not rent to the south. 
This year we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy, yet the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was one of the most prosperous European states did not know any migration. Its strategic location in the Mediterranean and its policy that makes it independent was contrary to the interests of Savoy and the other European powers of the time. The ratio of debt, with interest, and gross domestic product was 16% compared to the Piedmont where amounted to 75%. The first mass emigration it was with the Northern Piedmont, Veneto and Friuli regions, and were the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Only since 1880, after the forced unification cost in loss of life, oppression, violence against women by the troops the southern Piedmont and theft of his rich treasures of the Kingdom of Naples; million Calabria, Campania, Puglia and Sicily were forced to seek fortune overseas. The other migration with the most recent economic boom has, in the early '60s, but that is a totally internal migration, not free of all problems connected with it that we in the South we have drawn up a few years ago. We come to mind the days when slaves migrated south in implacable they encountered signs of entry to certain public places Po as a warning discriminatory sub-racial and territorial: "No entry for dogs and southerners." And when the poor fellow, tired of sharing his bed with his comrades of the yard, she placed herself in search of a dwelling to accommodate the family finally left the country, often stumbled in other signs with the words: "Do not rent to Southern because we considered dirty and uncivilized, used to grow tomatoes in the bathtub. Many years have passed but many prejudices are really die hard: the North are intolerant of the South, the South, in turn, refer to the Romanians, Chinese, Africans, and it seems that we have forgotten altogether when we were foreigners. Of course, that exile is really bad. Dante says in Canto XVII of Paradiso, about exile, he lived the last years of life: "Thou shalt prove how salt / lo bread others, and how hard a road / going down and 'l up another's stairs. " Good Life
maestrocastello
Post Scriptum. I spotted this story on the same topic Silvana Perotti us today that I think is very significant, because a woman tells the hardships of the northern migration of a woman in the south, because with the theme of the film: "Welcome the south "that the protagonist will live in person and also because it depicts in a wonderful and meaningful with a few strokes (very good writer Perotti) the hardships of women migrant from the south who spit blood but not give up, knowing that he had that one chance for redemption and that, vaccations of his brothers, certainly you do not let escape. Read the story takes five minutes of your time, but I assure you it is really worth.
; (No rent to the South)
Silvana Perotti
"Franca , Franca ", the meeting called Run along the endless corridor. Four species of gorilla I stand in the way and keep me wringing her arm behind her back. She stopped suddenly, looked at me a moment and order: "Let her, it's all right."
Then he calls me, along with a happy smile and dark eyes in amazement: "Valeria! But really you? God, how much time has passed. What are you doing here? ". I do not have time to reply, urges that one of the thugs, turning to her with a mixture of affection and respect, "Mr. Judge, are waiting." "I'll be right" answers, and closing the hand in a tight and strong, he says, "Sorry, I must be in Magistrate's Court within ten minutes. But I want to see you again. " It starts with a brisk pace, followed by five bodyguards.
I find myself alone in the hallway with a thousand memories that crowd the mind. Almost unconsciously I look at one of the open windows that let in and I see its a sticky Franca down the staircase leading to the busy road. The fixed while the car is going to get reinforced. Felt as if my eye looks up and our eyes meet. He smiles and greets me waving a hand.
At that moment a terrible roar fills the air and shakes the foundations of the building. The backlash of the explosion threw me to the ground, surrounded by broken glass and debris. I feel hurt all over and I pass a hand over his face: the withdrawal of dirty blood. When I can get back on my feet, seized by a horrible premonition, I grab the window with his hands and ripped open the car looking through the eyes of France.
In its place is just a smoke-filled crater.
blacks Her hair, eyes and olive-skinned blacks. It was a strange girl, so different from the children that I used to attend. Lean a thin sharp, dark eyes and white teeth always enraged, in a rarely opened his mouth into a smile full of shyness and reticent. He spoke very little and when he spoke I do not understand, even if the mother said, who spoke Italian.
came to our house that same year in which began to appear these strange signs, whose meaning was obscure to me, "Do not rent in South," was written on a sheet of white paper hanging close to the number of buildings.
"Who are the Southerners?" I asked Dad one day. I must have been seven years.
"People like us," he told me without giving me any other explanation. In my imagination, however, "the Southerners" were mysterious characters of which he was forbidden to speak. I thought they belonged to a sect, like the one I had read about an awesome comic, made up of people who gathered to burn crosses and sacrifice children.
Sometimes, when I accompanied my mother to the grocery stores in the neighborhood, he felt the shopkeepers speak in dialect. But they do not call them "southern." They called them, "terun.
Unconsciously I began to hate all forms of racism: I had those nasty shopkeepers, with their white aprons thesis on heavy stomachs, with their faces shiny with sweat and the smell of their cheese and sided with the 'South', which accusing them of being dirty, ugly, ignorant and spoil us with their presence our beautiful city.
finally found out who they were in one day in February. I was at the station with his mother to hang a cousin who came to study in Turin and a long train carriages along with many of the men went down badly dressed and shod with strange hats on their heads. They dragged all the horrible cases related with string and among them there was some woman dressed in black with a shawl pulled over her head. His eyes were dark and fearful, like hungry dogs, and looked around lost with his hands closing the collar of the shrunken jackets.
"I'm Southern," Mother said, answering my dumb question "is to work in factories." "Why do not you bring your coat?" I asked, surprised by their thin clothing. "They did not" cut short his mother. From that day on, every time I read the sign "Do not rent to the south," I cried because I thought of those poor people without homes or coat.
Franca came to my house with his mom. His mother was a cleaner. And while cleaning, singing. I envied it to him, his mother. Mine was tough and wiry and always cried. It's mom scolded France for not cleaned enough. "They are not like us - he said - they put us in the bathroom and planting parsley and sleep in one room. And then they are unwilling to do anything. "
I remember once he said these things on the phone while listening to Frank. And I remember the tears that rigarono his dark cheeks. To comfort her I brought my favorite doll, the one with curly hair and blacks who bend to close his eyes. But Frank shook his head and pointed his finger an old blonde doll. I put it to him in my arms and squeezed tightly Franca and ran to hide in a corner for fear of being scolded. I asked my mother permission to give her the doll blonde, but my mother forbade me in the evening and complained to Dad: "You've got to say" woman "not to take more behind that little girl. I do not like games with Valeria. " Upset by the unnecessary evil, terrible impiantai a whim and I won. Thus began my friendship with Franca.
Since then we spent the afternoon talking. Prior to gestures, whether from shyness or because Franca used many terms that I did not understand, then gradually in words, because frankly, going at school, he began to speak in an Italian closest to mine.
so I knew that was coming from a small town in Calabria and had four children. Two smaller and two larger than her. His father was a laborer in one of the many shipyards that had risen to rebuild new homes in the "holes" open by bombs. They all lived in two rooms with no bathroom and no heating in an old palace in the city center. They lived one of those apartments was then called "a gallery." A long row of windows that overlook a courtyard that opened onto a balcony that had a never-ending process on the bottom. A process that served at least six families. The sun never went in those homes. We came in rather large rats and hordes of hungry beetles came in droves from the pipes.
Franca had a great fear and told me that the night hid his head under the covers not to see them walk in single file on the wall next to the sink every night as his mother put the cot where he slept. His father had taken a cat to chase away the rats, but one night they found him dead. The mice were killed.
Even I had many toys, but Franca my room looked like Toyland. Remember that the plates stroked for hours of service kitchen in miniature that I had brought Baby Jesus. He asked me who was the Child Jesus and when I told him he had widened his eyes dark and I had explained that his country was the witch, and put the gifts in the stocking hanging on, but that she was carrying only a few nuts and a handful of figs dried. When I asked if it was bad shock brown hair and he responded with bitter gaze of an adult, "No, I am poor."
Her eyes were laughing when he spoke of his country. He talked for hours. He told me that in summer the sea became blue enamel. I've never met anyone else who could describe the color of the sea with your hands. Or that the houses. Who were all white and climbed on a hill overlooking the sea. He never cold to his country, he said, his eyes lost in the fog of the road. And I was looking at her with wide eyes when I told the networks full of fish darting and diving from the rocks overlooking the sea or prickly pears stolen property in the "master," a sort of master of the country. And his mother would pick the olives for the "ladies" and always had black fingernails that are not even cleaned with a brush to scrub the laundry. And his father, who had killed the sheep when he cried slapping his fists on his forehead. Then he had killed his brother, who had witnessed the murder of a farmer who did not want to give the land. Two days
After burying his brother, had climbed on the train to Turin with a cardboard suitcase. Inside were a stack of newspapers to protect from the cold and a dream. A future without sheep killed for their children. Then the impact to the city. Gray walls, closed faces, prejudices, an unknown language. A dormitory in the yard from dawn to dusk, a dish of cooked pasta on a reverse case, a cot frozen, the money sent to the post office in the country. After many months, a Sunday morning, Frank's father went to the icy shore of the train from Reggio Calabria: the last carriage, third class, his wife and children came down with two suitcases dark. Inside was all they had. Together a mortgage for the future.
France and I grew up together and joined us over the years a bond that nobody could break. Franca
soon turned into a teenager with a dark and disturbing beauty. We formed a strange pair, me with my colors faded and the features just sketched and Franca Mediterranean with his face on a body high and dry.
remember the hours spent talking, locked in my room. My speeches were simple: children, marriage, maybe teaching. Like my dreams. Franca had no dreams. His were determined. He wanted to return to his people, to help her. Almost felt responsible for the hunger, the resignation of the abuses that forced its people to emigrate for a loaf of bread. He spent his nights bent over certain volumes of economy and law, the weight of which upset my ignorance. "What do we know?" I asked. "What you do not need to know," he replied.
She was angry with his brothers who did not want to study and living the city as a ghetto in which to maintain the customs of the country. "They are people like them - accused them one day - they did attack those signs to people like you."
Meanwhile, he continued living in the house on the balcony, she helped her mother to look after the boys of the family and Meanwhile he was studying with a tenacity that surprised her teachers, breaking their own prejudices. And in the study, as in all things he was doing, put anger and pride and never tied to anybody. Apart from me, had no friends.
even with his family, tied more. But he loved with a love visceral, instinctive. As if to protect it. And it was strange to see that fair head bend in the afternoon to help her mother clean the floors of my house.
How many times I've relived that scene and I regret not helping her, did not understand his humiliation. But in my stupidity I assumed the world was divided between those who make things and who pays to have them do.
But she wanted me. Maybe I even pitied. He took as a privilege of the hardness of his life, because I gave her the determination that, growing up in cotton wool, I never possessed.
Until the day his father died falling from a scaffold in the yard where she worked. I remember Frank's funeral. Dressed in black from head to foot, without a tear on his face turned to stone, supported her mother and cried with a loud cry, in a typical lament of women in the south and thousands are mourning the violent death of their men. When I went over to console her, pushed me too. "We have been successful. They killed him, " he said. Since then I have not met any more.
He left the same evening. For a while, 'I asked news of her mother, then lost sight of her, too. It had dismissed the memory, as often happens with people that you were expensive, but you're sure never to see. Although at times his lack ached like an old wound, one that suddenly give you excruciating pangs.
few years after his escape, my father was transferred to the south from where he worked with the task to open an office in a town in the south.
The impact of that city, so different from mine, it was terrible. At first I hated him, unable to accept a reality so different from what I was used. I hated the noise, traffic chaos, voices, that dialect is so different from mine and even the bright light that hurt my eyes.
Then gradually I learned to love it. To love the warmth of its people so capable of making me feel 'at home'. Maybe because I did not find signs reading "Do not rent to North," but only open doors. And the sea tales of France, with the sun beating down on the cliffs. And the scent of jasmine and summer by thousands of lizards and the dark alleys and cathedrals Sometimes storied buildings and overflowing with history.
never returned to live in my town. A little 'dragged by the events of life, a bit' cause I love living here.
me are attuned to the rhythms of climate, the atmosphere of celebration and all of the tragedy that lies on this city. Perhaps they've become part too. But sometimes I still hurt the roots. Those uprooted long ago, suddenly, with one of those raps that do not feel pain.
The older I get more and some days I am assailed by a vague melancholy, as if a voice said to me to go look for my childhood there, where the hills are rolling and the frost of dawn lit the fields under the morning sun. I would like to review the red maple in my garden and look for the dim light of street lamps in the fog. I miss the lilting dialect of my people and the arc of the mountains the first snow whitened. I would be affected by the scent of narcissus in the meadow at the bottom of the valley where the river rushes. O hear the bell cows returning from pasture alp, where my grandfather was born. And along the arcades in December, and then stop, his arms laden with colorful packages, to take tea in a hot room with gilded mirrors.
Staring at the sea blue enamel, from the terrace of the house where I live, I understand the yearning finally moving into the eyes of France. His anger. His eyes suddenly lost in a void. The land where you are born is imprinted in the soul, and how you can leave it, avoid it, even deny it, made a new life, other memories, other friends, other loves, she will remain on as a brand, a proudly as a disgrace. And the wheels without even realizing it at any horizon that you see in every person you meet. As a lover lost. Whose memory never lets you down.
But here is where my son was born. And in his character are the characteristics of the two lands that have generated. The joy of the southern sun and the shadows of the mists of my land. The volcanoes of anger and sudden icy silence of the snowy peaks. Hidden behind a face slap and a heart that hates injustice.
Today I accompanied in court to testify against a group of misfits who have attacked a Nigerian to a bus stop. The night it happened because he came home at three o'clock, a black eye, how the sweater, the marks of the blows given and taken, uncontrollable anger in his voice.
"Those bastards - split between his lips stammered - the bastards! They stopped the car and are jumped suddenly. Dirty black, shouted, return to your country while the beaten and bruised. He screamed more and more entertained. They laughed, those beasts. I wanted to kill them, I threw in half. Luckily, the police came. "
Then he asked me, with his clear eyes clouded with anger: "Why, mamma, why?" And I saw him as a child would pick up the wounded puppies.
I do not know, Nicola. Forgive me, "I answered. Only later I realized he had apologized to my son ugliness, injustice, hatred, ignorance, cruelty of men. I had no answers. I do not ever find. I can not understand the reasons of those beasts, those that dealt with my son even if he could kill. Just as my father could not explain, many years ago, the reasons for that sign hanging next to the number of the door of my house, "Do not rent to the south."
But I understand his reasons when he decided to testify against these criminals, looking in the face. Yet, cowardly, I wanted to shout at him not to, I wanted to protect him as a child, and ran into my arms because something had frightened and it was enough to make him a stroke back a smile.
But I could not tell him anything because I was the one that I taught that all men are equal, and no matter what country they are born, or the color of their skin or the language they speak or the God they believe. I told him that hatred for the different is the father who created the monsters of history: slavery, racism, war. And that still produces them because the monsters have no memory.
's me that when he was still young, I told the story of Franca and I explained that in the world there will always be someone who washes the floor and someone else pays to have them washed. It is said that the best of the two is the one that has the money to pay.
was to accompany Nicholas to testify that I saw Frank at the bottom of that long corridor of the courthouse. B. Franca, a judge assigned all'antimafia. nsapevole to have a single chance of redemption that does not leave some escape.
(Silvana Perotti)
First place prize at PEN PUBLISHING AUTHOR.
