Still in Bovisa…

I won’t tell about every movement of mine, it would become too long. I’ll go right to the point. I’ll tell about the factory you can see on the right of via Bellagio, arriving from the train station, still part of the giant abandoned area. There’s no way to get inside from this side: it’s so impenetrable that there’s no space not even for imagination: there is a high wall along the whole street, with very high grated windows and a very high gate. From a perpendicular street, via Cernobbio, there’s somithing to observe, something good enough to turn on my curiosity and my willing to get inside the place and explore the urban jungle. The windows, without glass, but protected by gratings, are still at the same level of the others, but the street is a bit higher, so on the tips of my toes i manage to give a peeck inside. All i can see is a big room, very dark, but a dirty dark, where not only dust takes it’s place, but also every kind of metropolitan and natural dregs: smog has encrusted walls, humidity has made them black, and it seems they could absorbe anything passing by. The feeling is that i could find myself sticked to the wall if i dared to go inside that room, becoming part of the furniture. The dark doesn’t show, but let’s you intend the quantity of bird and rat poops forming a new type of floor, which, who knows, a crazy designer or mad architect could propose to a chic-eccentric milanese. A very important piece of modern furniture (at least untill i’m not found sticked to the wall) is given by the fire extinguisher. On the ceiling there’s another neat thing: time has preserved the neon lights. They are the last proove of the space organization willing. The structure is completly rusted, but the lights are still there, ingnored by visitors of abandoned places and by time. The walls still have traces of coating, where humidity and smog haven’t gotten hold of it (wonder why...): here and there green paint, or once white tiles. To tell the truth i’m supposed to know why certain parts get ruined more than others, by the time i’ve attend a course of architectural restauration, but the simple observation leaves enough spece to imagination: one square meter of wall, with the same exposition to bad weather and time, done with the same materials, with no wirings or tubes inside... why does one small part damage and the very next part doesn’t? A bit at the time i start remembering the lessons in school. Humidity rises from the ground, through the very small spaces free inside the composition of the concrete... more or less. For what concerns me it’s an amazing phenomenon.

Weeds found their reign over here: they are so high, there no way you can see what happens behind them, and curiosity grows as they get higher. I can just think of my mother’s neighbour, a garden maniac, who prunes his little tree with fingernails cissors and chenges the grass of his small lot every year: he would have a fit in front of such a sight! It’s hard enough for him to see my mother’s garden, which is not so far from what i see here.

Time has come to find a new point of view.