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By Kartell and .normaluisa. I might love it just because its name is Cinderella. Glue Cinderella.

If you are living in India, or have been here, sending your contribution will just feel so damn good. Check out I am like this only. Yes, with “only” at the end. Genius is there.

Yesterday has been a beautiful sunny Sunday. Delhi winter is round the corner, but during the day the air is still warm, and sometimes the haze clears, giving space to a sky so blue that it seem to swallow even the dust.

In the street downstairs, I found these two. I found them amazing.

I thought, sorry for being too “No surprises”, that maybe love is nothing more than spending together fifty, or maybe even sixty years, and still be willing to sit one in front of the other in a November’s sunny Sunday, selecting green chili peppers.

And it’s not a matter of passion, or romanticism: fifty, or sixty years ago, marriages here were mostly, if not only, arranged.

Flip Mr. French’s book over, however, and you confront this Voldemortian clump of words from Mr. Naipaul’s old nemesis, Mr. Theroux: “It seems I didn’t know half of all the horrors.”

I read this sentence in The New York Times. Yes, The New York Times. And yes, it says Voldemortian.

I just think there’s something weird and awesome in the fact that a character from a children book becomes so notorious to generate an adjective. And, on top of it, an adjective that’s fit to print.

Here we are. I go to bed now in India, and in the US the electoral day is only half-way through. When I’ll wake up, in some states the vote counting will be over, and probably a few hours later America will have a new President.

But, as far as I am concerned, Obama already won. He gained his place in history, the history of an electoral campaign of big-dreams-made speeches, of intense emotions that made into exact strategic moves, of a precise communication that reached everyone everywhere, using at its best the scary democratic potential of web 2.0.

Obama, either he gets into the White House or not, won -for me- because, despite all the analysis I have read (and tried to do), despite I know very well how much attention goes behind every natural-looking move, despite al the “tricks” i could individuate, today I saw again some of his speech on YouTube; and they touched me, again, moved me, excited me all over again as if I had never heard them before.

And as if I had never studied communication, not even a bit. But, thinking about it, maybe it’s just right.

A few years ago, trying to convince a bunch of students that it would make sense to consider getting a masters in semiotics, Umberto Eco did one of his speech. Which was all about how semiotics would have made us able to analyze not only a book, an ad, a movie but, really, all that we wanted and there were very few limits: he was offering a discipline capable of making us look behind the curtains of the world. Eco’s speech ended with a question, that he asked himself: isn’t it that all this analyzing the world ends up taking its charm away? And with a pretty straight answer: even gynecologists fall in love.

Happy Election day everyone, hoping on the other side of the Ocean they do the right thing.

After years in school trying to reach a decent cultural level, after endless attempts to gain some critical sense, after struggling to behave as an intellectual, I must just give up and admit it: I love gossip. I love it, that’s it. I also love almost any kind of sit-com, as far as someone in it falls in love. I blame it on my mum, who else?, that thought it was a good idea to tell me stories from the Odyssey, instead of fairy tales of princesses and princes and happily together ever after, when I was a little girl. As a result, I have this hunger for love stories of any kind.

So yeah, gossip. Only the who-loves-who kind. I don’t care about power, I don’t care about working drama. Just give me some romance.

Now you can easily understand why I think this is a great project.

It’s called Somebody Else’s Phone. You have access to the content of three persons’ phones, you can reconstruct their lives and passions from what you find in their inbox, speculate on their personalities and feelings as you read the messages they send. It almost elevates gossip to an artistic level, and for sure it makes it legitimates its charm. Basically, it’s the it’s-not-just-me-then relief.

Then add the famous Post Secret project and you’ll understand why I have never felt less ashamed of my interest for other people’s lives.

I think that this bed, named Principessa and designed by Doshi Levien (“Best Quality since 2000″, says the genius website), would perfect against nightmares and insomnia. Don’t you agree?

Born in North Italy from a Southern mother, a significant cut of my summers has been spent in the part of Italy that pronounces tré, for three, not trè (as we do, North).

A thousand kilometers, not one more, from down-my-stairs to down-my-Grandma’s-stairs. Nonna Tetta, who still waits for my arrivals looking from behind the curtains (spying, as she says in dialect), ready to turn on the fire under the steak (there’s always a steak waiting, to make sure I get enough proteins).

As a kid I hardly got the pleasure of traveling through these one thousand kilometers by car. Train, instead, with no string to keep the luggage closed but the blue-white-red striped nylon bag, that one yes. And the arrival in Milan Central  station, right on time two hours before the train leaves (you never know), that also was quite quintessential emigrant. We would load our baggage and our patience on the train then, with a Mickey Mouse comic book in our hands, would wait for hours, hours (and hours of delay) then get to Rome, and from Rome it was almost done, soon we’d see from the train the skyscrapers of the financial center (I think I learnt who Kenzo Tange was when I was about ten) and we’d be arrived. Napoli Centrale, Napoli Centrale station.

A month after, the trip back. In Naples station trains were longer than the platforms and we always ended up in the last carts, so we had to walk through the tracks, to hop on. Nonna Tetta would come with us to the station, carrying a portable refrigerator packed with meat because she didn’t trust northern meat (!). Once arrived, she’d take from her bag two eggs à-la-coque for the girls, the girls being me and my sister, so that our protein needs for the night trip would be matched. She’d feed us the egg there, on the platform, before waking us to the train.

Once, I remember, they were testing a new train called ETR500, if I’m not wrong. That the train wasn’t so long, and the platform was magically long enough. A few months after they christened it Eurostar, but from that point my travel memory gets confused and runs fast to the moment when, to Naples, I started going by plane.

But with the plane, my beeline has nothing to do.

It has instead a lot to do with curves and my notorious car-sickness, that when I was a kid would express itself in retches of vomit every kilometer. Explosions that sometimes wouldn’t allow the time to leave the car, with the damages you can imagine all over the back seat.

So from Naples to Nonna Tetta’s place, lost in the mountains of High Irpinia, it’d take an hour, but to me it seemed an eternity of curves and vomit pit-stops. So, everytime we had to leave, the little girl would complain.

The girl would complain for that and also because when her friends asked her where was she going on holiday she didn’t know what to answer, because nobody knew her grandmother’s hometown and nobody knew what the word Irpinia meant. The girl would have loved to say she was going to Naples, because everybody had at least heard of Naples, but between the city on the sea and the place where she used to spend every August, a place where nights were cold even in summer and one would need blanket to sleep, there were ninethousandmilions curves.

So one day, providing a solution to both pre-departure complaints and the necessity of clear geographical coordinates, Nonna Tetta introduced in my life the idea of “beeline”. Convincing me that, despite the road seemed never ending, Naples was actually very close. “In beeline”, she said (and says), “Naples is right here”.

Which was not incorrect.

At that point Naples could become a honest benchmark, and complaining for that trip of stomach sufferance simply became accusing the poor car road that simply wasn’t able to be as the beeline.

Well this concept, this idea that the distance between two places is not measured in the trip but with a straight line in the skies, has become one of the core principles of my life. It means that no matter how long and tiring the path might seem, there’s always a place to go back to and that place, if you look for it with the nose at the sky, is right there. That you must accept it, the imperfection of things, because there is always an easy and direct way to arrive. But it’s not for us.

I could open a brand new blog, sure.
Only, I felt I had to carry with me all my confused baggages, and I have no rational alibi for that. Just like when you open your closet and, well worn clean and ironed, hanging in the middle of the “blue clothes” sector, you se them: the Levi’s jeans you were wearing the first day of high school. You know too well you’ll never wear them again, not as much for their terrible 90s cut but because you long time ago lost the hope (with a downfall down to earth)  that they’ll ever fit again. You know that too well but they are still there, and there will be, despite relocation, cleaning, and obsessive compulsive attacks.

Just like that.

But order, O.C., that must be. So English here, and Italian there (inlineadaria.wordpress.com) for the joy of those who “is this blog all in Italian?” and also of those who è inutile che mi dai l’indirizzo del blog che poi è tutto in inglese e non capisco”.

Let’s see if I resist the confused language temptations.