Leandro Lucchetti

 

I was a kid when I was reading the novels of Emilio Salgari: I tought “I will grow up and I will travel, I want to see all these places.” When I was young, traveling it might have been nice … expecially to learn and I did not have any money. As an adult I traveled a lot for work, all over the world … I was directing documentaries for RAI Television and cultural programs. I won a few awards here and there … I did a short and unsuccessfull career in the cinema (5 or 6 movies). Now I am retired, if I look at the map of the world there are more places where I have been that places where I have not been (I plan to go everywhere but maybe I will soon be short of time). As an old man I would like to be a writer … in fact I’m writing a novel, not travel adventures but war stories on the eastern border of Italy, Trieste: Slavic, Fascists, Nazis, Cossacks, Tito, partisans, rice fields,  sinkholes, Istria esodata, the lie of the ideologies that continues, a trip of another kind, perhaps the soul … into unknown territories. I like to walk, I did a lot of trekking … now the age, weight (I’m a Big Belly), trouble with hips and knees (one knee broke-down  when I was a hope of football, at that time, on the fifthees/sixthees, there were no surgery and meant end of the career) force me to deal with melancholy and a slight frustration: I wished I make the pilgrimage of Kailash, last contact with the transcendent. I can’t do it, bye bye Shiva…what a shame! My place of the soul is the desert … following Piero I discovered the ice … not bad!