Vado al Massimo. Cronache dall'Italia postmoderna

The image of the clock stopped at 10:25 on 2 August 1980 was a tremendous blow to Italy's signs of recovery after the so-called 'decade of lead and blood'. Yet those who were in Bologna in September 1979, just a little less than a year earlier, had sensed in the still-warm air that there was the desire to change, to turn the page. Patti Smith was in concert at the stadium; she was also due to perform in Florence the following evening. The desire for music was so great that a total of 150,000 people attended over the two evenings, myself included. I had turned eighteen and had travelled from Turin on my friend Massimo's Morini 3 1?2 motorbike. I listened to Patti Smith's albums and pinned up the lyrics of her songs, full of references to the beat generation and poetry in general, yet I knew nothing of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. We are, however, talking about a niche artist, a punk poet who entered the mainstream along with a substantial part of the 'transgressive' movement. For almost ten years no one had come from America or London to perform in Italy; indeed those concerts assumed the significance of a symbolic liberation.
To complete that unforgettable weekend, Ferrari won the F1 world championship in Monza with Jody Scheckter (but we loved Gilles Villeneuve more, the boy of impossible feats). On the way home we found ourselves in Milan: Piazza Duomo was filled with red flags, but bearing the Ferrari pony rather than the hammer and sickle. [...]