In a book the “madmen of the city of Genoa”
There was what on a wall in Genoa had written “Enough written on the walls of Genoa”, a lady at Acquasanta who “passed her home and was not in good shape, chased you with a hatchet”, a boy from San Martino who “once got so angry that he threw a Vespa Primavera several meters away, then realized it was his”, but there are also songwriters, politicians, journalists.
In short, there is something for everyone in the book “Repertory of the madmen of the city of Genoa” by Paolo Nori, published by Marcos y Marcos in 2017.
During his seminars, Paolo Nori, writer and translator specializing in Russian literature, traveled all over Italy, and edited a series of volumes dedicated to the ‘mad’. “Once I was in Genoa – he writes in the introduction, in his unmistakable colloquial style – to do a literature seminar and to me Genoa, I don’t know why, the people, they all seem a bit deranged and to the boys who were doing the seminar, when I read some pieces from the ‘Repertoire of the madmen of the city of Palermo’, by Roberto Alajmo, I asked the boys who were doing the seminar ‘But why don’t you do the repertoire of the madmen of the city of Genoa?’ in Bologna, and looking around me, in Bologna, I thought that even in Bologna, there was full of deranged people, and I asked myself ‘Why don’t we do the repertoire of the crazy people of the city of Bologna?’. Milan, from those of Marcos y Marcos, and while I was looking around me on the subway, I thought that even in Milan, there was full of deranged people, and that the repertoire of the madmen of the city of Milan could also be made “. Needless to say, the publishing house liked the idea, and therefore a series of volumes were born that humorously tell the ‘madmen’ of each city. The book on Genoa was written by fourteen Genoese authors who – with the coordination of Nori – met at the Officina Letteraria headquarters in via Cairoli, at the beginning of 2017.
The result was a book of about 130 pages filled with anecdotes and irony: for each ‘madman’, a different paragraph.
And then there was the street artist who had built a model of the Titanic with 350 cans of beer, a girl who had made a will before going to the Caribbean on a sailing boat, the “old professor” sung by De André in ” Old town “, but also other juicier anecdotes (and some digs). Like that of “someone who was regional treasurer of the Northern League in Liguria. After they had expelled him from the League for having transferred money and diamonds offshore to banks in Tanzania, and for fraud in electoral reimbursements he had decided to take over a business family and to be at the cash desk. “Or even a journalist” who had a blog where he wrote a review of Sunday homilies every Monday. “And then that famous anecdote of the Genoan singer-songwriter who, at a concert, had seen a flag of the Sampdoria and said “Take that rag off”.
It is up to the reader to reconstruct the events with names and surnames, but on the other hand, as Alajmo says in the introduction of his “Repertoire of the madmen of Italy”, “perhaps every city should have a repertoire of madmen, just as every city exists restaurant and hotel guides “.