At the windows, looking up, there are two old sheets hanging on the iron grates. Why are they there? A mystery to which Anna Mazzoli, a resident, tries to give an answer. “Evidently someone enters the building, takes refuge inside. After all, just a few days ago I saw the traffic police take away a person who had entered those crumbling walls. It’s a disgrace”, she articulates the words, the Tuscan accent, her hometown, for years a teacher at the Roiti scientific high school. “It’s a disgrace – she repeats -. Let it be known, write it down”. An exhortation, an appeal pronounced a few meters away, stopped with her bicycle, from that building that seems like a punch in the eye, ancient ruins of a past that was turning to Art Nouveau. Now the pigeons wander among piles of bricks and rubble, a bottle of beer, a few bags that have housed a box of discounted wine.
Via Darsena, late morning. The sun seems to glaze the little square with light, the students taking a break, the entrance to the cinema and the buildings that house the accommodations for the students who attend the university. Then, breaking up the landscape, that white cube, closed by barriers, at number 75 what was once an entrance. “It’s a wonderful area,” the retired professor continues. “The Darsena has become a marvel, there’s the cinema, the little square. A wonderful corner has been created. Then you turn around and see that peeling building, the brick walls. Behind there,” she points beyond the corner, “in the evening people who don’t do such correct things take refuge. They’re the ones who put those sheets.” She called the Municipality, asked them to intervene. “That building is a slap in the face to decorum, to hygiene,” is her bitter comment, from someone who loves the city and lives, as an affront, that scenario marked by rust and graffiti. Marco Negrini, 21, lives in Ficarolo, in the province of Rovigo. He left like every morning with his car to go to class, he studies economics and management. On the bench he is taking a break from his books, with him is a colleague. His name is Luca Marzola, 21, he comes from Castelmassa, a town at the foot of the Po embankment on the Venetian side. “Here everything is new, everything has been polished up – they both say -. It’s a shame that this building has remained, where pigeons and mice find refuge”. They dig into their memory, a recent memory. “Last year – they remember – they put up barriers and fences, closed the entrances and windows. We were here, we were studying when we saw the workers arrive”. Iron protections, grates that cannot stop those who have found shelter beyond those walls eaten away by time. It is almost midday, the students crowd the bar. At the tables, outside, there are four girls. Coffee and books, waiting for the next exam. Flavia Esposito, 21, and Adriana Cebotari, the same age, attend the Faculty of Economics. They are in their third year, the last.
“It would be nice if they knocked it down, maybe used that space to build a canteen”, the idea of Adriana Cebotari, of Russian origins, who has been in Italy since she was a child. “The canteen – she continues – is a bit far away now, it’s in the Engineering faculty”. Flavia Esposito comes from Bologna. “Why do I study here? Because I like it here – she states decisively -. It’s almost quicker to get here by taking the highway, than to cross the entire city of Bologna to get to the university area. And then there you don’t know where to park. Here it’s much better”. Her gaze goes back to the building, a boil in the glitter of the Darsena. “Sometimes you see some strays disappear between those walls, they don’t bother you, they just stay in there. A punch in the stomach of a reborn area. Why don’t they knock it down?”