It was April of the New Millennium. I was fifteen and did not yet know that the Millennium I was about to live would define my generation.
In my cd player (I would have my first mp3 player shortly thereafter) Springsteen's evergreen Greatest Hits and Venditti's nostalgic Goodbye Novecento alternated.
I was fifteen and in the months of March and April of that year, one evening a week, I had my first experience as a mask and welcome, in front of this cinema. 'Talking Images' was the review we had prepared with my class at the ITC in Trani and our literature teacher.
I had discovered cinema ten years earlier, when I was very young, when in my eyes its magic was real, when sitting in the room, next to my mother - not on her legs, because cinema is a ritual and requires composure and respect - my feet dangled from the too high, wooden, foldable chair and I found it hard to push myself from time to time to the edge, to get a better look, as I always slipped towards the back.
At fifteen, in front of this cinema, which for me was really a Supercinema, that seed of magic had found fertile ground and was becoming the sprout of a passion closer to obsession. I still could not imagine how big it would become, how much those talking images would never stop telling me, in their fiction, the all human truth and all imperfect humanity.
Today, twenty-one years later, when I found myself by chance in front of this entrance, for a moment my heart went into apnea. A suspended breath, a caress of nostalgia. In the decadent, abandoned facade I saw my film, my images speak. In the small cracks, the wounds of broken dreams and, at the same time, in the stuccoes still intact, in the austere sign, all the tenacity of desires that do not want to die. The vocation and damnation of rebellious spirits who always believe, rightly or wrongly and never give up.
And so, today as then, the dreams are there, still standing, a little mistreated but proud, guerrillas, combative. And if I can still look them straight in the eye, letting myself be seduced by the typical charm of impossible things, without being a victim of them, it means that there is still something to defend. This is not the time to give up, nor to let them go. Not yet.