Pending the naming of the ramps on June 24th
twelve o’clock, June 4, 2021 – 08:39
Those who attended her after-school as kids remember the writer
of Mirella Armiero
The former after-school kids
«Fabrizia wore braids or long loose hair, always well-groomed. She hugged me, I snuggled next to her on the sofa in her house. Once she gave me a doll, for me it was the most beautiful thing in the world and it looked like her ». The Fabrizia in question is Ramondino, a writer whose conventional image was of a rigorous, shy, at times even rough woman. But not in the eyes of a young girl: the one who tells it is Anna Garofalo, who in the early 1960s was one of the inhabitants of the “country of children” that the Neapolitan writer was able to find “nowhere and everywhere”. It happened for example in the early 1960s in Torre Caracciolo, between Marano and Quarto, on the crater of one of the extinct volcanoes that open the door to the Campi Flegrei. The writer tells it about it The island of children, which Goffredo Fofi has recently re-published in his series of radical thought for and / or. It is here that Anna met Fabrizia.
Tower
The austere Tower stands out on a panorama flooded with houses but the outlines of the islands are revealed on the wide horizon, from Capri to Ventotene. This was for a couple of years the home of the writer and her husband Francesco Alberto Caracciolo, whose family owns the building. The house intrigued the children of the surrounding village, who often lived in very difficult conditions, in farmhouses. Fabrizia Ramondino says that she had hung persimmon shoots from the window and punctually targeted the little ones with slingshots. “As they used to use conquistadors, explorers, slave traders, I rabbis throwing them colored objects: coins of chocolate and candies. The children made friends with the white woman, they were at first shy and reverent, while she wanted to be an equal in their company ». And he succeeded, starting at the Tower one of the many educational experiences that he pursued with passion in his life, hosting the children in a sort of phantasmagoric after school, among cartoons, colors, brushes, walks in the woods.
shadow carousel
Naples, the former children of Torre Caracciolo
With the investigator of places
In search of the Aragonese Tower, in the footsteps of Fabrizia Ramondino, Francesco Paolo Busco, photographer, writer and investigator of the places leads me (he has made reportages on Caccioppoli and Leopardi, retracing their steps). He was at the Tower a few days ago, he talked to the oldest residents of the place, he managed to make an appointment with the Countess Caracciolo who still lives here, she is the sister of Fabrizia’s first husband, who died last year. The road that goes from the Camaldoli to Marano has certainly changed a lot compared to fifty years ago, but in some places there are still small gardens, pieces of land that have remained intact in the general urban devastation. Torre Caracciolo arrives unexpectedly at the end of a somewhat secluded descent, which slopes down towards the chestnut wood of which Ramondino tells.
“For me speaking Italian was like going to the moon”
In the village the rumor has spread that “the journalists are coming” and in front of the Tower there is a peaceful group of people. “Are you the one who must speak to the countess?” they ask us and immediately announce with pride: «We are Fabrizia’s children». There are four of those who attended his after-school, those who sneaked into the well-kept garden, along the avenue of oleanders, those who targeted the persimmons. “We would like to recall that period.” Besides Anna Garofalo there are Maria Nebbia, Maria Palumbo and Salvatore Garofalo. But they also remember the others, the smartest one was Sabetta, recently disappeared, one of the oldest of the group. Today they are employed, retired nurses. Anna is a municipal councilor in Marano. The meeting with Fabrizia Ramondino, they say, has radically changed their lives. And that’s probably what the writer hoped for, not out of pedagogical and paternalistic anxiety, but out of her deep, straightforward empathy with the lives of others. “It helped us a lot with the language,” says Salvatore. “For me at the time speaking Italian was like going to the moon.” But how was the relationship born? “We went in, we approached the Tower, at first with fear, but she told us not to run away, she offered us sweets, she kept us with her the whole day”.
“How was Fabrizia? Sweet, like a fairy tale character “
Countess Caracciolo has kindly opened the doors of the Tower to the ancient crew of children, who know the places inside out. “Here, on this long terrace we tried to fly a huge kite but we never succeeded.” “There was the room with all our things, work tools for the boys, sewing for the girls.” But often everything got mixed up. “One day he made us find a swing mounted between two lotus trees, we were delighted.” “And we took our hair for those who had to go up there.” Laughter of the company. Everyone is excited, even the landlady and her niece Raffaella Gomez, who keep fond memories of the late writer. Inside the estate there is also the chapel, which served as a parish church before the one in the square, just above it, was built. “Here we used to come to ring the bell.” But what was Fabrizia really like? “Sweet, like a fairytale character, she seemed born in the Tower. Here he was happy ». A solar Ramondino, far from the disturbances of other periods of his life, in short, the one that emerges from the memory of former children, now between sixty and seventy years old. A woman naturally immersed in this rural context, so close to the city but so distant in the ways of life, in the micro-economies that governed it. «The forest, for example, was a great resource. Today it is often uninhabitable, waste is poured into it, although it is still thriving. But at the time of the walks that Fabrizia recounts in her text, the wood was a reservoir of riches, from herbs to mushrooms, from the clay we found to the chestnut leaves that were used as a bed for chickens. In that wood no one allowed himself to throw anything away, a man who worked for the count, Don Carlo, always walked around with his mastiff, and he enforced the rules ». At some point the experience ended. “When I left it was as if I had gone out to buy cigarettes,” writes Fabrizia Ramondino. “I didn’t say hello to the children and never saw them again. I couldn’t explain or lie. ‘ Other houses, other children awaited the nomadic and restless writer.
The ramps dedicated to the writer
Meanwhile, on June 24, an appointment at the ramps of Salita Pontecorvo, which will be named after Fabrizia Ramondino, in a ceremony attended by her daughter Livia Patrizi.
June 4, 2021 | 08:39
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