The title of this thunderous full-length is mostly self-explanatory.
As in “Italia: Ultimo Atto”, a veristic narrative is used with the help of tracks conceived as snapshots of real events and characters – whether they be famous or unknown – caught in the very same moment where History itself is unfolding, and trying to grasp the essence of a Spirit overlooking and encompassing stories and lives.
The Spirit that is meant to be summoned is that of Decadence, as it manifested itself through the European culture and arts before those apocalyptic events we all know upset and overturned forever the face of the entire Continent.
Presented is a real gallery of ghosts where the ineffable European Canon – today reported missing and unlamented – is back and still haunting, powerfully conjuring some noble causes as well as dubious excesses, Olympian Beauty as well as suicidal gloomy eccentricities. Nevertheless, it contains and epitomizes us all, and its dispersion corresponds to our very same extinction.
To address such a complex and difficult issue that has obsessed for decades legions of illustrious predecessors, IANVA look at these artists more carefully and clearly than in the past.
And today the usual assault of IANVA’s all Italian vintage soundtrack sound meets the Central European suggestions and motorik influences (the backbone of the first and best new wave and new romantic releases), with the help of various guests whose experience in “decadent suggestions” is well-known.
The 19th Century Melodrama meets the clangor of Industrial Revolution: Chanson, Cabaret and Neoclassical resonating with echoes of European monumental cemeteries.
The European Canon is still here.
Enjoy.
The Classical Greece. The place and the age where not only the western civilzation flourishes, but the very same structure of our Thought and the ethical and aestethical categories which are the foundations of our most lasting and deep cultural roots are formed and come to life. For this reason, the devastation and the cold genocide committed against the Greek People by financial criminal cliques take on the specific characteristics of a real epitome – the paradigm of a civilization perverted enough to hate its very own origin and imbued with a blind and demented anxiety of levelling down.
There was a time when the Continental Europe gave birth to artists and heroes who chose to fight and die for a land they weren’t born in but that ideally was the cradle of all the people of the West. Today that very same part of Europe sends to Greece only financial inspections and liquidators.
The Ancient Gods stand and watch helplessly, in stunned silence. But for how long?
HELLAS
Nevermore will the argonauts land on your jagged shores
Nor the roaring Phoebus irradiate the Eternal Summer of the heroes.
Calliope is silent,
Here nothing sings but the wind.
You lost yourself
On your path to Eleusis.
Hellas, remember how the vile cowardly revel in hating the incomparable traits
Hellas, on the verge on your marble cliffs, Beauty is vulnerable if it can no longer string its bow.
And if the barbarian souls never suffered from the obession of envy,
Now their hearts are tainted by the bigoted hypocritical germs of usurers.
And they’ll give the name of “calvinist rigour”
To a barbarity that’s too arid for daring a conquest.
Hellas, now look at yourself: phalanxes of stunned mendicants begging for a morsel of food.
Hellas, no more roseate fingers for your sunrises, they unlock the desolation of an aborted era.
I wonder if we will ever raise our glass filled with your Rhodian wine again
And toast to hoplites and maidens still dancing around bonfires.
No, I’ll never understand the reason why such a noble breast
Could feed a posterity of unchained slaves.
Hellas, ask me if that virile indignation will inflame all the tumoltuous hearts as it did in ancient times.
Hellas, I’d reply to you – ‘export’ your anger and return to us the poet’s heart that burnt in the sand.
Hellas, rise again, now close your ranks, beat that rhythm on your shields and mark our time too.
Hellas, the torch is extinguished in the frost, may your courage kindle the presage of a new morning.
.
In times less smarmy and sickly than our age, even rants and tirades had to be subjected to the Canon. They could and had to be turned into Art and, just for this reason, if they were well devised, they could aspire to divert the course of History.
Today everyone thinks he’s entitled to speak his mind about everything, but all is completely irrelevant. A foggy nebula made of unquestionable ideas and politically correct languages consigned to the dumpster of History any possible debate and any further analysis other than those universally approved.
The Rebel finds it hard to get the center stage, but he doesn’t give up on wielding his words and thoughts like mauls, and he thanks the present age for all the new suggestions provided to his uncompromising opposition and his cold contempt.
Featuring Cristiano Santini (Disciplinatha/DishIsNein)
COME FERRO BATTENTE (JUST LIKE STRIKING IRON)
They’ll come and pin you down nailing you to the most mediocre aspirations,
They’ll impose upon you dreams more realistic than the real thing.
They will prescribe for you the tone, the right vocabulary
When and if you’re allowed to express yourself.
After all it’s so clear: at this point it’s reasonable to expect the most correct language
Only from the mavericks, but…
Oh, Nation –
What new excuses will you once more invent,
Which words will you choose to deceive yourself once more?
To tell yourself that yes, it’s a normal situation
And that the rock bottom you’re hitting
Is still high-quality material?
But now you know that you’ll always keep on sacrificing the offerings you must to that vile altar.
And that every reaction is precluded – from any appeal to reason,
To every rule, to stability.
But they’re the only ones entitled to establish on an almost daily basis
Every current limit for that realism.
And for that equal change you keep on begging
They thumb their nose at you, but in an authoritative way, obviously.
And suddenly a doubt crosses your mind: justice is not a thing to beg for,
You should create the force of ordering and get it, but…
Oh, Nation –
You’ll die the way you are – a wasted coward, chaotic, indifferent and seditious.
Incapable of every intransigence, with no urge and taste of daring and with no compassion.
Just give me, if you can, what you always have and never relinquish – the ambiguous charme of the very worst.
Now let my contempt never be extinguished and my threatening and outdated attitude never fail.
Because I’d like to be just the way you are not and you will never be – a sharp edge,
The ultimate resistant material, fast and striking iron, a hateful lucidity
.
Milan, 1848. As in the rest of Europe, the long awaited fire smouldering under the ashes of the Romantic Age at last is finally raging even here.
Announced by scuffles occurring during a premiere at La Scala Opera House, the first riots break up, turning soon into open revolts. In such circumstaces – when History starts to speed up its course and the events unfold quickly as if they were driven by otherwordly forces – even a marginal and short role, like the one played by our female protagonist, can become a key moment in a lifetime.
A heartbreaking moment cherished for the rest of her life. A memory that has the bittersweet aftertaste of nostalgia and regret, in the light of the disenchanted realism of the old age.
RESURGENTE (RESURGENCE*)
I remember that night as in a dream –
The sky forecast a snowfall,
The curfew and then a gloomy tolling
That fortold an agony.
Wrapping myself up tightly in my fur-collar
In the dark, under the arch of a doorway,
I’d shiver with cold and anxiety
And fear of a patrol there and then.
The other day during the premiere at La Scala**,
Suddenly, the whole issue was raised
While we were throwing from the public gallery***
Some tricoloured leaflets and pamphlets….
No, the stooge of the Hapsburgs
Really never forgave us for that,
And swore vengeance on us.
And I wonder if someday our people will understand
That fighting for freedom is not a whim, but a necessity.
I remember his tall silhouette standing out
A lactescent halo,
I lifted the veil up my face, then close to the wall
I peeked out and whispered “I’m here!”.
A twenty-one year old poet with a big smile,
It was rumoured he was a miscreant
But surely he was a fearless one
Who was calmly taking the risk.
He delivered me the dispatch saying: “You know
What to do with it. we are in your hands.
The insurgency will begin tomorrow,
You’re an angel and God will help you!”.
I’ll never forget that moment, he softly touched my hand
And said: “If you want, I’ll live just for you alone,
But in a free land, because it can’t exist tomorrow
If we would also live a life of cowardice”.
But the year was 1848,
He joined the rebel army, left and did not survive.
He died in the Battle of Goito****, they said.
Somebody mourned his death and eventually forgot him.
Years passed by just like trains
Travelling fast across the Old Continent,
Nevertheless I happened to walk past
That big front door quite often.
I should have died that night
With all my years and ideals still untouched,
Just eighteen and with a pledge of eternal love in my heart
In the year when we all dreamt of a Nation.
* The original title is “Resurgente”, untranslatable in English. The song is referred to Italian Risorgimento and inspired by Luchino Visconti’s “Senso”, but in a reversed context. Here the protagonist falls in love with a young patriot instead of a young Austrian officer.
** La Scala – (abbreviation in Italian language for the official name Teatro alla Scala) is an opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated in 1778.
*** During the famous “Va Pensiero”, taken from Verdi’s “Nabucco”, patriots used to throw tricolor leaflets to protest against Austrian occupation.
*** Battle of Goito – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Goito
The European Canon is here.
And it’s here to stay despite the blatant death of the civilization that produced it. Despite the orders that faceless authorities have been barking at us for decades.
Despite the fact that the most excellent and exquisite heritage of all time is depreciating and dissolving by the manifest incompetence of its unworthy heirs.
But the Canon is still here anyway. Because the Golden Rule, the infallible norm becomes a celestial matter although it’s born from human roots.
The Canon is a fixed star standing out in the dreadful void that they built for us. It’s a self-explanatory enigma. It’s the black light exposing the traits of the Brutal and the Miserable which is tirelessly assaulting us. It’s our only residual decency that, as such, is firmly situated in the Past. From that Past it plants a seed of Doubt in the apathetic soul of servants and introduces a nagging thought in the mind of the new masters,who are too dull and vulgar to have one in their turn.
Today “Europe” is just an irrelevant name and “Future” an ill omen. This has happened because we have allowed a bunch of nobodies to confiscate these two words and use them to store only their own dreams and projects.
The Canon is the Stone Guest at a Feast of Death which – even worse – is lacking in style.
It’s the inner code of the Aware Hearts. It’s the monument in time of a contradictory but nevertheless lost greatness. But it will still tell us stories and will tell others stories about us. Tales of a tireless pursuit of harmonies and eternal proportions then fallen in the dust of History. Tales of idealism, boldness and Sprezzatura. Tales of the magnificence and the grandeur they let drift away into the damnation of the Panta Rei, in cosmos more and more viciously useless.
Featuring Italian Leghend Enrico Ruggeri (thank you, Sir!)
CANONE EUROPEO (EUROPEAN CANON)
Oh my love just tell me what are you looking for in those old cafés,
Can you tell me the name of the feeling that is tearing you apart at a Nuit A L’Opéra?
Why in Baden-Baden, Bruges, Saint-Malo do the carousels comfort the soul with the autum rain,
Though it should sadden you who live on fun and pleasure?
Sinking in the plenitude of Il Vittoriale will be even sweeter to you,
And then, like every time, you’ll be speechless before the vagaries of Ludwig Der Zweite.
Take me away with you, my captain…
Take me away with you, my captain…
Echoes and recollections crowding our inner worlds
Or just luxurious locations for commercials?
The answer is up to you, tourists from the outside world,
Because we, who live inside this world, know very well that the Canon is here.
If you can still remember those galas at L’Excelsior and were also in Marienband last year,
Then you can surely explain to me the connection between Busseto and Bayreuth.
And the reason why a Fenice* rises from the ashes of another same one, located on the faecal sea
Of a town like Venice, that it’s just a backdrop where even a copy elevates to a higher role.
Why do lovers always commit suicide in Mayerling and the sick people are always placed in Toblach?
And why Nižinskij’s euclidean grace should be a divine archetype of the Motion?
Take me away with you, my adventurer…
Take me away with you, my adventurer…
However the eccentric decor which survived
Is just what remains of a civilization’s decorum.
Come on, barricade yourselves in a fucking cubical building
Hidden by mirrored windows, but the Canon is here.
In an hour frontiers which were pyres
For one hundred million lives are dissolved, and so let “Humanity” rule!
But for now it seems to me that you have a problem of style
And you can even laugh about it, but the Canon is here.
* – it’s a pun – La Fenice (The Phoenix, in English) beautiful and renowned opera house in Venice, was completely destroyed by fire in ’96, rebuilt in original XIX century style and reopened in 2003.
Paris, 1912. The most iconic work of art of all times – “La Gioconda” aka Mona Lisa – has been recently stolen from the Louvre Museum, where the famous Lady had been smiling cryptically for centuries.
At first people think that it must be the masterful robbery of some sophisticated and professional thieves, then perhaps the iconoclastic act of some avantgarde intellectuals. Once the truth is revealed at the end of 1913, the news comes as a letdown for everyone. The man who tricked the security and every surveillance – escaping for months one of the best police forces in the world – is nothing but an Italian house painter, Vincenzo Peruggia, ridiculed for his awkward behaviour and his poor French. Peruggia claims he didn’t steal the painting for money, but as a sort of “revenge” for all the rudeness and the insults that he and his fellow countrymen have been suffering in France and, most of all, for what he regarded as a real plundering committed against his homeland.
Considering that our opinions on France are much higher than Peruggia’s ones, our sympathy for him remains the same. Because Vincenzo typifies an innate characteristic of Italian people – the ability to surprise when the arrogant underestimating and the pompous mockery of some other “European brothers” leave them no other choice but to persist out of pique. And this whole story shows how the trait of “Sprezzatura” – in other countries an exclusive prerogative of a few noble souls – in our country can dwell in somewhat humble and simple men.
LE RITAL (LE RITAL*)
Who the hell are Picasso and Apollinaire?
Probably bohémiens, Futurists or just daubers.
Maybe it’s because here I don’t read any newspapers
But I’ve never heard of any of them.
Someone is trying to frame them
But it almost sounds like they don’t mind,
All those people crowding around them to see their faces:
That’s enough to expose themselves.
But I’ll tell you –
She only smiles at me,
And tout le monde is wondering where he is
And who will be
That Fantomas, that Rocambole
Maybe the Lupin, in other words the mad genius who’s making the Sûreté swear and curse.
Très bien, c’est moi – a house-painter.
An italien, mon Dieu the horror!
And I can already imagine your disappointment, if you could only see face to face the “peasant” who stole the grisbi.
I am Le Rital
With the R of a whole army of frogs,
The tramp who steals your job,
The pimp who makes your daughters walk the streets.
For them I’m always Le Rital,
A cutpurser whose skin is too dark.
And my workmates, all reds or anarchistes,
Were the first ones who made my life difficult.
I know, this will not compensate us
And, if anything, the ill-gotten gains will increase as time goes by.
But the fact remains that
At the crack of dawn, at the Louvre
This canaille of yours just seized the perfect moment
For a fancy trick,
And I chose Her – the boast and the pride of the loot of a whole bunch of arrogant thieves
And also claiming imperial rights, since pigs and cheeses are not enough for their Grandeur.
I am Le Rital
And I took Mona Lisa hostage.
She’s locked into a suitcase, under my bed,
And she’s still smiling while she gets ready for the trip.
And there will be plenty of Rital
Inside your Louvre, full to a bursting point.
But you, who keep on laughing at house-painters like me
Well, just remember what we’re capable of!
… C’est moi!
*French derogatory term for Italian people
Probably the most famous and media-sensational of all D’Annunzio’s war exploits, the bloodless – and altogether unnerving – Flight Over Vienna, as seen through the eyes of one of those young pilots who joined Il Comandante.
Maybe, on another plane of existence. that flight is still going on…
ROMBO DI GIOVANE ALA (THE RUMBLE OF A YOUNG WING*)
The ultimate risk aims to specify the target
We’ll be a bolt, a summer storm.
Over this heatwave there’s an exploit never attempted before
And you are out there – how could we ignore your invitation?
Il Comandante tells us
“Today we’ll be really bold and daring!
Tomorrow, who knows? But now
It’s just everything we want and crave!”.
Then the propeller chases and bites
Some inharmonious ascending airflows.
If gravity is a sentence
Up there in the sky it will be suspended for us.
Catching the altitude is almost like a spasm,
And the wind is swirling and harassing the tail.
It seems it loves to let us fall in pieces,
It’s weird that then it surrenders to an engine.
On crags made of gore
And littered of bones
We’re flying with burning souls
Higher and higher than we can.
And if the only stop we can conceive
Is beyond every imaginable limit,
There’s a grim omen in our heart –
We’ll never have a better day than this.
And from the Alps the abysmal ring of the mountains
Already gapes a titanic embrace,
It’s strange to be so grateful for a fatal risk
And promised to rocks and ice.
But it’s a flight shaped as a hardened spearhead,
Which Parca** will be so able to deflect it?
We’re proud we threw it,
And love the thrill of riding it.
What’s the point of this unarmed flight?
Yet it has already echoed the Eternal.
The Sacred disguises itself within the Mockery***
And won’t call for blood and purification.
A flout that is a fiery stream
To bomb you with shame,
You are the brute and average Ordinary,
We are who we are, and it’s all that matters –
The rumble of a young wing
Coming and poking around your heart,
It throws you a new gauntlet
And pays respects to your ladies.
Does one really need to explain
What it’s like to reach the peak?
That’s why we keep on flying
While a whole people stopped doing that.
And how many tragedies, injustice and afflictions
We shall see tomorrow,
All of them, because of that reneged courage –
The guts to be only the Masters & Owners.
* taken from a verse written on the leaflets D’Annunzio dropped over Vienna – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_over_Vienna
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parcae
***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakar_mockery
note: all wiki English links are seen/written from a UK/USA perspective
Every decline of civilizations has its own seers and every catastrophe its Cassandra curses. Throughout the 20th century runs a long and fatal chain of famous suicides dotting that “Sunset Boulevard” with an equal number of memorial stones.
The Artist sometimes acts as an antenna tuned to some unearthly frequencies and, very often, he just can’t bear the violence of this gift for too long. Therefore a civilization permeated by evident self-destructive urges could only be sung, on the edge of its abyss, by bards equally devoted to self-destrucion. The second-rate rationalism and scientism prevailing today associate every urge to the field of psychiatry, but oddly enough they elude every interpretation regarding a phenomenon just as pathological and absolutely modern: the complete submission of Art to the diktat of the dominant ideology.
Even at the risk of sounding pathetic and farcical – nothing is more embarassing than a “saboteur” loyal to the regime.
Very loosely based on Michele Mari’s book “Tutto Il Ferro Della Torre Eiffel”.
L’ALBA DELLE CENERI (DAWN OF THE ASHES)
Not even a single skylight illuminates this passage,
But only the sparse and dying flames of some gas lamps.
Harsh will-o’-the-wisps of another Père Lachaise
At the dismissive funeral-wake for La Rochelle the Unholy.
Celan will swallow a black milk at dawn,
While Klaus Mann will choose the barbituric Seine.
And Denoël the Reckless will surrender to a ghost
To pay the ultimate price for certain Bagatelles.
The frozen tide of a brand New Wave is rising.
In the Métro de Paris there’s a ride waiting for its Jean Seberg.
Graham Bond, the Druid Of Blues, will splatter on an identical subway track
Because in this century it’s the Count of Lautréamont who breaks the bank.
It’s good to shoot yourself in the face inside some northern chalets,
The only “Farewell To Arms” you can give to yourself.
But if the ammo is made of Armagnac
There’s Joseph Roth nearby, it’s enough for you to be out there.
Slashed wrists the Witness Weiss’s way or
A double bed and bullets in full Vogel-Kleist style.
You can shape and slot a teapot knob into a buckshot
And say “It’s a one-take!”, just like Potocki taught us.
Sylvia is afraid of poppies: no Poppy Day to celebrate her memory,
Such a scornful and aryan death and Robert Howard is with her.
Just give us a good kitchen-drama, but a virile one this time,
And a drying rack would close with a snap in a dawn of ashes and marble.
Tell me about Yukio Mishima and his wild ideal,
Tell me about some hotel rooms in Turin, about nooses and stairwells.
And tell me about the founding tragedy, tell me when and why it’s gone,
And then tell me the story about how you die for nothing when you live on a big lie.
Benvenuto Cellini is maybe one of the figures that best exemplifies the idea of “incomparable life”, just the way D’Annunzio himself understood and achieved a few centuries later.
He’s also a very good example of the uniquely Italian duality where a minority of flamboyant souls is in contrast to a reticent, cautious, ultraconservative and familistic majority.
A bold, daring and adventurous minority following aestheticism and with an aggressive approach in relation to life, society and arts.
In short, another perfect archetype of that all-Italian Sprezzatura we gladly give the floor to, to tell his story in his own words and with the lexicon he’s comfortable with.
BENVENUTO*
From that salamander I saw one day stopping in the flames
Of an ancestral hearth and then coming out unscathed,
And from the uranic poison of the most lethal scorpion
I drew my wild temper and my heraldic emblem.
If no one ever saw such an unmatched goldsmith chisel,
If the ardour provided me with enough heads to cut,
This very same hand of mine armed itself
With gouge, emery and ranseur**.
Oh Life, you slut! You always cast and rolled your dice,
You, sick whore, while it lasted I gambled and bet more and more.
So beautiful and with no honour, you even won my heart.
But I paid you in full
Now.
Who can deny me love, now
That with the fire of the stars I’m going to get me a new skin?
I tried to find the most perfect balance between darkness and light,
I felt the fleeting extasy in the greater danger.
I found the most loyal friends in real beasts,
I happily left behind all two-legged dunces and bitches.
And then I overthrew a siege with my dragon wrist,
Aiming for the neck of the highest-ranking one.
And flattery never brought me
Unearned honours and baiocchi***.
I mocked the dull ones, kicked the villains, laughed at the bigots,
And I liked to do it on the face of all the herd in my sight.
A prince or a rogue, but I’m Benvenuto* and a name can’t be wrong
Now
Who can deny me honour, now
That I will start a war with the earthworms?
I forged so many chimeric and sylvan wonders,
Nymphs, ephebes, and then seashells and grotesque mayflies,
A hermetic philosopher, or maybe not
But I preyed on firm thighs and stiff arses.
Now that it’s over, I’ll never suffer from this foul old age.
Time to end this game, I’ll be the Beauty that in the past I gave to the world.
I’m heading to the Night, will never be a prison this body that I left here
Now.
* It’s Benvenuto Cellini. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benvenuto_Cellini But “Benvenuto” in Italian means “welcome” as well.
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranseur
*** copper coins
To be part of the opposition today may result in a multiple-choice situation, including the one of being deliberately marginal, in order to watch the current destruction with bitter skepticism.
One thing is certain: the post-modern rebel can no longer just feel outraged by his contemporaries; it’s time for him to be aware that his disgust should also be extended to their values and aspirations. But he must nerve himself and be brave enough to face the retaliatory measures that inevitably start to arise.
In fact, he must be so able to draw from the retaliations the strength not to let them muzzle him.
Because it’s in him and for the short time he’s allowed that the voices of all those who had been definitively silenced in the past and before him can be heard at last.
NESSUNA CROCE MANCA (NO ONE’S CROSS IS MISSING*)
To all the most distinguished masters sealing
All mouths shut, I give as a dowry a whole stack of pillows –
I care about the sleep of the Unjust some of these gentlemen sleep
Much more than a peasant does about his pigs.
I want you to be shiny and happy in your best formal attire
Which is the only leftover of some old investitures,
Formal just enough in case the occasion
Would require old crap and new sealing.
Then, what embarasses you is
A legacy I keep for myself…
A harsh idiom that was forged on the high seas
By the wind, this is the reason nothing else can rip it out,
A will for honour and integrity following the path of a long line of craftsmen.
A rememberance for those cross-less Fallen
Whose Truth can’t get a voice anymore,
And the pride I feel in being here now, with this torch in my hands.
I still feel honoured to be the inspiration behind your overzealousness
Though it’s so annoying to know that I’m actually harmless,
But there’s an underlying bad faith in your slimy behaviour
That I like to expose – it makes me feel alive.
I really owe to your arrogance only
All the persistance that Nature wouldn’t give me
And that, together with the obligation of bearing witness,
Vetoed the luxury of simply growing old.
Despite that my heroes are weary,
Sorry, but I’m still holding on.
The outrageousness consists of not suffering at all
While facing the reality of a havoc that is still ongoing,
In not admitting that being a Nation means primarily to preserve and protect.
But all that is left of an absolute unique landscape
Will not escape from the brutal and lowest souls
Of armed progressists, devouring financial markets, democracies quite happy to kill.
And If I should ever stand alone against the whole world,
At the risk of sounding a graveyard rather than just a man
Hiding and saving memories and forgotten stories inside itself,
Then no one’s cross will be really missing, for sure.
* the title is inspired by a famous poem by Giuseppe Ungaretti – “San Martino Del Carso”.
East Africa, 1942.
The Allied Forces led by the British Army are now essentially the masters of the situation, while all that is left of the Italian Colonial Troops is withdrawing northwards.
An officer of Italian Royal Cavalry, Baron Amedeo Guillet, decides that a capitulation is not part of his list of acceptable options. And therefore he starts his private war supported by a handful of his compatriots and an instant army of native horsemen of the most various tribes. In a few months Cummandar As Shaitan (“The Devil Commander”) as he is now nicknamed by his loyal “soldiers”, takes the name of Abdellah Al Redai and leads the guerrilla army, becoming a real thorn in the side of the British Army, and inflicting upon his opponents many bitter humiliations.
Respected by his enemies and idolized by the natives, he will keep on serving his country on the post-war period following a diplomatic career, with the usual dedication. Although with an elegant and refined disillution for the past and, most of all, for the present time.
CUMMANDAR AS SHAITAN
The more I think about it, the less I can explain
The reason why I find the fight so enthralling,
While even a moron could realize
There’s a cause falling apart behind him.
But I surely know that never to surrender corresponds to a precise logic:
Not to fit in an ignoble role.
So believe me, if I say that…
That part of Italy that is fighting here is made only of African people
I wish you could see it, because I can assure you
That in my whole life I have never lead a more impeccable troop –
An authentic Cavalry… With me!
For what it’s worth, just ask a question to those
Who were already marching pompously triumphant,
Ask them which kind of breakfast made of dust and bile
We served them over and over again.
And ask them about how those charges of nomadic horsemen
Could hold a whole army in check.
So believe me, if I say that…
We got the contempt for the natives off of them
You see, it disappears so fast off the backs of fugitives.
I owe to my warriors all that is left of noble in me –
Abdallah Al Redai, my role.
A change of backdrop for the second act,
That peace-time we had hoped for for so long.
It helps us in opening a whole new world
But it costs us a posture of a hangdog.
Above all I must serve Italy, anyway
But staying away from it because, not surprisingly,
I can do that better anywhere I don’t waste
My days doing it reluctantly.
And to think that all evidences were clear at the time
When they used to purge the “bastard sons”,
And oh how I felt disgusted when I saw the most coward and vile
Promoted as true heroes.
Now I ride under an Irish sky,
The stench of manure is so dear to me.
And I’m even philosophical, like the Arabs,
About the risk of breaking my neck.
And some nights I still dream of a wild charge
I wish you could all be back here with me
To launch an assault to the sky, and pardon my rhetoric:
Yours truly, Amedeo Baron Guillet.
*“Devil Commander” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Guillet
Children Of Chthonia,
We’ll leap over the bull once more.
Guests: Massimiliano Bolcioni (yes, we’re lucky enough to work with a Fellini’s actor) and Magister Rex Church.
PATMOS*
It’s time again for ancient Thera**
To eclipse the sun of each continent,
And erect its black tower up to the sky.
A tower incandescent with fumes
Which are the breath and the living tongue
Of the irate Earth itself,
Just like a leviathan venting
Its primordial bile.
May the lethargic Marsili*** rise
From the abyss of the Thyrrenian Sea
Just like Cronus,
And find its Saturn prone at last,
Helpless and with a broken back.
And may all begotten flesh
Be grateful to be the main course
For the ultimate, funeral feast
And lay down
Just like a dying man on his deathbed.
The exhausted civilization will end where it all began,
It eclipses in a silicon angel’s moan
And the Unholy Whore already ascends to her throne.
It’s time for the Forgotten Gods to rise –
Let them have their sacrifices!
The Leading Horse is white
The Second Horse is red
The Third One is a black
The Last One is a green.
May the star throw vehemently its lightning bolts
On New Atlantis The Impure,
And a rising Poseidon sink it with a single, gigantic wave.
May the stone’s damned ichor go back
To the dark dwelling of those caves
Where all that once was a living thing
Is now reduced to a viscous tide.
Just like the Titans of the Carboniferous,
Reduced to a black, mineral form
Then ripped out from the bowels of the Earth
And thrown with both ends
By Ephestus The Industrial
In his big furnace which will burn in the end
Its very own architect and his sacrificed flock,
May Atropos cut that thread that is still holding it.
Living things of all time, just one big pyre –
They will finally get their precious melting-pot scattered in the wind.
In celestial exodus, millions of years to come,
And the Earth will forget us, the Earth will still be breathing.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patmos
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thera
*** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsili