Here I am, twenty years later. I hear the steps, the voices, I smell the scents of times past and again, for a moment, I see a child with my name and my face. I who lived a stone’s throw from here, and here I used to play and hide. It’s been a long journey through the night. It was just like when our football ended up landing here and nobody would want to come and collect it because you could hear sighs coming from the end of the corridors and from the dark rooms behind the barred windows. But that child is gone now, and so is the fear.

Like a blindfold over the eyes of a condemned man, vegetation has covered this building that has been forgotten for over half a century. It is full of ghosts here. You can hear them whisper from the cracks of the crumbling walls, or from the gates where they exchanged passwords, you can see their shadows slip away behind you in the pale rectangles of light the floor has captured from the rusty bars. Soldiers, they were. Before Papal rule, then the French, the Piemontese and lastly the dreary artillery men of the king. On days like these, when you can see winter turn its back and leave slowly, they would come to town whistling through the alleys, carrying wild flowers and small change for the laundry women of the rione San Pietro, in exchange for a smile and a fresh uniform. Perhaps they even took some of them away, to the muddy plains, away from the coasts of their childhood years, from the sound of the bells, from the smell of the sea that rose up the cliffs carried on warm air, or else, some of them never left again and decided to pass the rest of their days in the belly of this sleeping dragon by the sea, blending the crashing sound of the shells with that of the waves, to forget about war and remember themselves. Perhaps the man that wore the stripes I am treading on is the old man seemingly coming this way, leaning on his cane. He is slowly walking up the hill, he is old like the fog, and doesn’t seem to be in any hurry.