The Conductor

A centre of gravity is not proved once and for all. It is confirmed every time the world around it pushes in a new direction, and that is what happens in these pages.

Anyone who has read Il Metodo Walkman already knows that behind every decision made by this family there is a small device with five buttons, and knows what they mean. Anyone who has not read it will find out all the same: some things can be understood even by coming in halfway.

Club Farnese

Termini station, at seven in the morning, has a noise that no microphone could ever record faithfully and then give back, without loss, to someone who was not there: it is not the noise of the trains, it is that of thousands of people who decide, all together and without knowing it, to trust a timetable printed on a board.

Alberto Ferri thought this often, almost every time, as he went down towards the underground platforms of the metro, that the fidelity of a city is measured precisely there, underground, where no one ever really looks, and where everything continues to work only because someone, elsewhere, has decided that it should.

From there, from that very point, thousands of people set off every day in every direction of the peninsula, just as once, from a gilded column in the Forum not far away, the distances of an entire empire were measured: the stone changed, the name of the station changed, but the need for a fixed point from which to count how far one is from home remained identical.

It was, Alberto thought, the same function he himself ended up performing in every company he accompanied: not an oracle, not a saviour, but a temporary fixed point from which to count the distance between where one was and where one wanted to arrive, a mobile milestone that remained just long enough to fix the measurement, before moving elsewhere, leaving behind not a monument but only, if everything had gone well, a method that those who remained would be able to go on using on their own, long after his name had been forgotten.