He had been standing there for the longest time, hands behind his back, staring at the roadworks in the square. It was summer, hot, and dust rose up every time the shovel dropped its load of rocks and dirt. The tireless worker kept digging. He was filling a wheelbarrow that another worker would later carry away. Marco had always wondered how his life as a pensioner would have been. Whether he too would have ended up stunned, staring at roadworks. “Well, here I am,” he thought drying the sweat on his forehead with the handkerchief he obstinately wore in his breast-pocket. Twongg…Twangg...Twongg! Maybe the sound of upturned earth would eventually prepare him for death. Too early to think about it? Well, after all he was almost 68. He didn’t look his age, no, but lately certain thoughts had become recurrent. Like the dreams… Especially since he had quit his job a couple of years before. He could not understand the emptiness. He had looked forward to regaining possession of his own life, a life that his work at the newspaper had sucked away, day after day, a life that now appeared to him as bare as the scaffolds those workers were building. Well, of course, there was Bianca. His daughter was now 27, and had replaced him at the newspaper thanks to his diplomatic effort. Thanks to all the waiting and all the slammed doors he had endured just to plead for her sake. Now the roles were reversed. From the moment she had settled in her new job, Bianca had become a sort of second wife to him. Or a mother. Where are you going, daddy? Be careful, you’ll catch a cold, daddy. Keep yourself occupied, daddy… So here was the second big truth he had learned from his life as a pensioner: after understanding that roadworks were popular among old men because they were a metaphor of their own burial, now Marco discovered that the regression to childhood brought forth by old age was not merely subjective. No, it was the others, your own children, who determined it by suddenly considering you unable to take care of yourself. And out of weakness, or rather convenience, you ended up getting used to it. Having someone do things for you wasn’t that bad after all. The continuous calls were annoying, but what if you got sick and no one were around to help? No, no. Age definitely had its positive sides, especially for a man like Marco who did not enjoy taking care of himself. He looked around and took in Genoa, the city which had become his home. Facades of aristocratic palaces undergoing restoration, construction sites on every street corner: big things were happening in the capital city of the Cisalpina Democratic Republic. Cisalpina Democratic Republic, this was the complete name of the curious abstraction which had come to include a big portion of north-western Italy. The worst had passed; the years when the unfortunate inhabitants of Piedmont, Liguria, Emilia-Romagna, Lucchesia and Lunigiana had to fight austerity and primary goods’ shortage were gone. Heroic years that, after the inglorious end of Fascism, had left Italy broken into at first two, then three parts. Fifty-five years of Regime and suddenly Ciano was not there anymore. The former Count of Castellazzo had been a peculiar fascist leader. Faithful son-in-law of Benito Mussolini in the early days, implacable opponent of the Nazi Germany later, he had persuaded the Duce to remain neutral in the August of 1939. A decision reasserted by Mussolini in the June of 1940 when Hitler’s tanks were already in Paris. And that, Marco thought, marked the beginning of Galeazzo Ciano’s fateful rise. Wasn’t he the man who had prevented Italy from being involved in the most terrible war of all times? Italy’s Foreign Minister represented the ideal candidate for the succession to Mussolini when the Duce unexpectedly died of a heart attack in the August of 1944, only a month after Adolf Hitler perished in von Stauffenberg’s bomb attack. The defeat of Germany and the incumbent peace led Ciano straight to the top thanks to a pact among Fascism’s highest gerarchi. Grandi, Bottai and Pavolini, moderates and radicals all agreed to lay the destiny of the country in the hands of a man they considered ductile. Because neutrality had given Italy the ultimate gift: a future. Ciano lived up to expectations, at least initially. His good nature and old-fashioned ways settled all contrasts but ended up anesthetizing the country, shielding it from everything included progress, thus consigning Italy to the fringes of Europe. Until 1975, a fatal year. The effect of Francisco Franco’s death in Spain was similar to uncorking a bottle of warm champagne. The foam came out in spurts. Ciano found he had grown old and tired, and new protagonists prepared to make an entrance on the political scene. Marco’s thoughts went back to her once again. As they had in the past twenty-nine years…Maria de Carli, the shiny star in a by then dull fascist sky. At the end of 1975 she was the most extremist fascist gerarca. A former follower of Julius Evola, she had come closer and closer to Nazism. In spite of her unpopular beliefs, she had easily climbed up all of the steps leading to power. Ciano himself, intimidated by her charisma, gave her more and more room, while at the same time accentuating the pseudo-democratic traits of his government, until Fascism became a post-Fascism with a Parliament, elections and political pluralism. For a while he managed to walk the tightrope, but he was bound to fall. He took the plunge when he was caught in crossfire: on one side terrorists’ bullets targeting the gerarchi, on the other the fervour of Maria de Carli’s projects. What was left of fascist Italy became an ally of the Soviets. The new pact Ribbentrop-Molotov was fiercely opposed by the German President Albert Speer who sent a division to invade Italy. Ciano was kidnapped and brought to safety by the Reichswehr that foiled the radical fascists’ attempt to seize power with a coup. Some districts of Rome were heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe. Maria de Carli had supposedly died in the attack. Hundreds of people were killed. As for Ciano, he had passed away in complete solitude in Weimar seven years later, a few days before his eightieth birthday. The German intervention, the failed coup d’état and, later, the hint of a popular insurrection tore Italy apart. The old colonial Monarchy expired: Somalia and Ethiopia proclaimed their independence, Dodecanese was peacefully annexed by Greece, Dalmatia and Lombardia, together with Veneto, Trent and Trieste, were incorporated in a German protectorate. Two years, Marco remembered, the agony of the Kingdom of Italy had lasted that long. In 1978, after the kidnapping and execution of the appointed Prime Minister Aldo Moro at the hands of the terrorist group Socialist Struggle, an institutional referendum was held. Republic won easily over Monarchy, and a centre-right government was formed. As if it were not enough, the Communists made accusations of vote-rigging and threatened a revolution in the regions under their control. In order to avoid a bloody civil war, the newborn Italian Republic allowed them to claim independence and create the Cisalpina Democratic Republic. An abstraction, that’s what it was, a jumble of territories with no common history thrown together to deface Italian unity. But this abstraction was about to celebrate its 25th anniversary, and it was not going to be caught unprepared, Marco thought observing the road works. He lit a cigarette. A habit he had got into in recent years, just before retirement. “You are too old for it,” Bianca had sentenced the first time she had seen him smoking. She could really be annoying, she and that wellness fixation of hers. Marco sighed. She was a product of the left wing…She had been such a delightful child, though. Marco remembered well: it was 1980 and the two of them had fled across Italy, a country divided by an undeclared war. With his four-year-old child he had decided to cross the state line between Marche and Romagna, one of the most dangerous borders of the world, cutting through San Marino. Enough of the Italian Republic which resembled more and more the old Bourbon State. He needed something new, the vibrant socialism of the North-West, the Cisalpine Socialism. Marco laughed. That sounded like something a French Revolutionary might have said… Marco and little Bianca were among the last to cross that border not long before the soldiers mined it shutting it forever. The two of them headed for Genoa, the cisalpine capital city, home to the new élan as the propaganda had painted in huge capital letters on every available wall including the delicate liberty facades adorning former Piazza de Ferrari. City of sadness, thought Marco remembering what Genoa had looked like back then. The new capital was chocked by the smoke of its steel and chemical plants and factories. Dust everywhere, aristocratic palaces in a state of decay, a port that only ships from the Soviet Union and its allies were allowed to enter. Gloomy and ruined hulls, gloomy and ruined people: Genoa was a gloomy and ruined city which did nothing to at least keep up appearances. Even television, which had bloomed in a multitude of private stations and networks in the sleepy Italian Republic, was neglected here. The one and only public channel offered news recited by pale and servile reporters and programs that made the naïve Saturday night shows on Immagine Italiana, the old fascist public television, appear like a breath of fresh air. Nevertheless, Marco was satisfied. His experience as a TV journalist landed him a decent job and his habit of obeying was well repaid. That was how Marco and Bianca had survived those first terrible years when Europe looked suspiciously to what was at the time considered the new communist bubo planted in the heart of the West. Luckily, the tension dissipated and when the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989 the curtain that divided the two Italian republics was taken down as well. Under the influence of the new capitalist Russia, born from the ashes of the Soviet Union in 1991, Genoa began to thrive. For the first time the shower that hit it wasnot a dirty coal rain but a sparkling deluge of Russian roubles, billions of them, coming straight from the mafia’s safes in Moscow and Novyi Petersburg, as the old Leningrad was now called. The fresh flow of roubles set shovels, picks and bulldozers into motion in order to restore the long-forgotten city to its original beauty. New streets and new squares were realized in no time thanks to the hard work of hundreds, thousands of Arabs, Caribbeans, south-Americans and Slavs. Rich and poor immigrants, for the most part even more gloomy and ruined than the Genoeses. Twanng… Twonkk! Twangg… Twonk! It was the sound marking the end and the rebirth. With uncertain fingers Marco took his old journalistic card out of his purse and held it before his eyes. Smiling back at him from the picture a man almost 30 years younger. Marco Diletti, Immagine Italiana. He compared it with a second much newer card, a plastic badge similar to those used in the army. His face was sullen and older. Marco Diletti, State Information Department. “Hell, they’ve turned me into a cop,” Marco suddenly realized. But where was the difference after all? “Que pasa, tovarich? Te gustan los chicos cubanos?” Marco was startled by the Russian appellative that had been in use in Genoa for the past 25 years to formally address strangers. The words had come from one of the workers busy digging in the square, the one he had been staring at for at least half of an hour he now realized. The man was young, about Bianca’s age, and very muscular. “He must have come to the conclusion that I was looking for some paid company,” Marco thought. Not a rare event in the otherwise austere Democratic Republic. One of many ways to offset the money flux. Marco smiled at the misunderstanding, shook his head and turned away. Before he could take his first step towards the former Piazza de Ferrari, now Workers’ Revolution Square, a vigorous hand grabbed his shoulder. “Marco Diletti, if I’m not mistaken. How about a cup of coffee by Giuseppe Garibaldi’s monument? He is the last Italian hero the bastards didn’t snitch. Perhaps they were satisfied with his red shirt…”