.

Were those rituals still ongoing? Of all the Greek-speaking villages in Salento, mourning lamentations persisted only in Martano, as a tradition whose last repositories were the women we captured on film, playing themselves. The women were aware of this, so much so that they told me: ‘When we are gone, the lamentations will be gone, too.’ Whether they still practiced it? I’m not sure, but I imagine they would have as a last salute to Nunziata and Filomena, the oldest among them. The same goes for La passione and L’inceppata – although really an ethnologist should have the last word on these matters. The idea I got was that the elders in these communities would had been ‘defending themselves from the malignant threats of daily life’ by such things as performing lamentations, the sickle ritual, or the ritual of the engagement log.[3] Their children would have witnessed these rituals often enough to memorise them before they disappeared, joining in only occasionally. Their grandchildren only had a vague, ghostly memory of them. Their great-grandchildren will have forgotten them entirely. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact time of death of magic rituals. Its killers, however, are known: television, the social state and consumerism.

"It’s hard to pinpoint the exact time of death of magic rituals. Its killers, however, are known: television, the social state and consumerism."

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What kind of issues did you have with censorship?

 

There were two different types of censorship that could be used to silence documentary filmmakers: censorship proper, and, in accordance with changing law requirements, the exclusion from mandatory screenings and prizes. Exclusion was a sort of exemplary financial punishment, aimed to deter producers from making documentaries that probed politically uncouth subjects. As for myself, I had to deal with both, with Ignoti alla città (initially banned from all screenings), Divino amore (winner of the gold medal at Festival dei Popoli, but banned from consideration for prizes) and with Essere donne, which generated a bunch of press at the time, since it had won the Special Jury Prize at the 1st All-German Leipzig Festival of Cultural and Documentary Films, awarded by a panel that featured Joris Ivens, John Grierson and Jerzy Toeplitz, but was entirely worthless according to the Italian commission judges.

It is very tempting to twist the knife in this particular wound, but I’d rather not test our readers’ patience. To sum up matters quickly: documentary filmmaking has been a protected genre in Italy – that is to say it is entirely helpless before the protectionist state ukase that subsidise it. What’s worse, it has no fan base; cinemagoers are hostile to it. This goes back to the years immediately after the war, when the ministerial commission was in charge of mandatory screenings, from which documentaries took a percentage on earnings through being paired with a full-length feature. It goes without saying that documentaries made by ‘friends’ of the Christian Democratic Party would be paired with successful films, while those made by ‘enemies’ would be screened alongside lower-earning productions. What a joy to prosper alongside Gilda – and a depressing bore to languish in a pair with A Man Escaped, despite the fact it is one of Bresson’s most celebrated works! Following the principle of least effort, documentaries made by ‘friends’ would typically feature Roman fountains, Roman pine trees, Roman sunsets dipping behind the seven Roman hills, upon Roman bridges and Roman squares, and on the banks of the river Tiber of Rome and so on and so forth. Of course cinemagoers would squarely reject that kind of canned boredom. The damage done by that screening system would be irreparable.

Once the pairing system was abolished, the law continued to subsidise documentary filmmaking through prizes, which were awarded through scrutiny by a stern commission of judges. Pine trees and fountains, arches and columns didn’t quite disappear completely. But the new process at least allowed for a new generation of documentary filmmakers to begin their careers.

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"Documentary filmmaking has been a protected genre in Italy – that is to say it is entirely helpless before the protectionist state ukase that subsidize it."

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What kind of distribution would your films typically achieve back then? And later on, what kind of audiences did they attract? Was it the kind of audience you had in mind for your work?

 

You have to bear with me for getting into specifics about Italian film law, but it is impossible to understand the history of Italian documentary filmmaking without making at least some reference to it. All film laws, from the end of the war onwards (except the latest, which in 1998 committed documentaries to the grave) stated that any theatre showing should mandatorily include a full feature and a short film. The requiem for documentaries began to sound in the Sixties, when cinema owners started to perceive them as valuable time stolen from advertisement – a bona fide theft in terms of income. And so they did away with documentaries, to free up that 10- to 12-minute slot, to be filled with a dozen ads. Cinemagoers, who – not without reason – had turned against the pseudo-documentaries of the time, suffered these changes quietly. We witness the same kind of inertia, today, with television, and its massive daily dose of ads. A question thus presents itself: did cinemagoers really ‘suffer’ advertisement, or were they by that point beginning to subscribe to the false promises of occult persuasion?

In any case, we were forced to accept the facts: documentaries were no longer screened in theatres. Ever. There was a crackdown in the Sixties. The State reacted: good heavens! We must really screen these documentaries; the law tells us so. There were police checks and some of those cinema owners were forced to pay a fine. Hooray! Our celebrations didn’t last for long, however: who could have predicted that theatre owners would get clever, finding a way around it all by cutting documentaries down to an inch of their lives – just the opening credits, a couple of scenes, the end?

It wasn’t easy to accept that state of affairs. We tried our best to see the bright side: we could shoot our movies for an ideal audience – the kind of audience we dreamed of having. As a matter of fact, we rarely encountered this mythical audience – only occasionally, at festivals or conferences, and we had to make the best of those few occasions. During an interview in Germany, I said that Italian documentary filmmakers had to operate under the radar, like drug dealers. They looked at me as if I were mad, since documentaries can count on large, affectionate audiences in Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

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What kind of production process was behind the documentaries?

 

The low cost of documentary production allowed more freedom. Production expenses don’t apply. There are no above-the-line costs, such as actors’ fees. You don’t need sound stages, costumes, make-up or stage props to make a documentary, and you can run it on a skeleton crew. Documentary producers won’t harangue you with their recipes for success and tend to be satisfied with a product as long as it’s good quality – not out of the goodness of their hearts, of course, but because they make their money from prizes, rather than attendance numbers. They can exercise a priori censorship by simply rejecting a subject when they feel it’s too ‘out there’ – and I mean socially, experimentally, rather than verging on the sexually obscene. Aside from camera stands, you can fit most of the equipment you need in the back of a small car, including standard lighting equipment. One time Lino managed to get hold of a dolly, and once I was lucky enough to have access to a helicopter – courtesy of ANAS, of course, rather than the producer.[4] You use a tiny amount of film (with a ratio of one to three or one to four – Nanouk used ten). Shooting only takes two to four days.

Mind you, the way that I’ve described this doesn’t scratch the surface of the effort that’s involved in making a documentary. "Se otto ore vi sembran poche...": we worked, 12, 13, sometimes 15 hours a day, we turned ourselves into slaves for the sake of best results. There was a certain fervour to the climax of a shoot, an unnameable something… an overwhelming feeling oscillating between exhilaration and neurosis, each time a cloud threatened to block the sun, or whenever an overloaded power supply momentarily cut off. Our biggest strength was versatility: the director was also in charge of production, a grip would help with production coordination and the coordinator dealt with the public when it was necessary to block a road or empty a square, a camera assistant might step in as an extra, and so on… each of us, in other words, worked the equivalent of two people’s jobs at the very least.

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How to decide what the right thing to do was? We solved that problem by asking a different question: did Pasolini add anything valuable to the documentary? My own answer to the question is: yes.

 

Let’s talk about audio and its relationship to images. And what was the role of spoken word? I am asking with particular reference to your choice not to translate the dialect in Stendalì.

 

There’s no real rule of thumb: establishing a relationship between sound and image is a finishing line to strive for, sometimes easy, sometimes difficult to reach through collaboration between a director and musician. Each documentary is its own thing: La briglia sul collo uses music only in the opening titles and at the end. In other of my films there is music all the way through.

If you pay attention to the opening titles of our films you’ll find that some names frequently repeat themselves. Egisto Macchi appears the most: he was a musician who could truly interpret images through music. I am using the past tense to speak about him, since he left us, out of the blue, in the summer of 1992. I was in Puglia when he died in Montpelier and the distance between us increased my feeling of emptiness and loss. We made the soundtrack of Stendalì together; it wasn’t filmed live. Once we’d finished editing the documentary, Egisto and I travelled to Martano with our sound engineer and hired a small theatre in a local parish (this was in Maglie, if I remember correctly). Once we had gathered the women who had performed the lamentations, we showed them the film, which they received with huge emotion. Macchi then directed the women to dub themselves, and I do think they did a better job than professional actors would have.

Domenico Guaccero wrote the music for my other two ethnographical documentaries, La passione del grano and L'inceppata. He wrote gorgeous music, full of ancestral echoes reminiscent of Stravinsky, which emphasised the archaic nature of the ritual.

There are no rules or laws for spoken commentaries either, except the need to pare it down to the essentials. Dialect is a different matter entirely: it is an expression of those who speak it, a mark of identity. But what about dialects that are entirely different languages, completely impenetrable like the one spoken in Stendalì? Our choice was to entrust it to Pier Paolo Pasolini, since lamentations are a kind of poetry, with far-reaching roots that run deep into the mulch of popular belief. We could have gone for a literal translation, or subtitles, but the time needed to read them would have impaired the rhythm and the timing of images. Then again, we could’ve done nothing at all, leaving the Greek chants of Salento enshrouded in their own mystery. How to decide what the right thing to do was? We solved that problem by asking a different question: did Pasolini add anything valuable to the documentary? My own answer to the question is: yes.

 

"Editing plays a different function: it’s about understanding the secret language of images and how they relate to each other; the ability to ruthlessly assess their life expectancy, to join them together according to the cinematic rhythm they suggest, or demand. Sometimes, images can hold such a variety of purposes that you have to make that choice for them."

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What kind of choices did you make in terms of editing? What about the use of sequence shots [plan-séquence] to confer a sense of time to the events represented? I’m thinking especially about the relationship between ritualistic time and cinematic time.

 

Let’s put it this way: you don’t just need a camera and film to make a movie. You need a camera, film and editing. But what is editing? To glue together a sequence of shots all you need is the right tools. Editing plays a different function: it’s about understanding the secret language of images and how they relate to each other; the ability to ruthlessly assess their life expectancy, to join them together according to the cinematic rhythm they suggest, or demand. Sometimes, images can hold such a variety of purposes that you have to make that choice for them.

 Sequence shots are something we almost never used in our documentaries; we were so absorbed by the possibilities of editing that we never really considered it. In hindsight, I think this is the crux of it: a sequence shot is a multi-frame that bypasses the need for editing, image selection and rhythm – its sequence is determined by the way the film is shot, rather than seen through the eyes of a Moviola machine. An edited sequence and a sequence shot both run on cinematic time, but a sequence shot subsumes that time, appropriates it – that’s why those who use it plan it so carefully in advance. In other words, a sequence shot is a bravura piece, a performance which uses up a lot of film, and guarantees a lot of admiration in return.

 

What compelled you to keep returning to the South? What else did you and Lino work on after Stendalì?

 

Lino and I didn’t just travel to the South to shoot ethnographical documentaries.

We went back to the South to shoot Essere donne (Cecilia Mangini, 1965), meeting the women who worked in the fields, and tobacco workers, and those who migrated north to seek work in factories, hoping for better lives.

In Fata Morgana (Lino Del Fra, 1962) we documented the arrival of Southern migrants to Milan during the years of the so-called ‘economic miracle’. We filmed them as they got off the train carrying their cardboard boxes and suitcases tied with string, and followed them as they struggled to settle in the city, poorly paid and segregated in the so-called ‘coree’.[5]

With Brindisi, ‘65 (Cecilia Mangini, 1966) we documented the impact of the newly built Monteshell petrochemical plant – a real cathedral in the desert – in the city of Brindisi, and how it had generated a new local working class, with factory workers selected not on the basis of merit but upon recommendation of eminent political personalities.

For Tommaso (Cecilia Mangini, 1969, two episodes aired on RAI) we followed a local boy on his moped runs, as he follows his dream of becoming an employee at the Monteshell plant in Brindisi.

For Comizi d’amore 80 (Lino Del Fra, 1984, 3 episodes aired on RAI) we visited workers at the Italsider plant in Taranto, who were reckoning with the evolution in gender politics that the factory work model had triggered, and spoke to the women of Lecce about abortion law.

For Domani vincerò (Cecilia Mangini, 1969, two episodes aired on RAI) we met young Sardinian men and boys born to Southern families in Central and Northern Italian towns, who sought escape from poverty and marginalisation through boxing. These amateur boxers saw fighting as a potential avenue by which to climb the social and economic ladder, and told us all about their ‘dreams of glory and revenge’.

We could’ve done even more for the South. Unfortunately, inflation kept growing year-on-year – to 15%, then 18% - devaluing the worth of money. The amount of prize money available, however, stayed the same – the Ministry never revised it upwards. So it was farewell to shooting documentaries – in the South, in the North, anywhere except Rome, one could hardly venture further than the ring road. Film costs doubled, so we switched to 16mm, blowing it up to 35mm when we went to print. In the end, our screening times were cut. All there was left to say was farewell.

We have had so many different Ministries of Culture over the years; so many different ministers have taken up their rooms in Via della Ferratella or del Collegio Romano, since the Seventies. How many lifted a finger to save the Italian documentary? The answer is zero.

So let me end this interview by remembering the golden age of the documentary. From A to Z, here are some directors who started off as documentary filmmakers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Alessandro Blasetti, Luigi Comencini, Lino Del Fra, Carlo Di Carlo, Luciano Emmer, Giuseppe Ferrara, Andrea Frezza, Ugo Gregoretti, Alberto Lattuada, Marco Leto, Carlo Lizzani, Francesco Maselli, Gianfranco Mingozzi, Elio Petri, Dino Risi, Nelo Risi, Roberto Rossellini, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Florestano Vancini, Carlo Verdone, Valerio Zurlini.

 

[1] Lino Del Fra was an Italian filmmaker and screenwriter, who was married to Mangini until his death in 1997.

[2] Clara Gallini (1931–2017) was a scholar whose research included the classical world, religious folklore, tarantism, the Italian South, and Ernesto de Martino. She was a founding member of the Ernesto de Martino International Association .

[3] The sickle ritual was a harvesting ritual which appeared as part of  La passione del grano). “Harvesting was perceived as a deliberate murder,” writes De Martino, “[…] so the ritual was intended to conceal this act of killing: harvesters would pretend they were hunting a goat instead, with one of the labourers pretending to be the animal.” In the ritual of the engagement log, under the cover of night a suitor would leave a log outside the home of the girl he liked. If the family accepted him, in the morning they would take the log inside; if they didn’t, they’d roll it down the road.

[4] Mangini may have been referring to one of two ANAS and it’s hard to tell which one from the context: one is an infrastructure committee that mostly oversees motorways, the other is a charity network.

[5]  Corees were dilapidated suburbs where Southern workers lived in poor conditions, in unfit accommodations (ie, on farms left behind by local workers who had moved to the city, or in houses they built themselves overnight).

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Livia Franchini is a writer and translator. She is the author of a poetry pamphlet, Our Available Magic (Makina Books, 2019) and a novel, Shelf Life (Doubleday, 2019). She is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing, with a focus on women’s experimental writing at Goldsmiths. She lives in London.