One Collar A Day, One Story A Day: Tuesday

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Today's collar features postcards from Venice and Naples. The story (please check out yesterday's post to read more about this project) starts where we left it: our protagonist was dreaming about holidays in Lugano; today the quietness of Swiss lakes makes her think about water and sends her back to her childhood and to holidays in Venice and Naples.

She remembers a lonely tourist, an anonymous man in a suit, sitting in a gondola floating in the Venetian canals; she summons up in her mind the colour-coded mooring poles and the pungent smell of rotten algae.

The algae drifting on the sea brings our protagonist back to another setting, Naples, looking fakely idyllic, but riddled with social problems. Our protagonist remembers a book, The Sea Does Not Reach Naples, by Anna Maria Ortese, that she read while she was in school.

The sea in Ortese's anthology of stories was a sort of screen on which the author projected the alienation she lived in and her controversial relation with the reality surrounding her.

Visions of the sea, of Ortese's characters wearing cotton shirts and blue trousers or cheap mismatched garments bought at the markets of second-hand clothes dismissed by the Allied soldiers, of a fakir smoking in a glass coffin, suddenly mix in the mind of the protagonist of my story, making her realise that she is stuck in her own undesirable and repetitive reality that, like a dark illness or a thick and confusing fog, wraps up today's humanity.

Detesting reality, finding it incomprehensible and hallucinating, she keeps on dreaming, lulled by an imaginary sea, retreating into a fantasy world that protects her but also traps her like a fish in a glass bowl. Will she manage to shatter it and reconcile herself with a more desirable reality? Follow the story on tomorrow's post to discover it.