Fiume is the name..
Grandparents are gold
..of my grandfather Giuseppe. He was a painter, mostly known around his land in the center of Italy, He was probably nicknamed by people in town or he chose by himself, this is something still mysterious that I’m discovering, because 99% of his generation passed away and it’s hard now to discover the full story of the town without a handed down on paper. Anyway, this is the story of a name.
I grew up with him and my grandmother Anna, much of my childhood, in a small town on the mountains (circa 1000mt) surrounded by oil colors, canvases, brushes, solvents, and a lot of landscapes with a common subject: the river. This why this nickname, the italian for “river” is fiume.
They were happy and carefree years in those mountains, which luckily for me I lived only in the summer, while the winter I lived with my parents down in the city where the climate is milder. Everything was not always quiet and peaceful: I was a dreamer child, beyond every limit of fantasy, my being with my head in the clouds was bullied by the kids of the village. Many times unfortunately. I never reacted to anyone, I never responded with violence to any act of bullying, I felt the blow and tried to leave everything behind my shoulders. After all, this also happened to me in other contexts: I was just a naive child who created his own parallel life in dreams, sewing it just as I wanted. All I did was do with my mind what we do today with the “Metaverses”, searching for a refuge in a parallel universe to escape from a society that is falling apart. Don’t you?
6th of February 2019, my father phoned me to warn that Giuseppe’s health conditions were getting down and probably some days left for his passing, so I immediately stopped working and run to his hospital room (2hrs of train from Rome). He was still alive, with the oxygen mask, speechless, just looking into my eyes with his tired shiny eyes. The nurses brought the dinner and I fed him, I’ll always have clear that dinner in my mind. After dinner I moved him a little bit to change position in bed, I hugged him, put the oxygen mask in a comfortable way, kissed his forehead and stayed there over visitors time until somebody pleased me to leave. I was the last he saw. During the night he probably removed the oxygen mask and decided to leave the ground, some days later the doctor said he decided to hold out alive until he saw me for the last time. I’m not religious, I don’t know if there’s something beyond this, for sure I want to keep him with me in every single artwork. It doesn’t matter if I sell something, It doesn’t matter if somebody likes me, It matters that I’m continuing his desire to leave messages through colors. I am Fiume.
