lto our ship this time her name is not Marina, but Claudia, much bigger and more spacious than the Marina, and we climb fifth, remembering the little story that whoever enters first, leaves last. The fact is that we are tired and do not want to stay in the Terminal anymore. After all, this time they make me turn my nose up, make me turn around on board once and park on the bridge, there are no underground parking, on the side. Even some of the places this time are more, only, unlike the first stage, we go in and, having taken our places, we find with some anxiety that after a two-hour wait there will not even be a free place left. It’s in the chair room, where there will be ordinary mattresses, a real metal cot, and quite strong, considering the size of the girl who will sleep on it all the way, and the walking of people looking for a place. get seasick. The rest of the ship is a jigsaw puzzle of families scattered all over the place, in the bar chairs, in the hallways, on the stairs, I think we are the only fools who paid extra for the chairs, and also to stay up for a minute, because this will happen, just as uncomfortable as chairs if you use only one of them (on the way I slept on four empty chairs, like a bed). The ship miraculously leaves early, which bodes well for the arrival, because I don’t think I can spend nineteen hours on the ship this round. Tired, indeed, exhausted, I allowed myself to move on to some reflections.knowing full well that we had come to the end not only of the journey, but also of this diary that accompanied my evenings, and not only, and which saw my mini iPad as a device, I first wrote a book like this.
People here, I try to start with people. Leaving aside the stereotypes about Albanians, which I hope have long been overcome everywhere, I do not even want to take them into account, even if some Albanians we were told that there is calm in Albania because the criminals have all fledsomehow feeding these stereotypes from within. Let’s talk about the public space that Albanians occupy in my world, namely the musical one. I said, daring to slip into racism, body shaming, international faux pas, and a whole host of nasty and risky, almost Lombrosian situations, oh Dua Lipa and Rita Ora, specifying without any “if” and “but” that although they come from here, they are not quite typical local beauties. I could expand the discussion, I don’t know? dancer Klediwhich, as far as I remember, existed for a long time Maria DeFilippiand which as such I have evidently lost sight of long ago, oh Ermal Metbut to be inclusive and anti-patriarchal and mitigate the damage in some way, but I believe that if you want to do something, you have to do it right and to the end, so go to hell. However, today I will go further, raise the bar if possible, and am going to point out what instead seems to me the ideal archetype of Albanianism and even the face of the race, a significant part of the Italian spirit that is present in Ksamil. I say make yourself comfortable and put out the popcorn Singer and tiktoker Loris has one million one hundred thousand subscribersand his partner Emanuel. I met them, by face and by name, I think also by voice, last night during a very long blackout. Indeed, just before. Loris made this song, I am Albanian, almost three million views on YouTube, it is a manifesto of patriotic spirit, sung by those who do not live there, in their homeland, maybe they were not even born there, they certainly regret it. Despite the success in Italy, it is, frankly, almost completely inexplicable. In the text, he talks about ambitions, regrets, demonstration of status symbols, national spirit, which, of course, extends to Kosovo as well. He also talks about funny customs, like moms throwing slippers with the precision of a protector, coffee offered by the hundreds, a vacation at home eagerly awaited like never before. Next to him is another singer, so to speak, Emanuel, who in turn is the owner of some hit stories, almost all in Albanian, Krenar, with B2N, over twelve million views on YouTube, the one who recites the aforementioned verse. “if you see a Mercedes it means it is Albanian / if you see it is signed in Albania it means it was bought“Just on this occasion, I discovered that Matteo Salvini also mentioned in a video on Tik Tok with Emanuel himself. A video of Krenar flaunting a bold wealth of toy cars, beautiful women (don’t accuse me of patriarchy, I’m not a director), fabulous locations, even if the lyrics talk about the sacrifices made to achieve these results, just like in “I Albanian, who e.g. Italian Toto Cutugno, albeit with a modern sound, between urban and trap, combines what could be called a cliche, from the original “you are Albanian if you prefer byrek to pizza”, a typical local dish that we have not tried yet, puff pastry with stuffed with meat and vegetables. The role of Emanuel, who polishes his letters a lot, like all Albanians to a certain extent, is a series of show-offs, quite ironic even, from the fact that he brings his girlfriend to Santorini or Sardinia to Saranda only to then invite her to stay home , to save. But it’s not just real or perceived wealth that’s on display, but also features of social behavior, such as a marriage that lasts a month, the fact that every woman, hello Barbie, cooks here for thirty people, or that any meal here looks like a Communion, with a I keep talking about food, drink, good living and entertainment. Loris, the owner of the song, utters a very clear line: “There is no depression in Albania / if everything goes wrong, I will go out and dance“. A sort of counterpart to Emanuel’s “If you earn 500 euros and live like a king” who, unsurprisingly, ends the song with “I’ve been living in Italy for many years / I want to earn a lot of money / build a three-story house in Albania”. More clear than that. Considering the crazy numbers these two make up: two million nine hundred thousand Albanians living at home and ten million in the rest of the Balkan countries, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Greece, Türkiye, the nation with the largest number of Albanians in the world, five million, one and a half million in the rest of Europe, of which about four hundred thousand in Italy, the second largest migrant community after the Moroccan, I would say that to take them into account in order to counter the modern popular culture of this people, it would be wiser than to laugh, because these songs are objectively funny to our ears. Looking at them, which is where I started, they look like maranese, like many of the ones you see in Italy where they actually live, with the exception of Dua Lipa or Rita Ora, but they tell us much more than we can think in short videos. People who idealize their homeland, as is often the case with those who have migrated or are the children of migrants, but at the same time adhere to the rules of the place where they live, allowing the idea of Albania to become a reality only for a few days a year, during moments of leisure , return, reunion, not only literal, but also literary. However, people who create music, albeit filtered by sounds that sound exotic to us, this is absolutely modern music, in Italy, as in the rest of Europe, probably because they too, as Elio sang in the incredible Complesso on May 1st, created their own lines: “Music broke our balls / it’s beautiful and all / but in the end it breaks balls.” Midnight comes, and sleep is out of the question. Some quarrels kept us awake, always over unnecessarily occupied positions or even simple requests to move, as well as the strange behavior of some subjects, such as a Neapolitan engineer stationed in Jesi, married to a Polish lady, who chatted with an Albanian, telling his whole life where he worked when he was fired, how he retrained as an author of books on technology applied to medicine, to the point that he even opened his own publishing house, and in the end everyone tried to sell him a set of glasses with focal lenses, he said in his own way Vomero gagà, and this attempt failed miserably. Or like a family that came to take their places at four o’clock, about ten o’clock, legally displacing a German mother, father and two sons, he’s practically a Hollywood actor, she’s a troll, a family led by a guy with ever-widening blue eyes who will spend part of the night walking around with a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste in hand. Fauna di mare, Tozzi and Raf sang, parodying their hit of the eighties, the video of which, I say this with that veil of melancholy that always brings with it the knowledge of how to return to my native land, which I left in exile twenty-six years ago, he was filmed in Numana, on Conero. It’s late, Marina and I go down to the bar, drink beer and lemon soda, you decide who eats what, and we’ll talk about it on the next trip.