Purchases of Mid-August: the vu’ cumpra’ through the streets of Rome and on the beach

400, 500, 600... how many kilometres, at a minimum, you must be away from home to be considered a foreigner? Having done in the past few hundreds too, for reasons of work, sometimes I ask myself this question. Like now that I am on the beach, just over 100 kilometres from Rome, and I can not help but dwell on the faces of the dense rank of vendors, who paraded in front of me every few minutes apart.

 

To reach this place, this early morning,  I took the regional train that goes to Pisa. I travelled in a carriage occupied mainly by Bangladeshis still sleepy. At every station where we stopped, others have seen emerge along the escarpment, between the thick reeds, and to set out with a quick pace to reach the train. Yet even for a moment I felt a sense of insecurity, fear, danger. Feeling them even more familiar of the many home sellers, mostly Neapolitan, to which, in theory, I should feel closer, coming from the same region.

 

Thin. Combed, dressed always in a dignified manner. They look like eternal students. You would not say that they, with their loads yet tired, have the strength to go and pick something. On the streets of Rome, if they try to sell you just an umbrella to shelter from the sun or on the beach, a clock, they are never arrogant. They just smile at you and hardly behind their timid eyes we glimpse the shy ambiguity of who is ready to deception. For the brief moment that the meeting lasts more than a discount, you're always tempted to offer them a barter.