A large ship has already sailed out of the port of Genova. From the bridge we watch Italy fade away, as the sun slowly sets behind it. We do not know that this will be the last image we will see of the country where we were born.
Explorers by necessity, adventurers in search of a place to survive, we sail for 26 days. During the nights we search for answers in the long tongue of white moonlight, which reflecting off the mirror of the sea seems to show us. Are we making the right choice…?
As we cross the Atlantic Ocean, walking through the rusty, iron corridors of the ship, we hear prayers, chatter, swearing, games, love phrases, hopes, each with their own dialect, each with their own desires, all with one thought: to reach this land of plenty, where ‘salami grows on the trees, and where he who sleeps the most earns the most’.
At the port of Santos, all around us an immensity of different faces to get lost in, people from our country completely bewildered, faces of the most diverse features, unimaginable. “Is this Brazil?”
We ask ourselves aloud. Is this the land of cuccagna?”
It is the dawn of a new day, lost in the vegetation, near the banks of a river, a group of people, visibly tired and dried up from the long journey, are waiting their turn to finally be ferried to the land promised to them.
Immense trees, fields in which the eye loses sight of the horizon, fruit and flowers in fantastically shaped, colourful forms, bizarre animals fly over their worn-out suitcases, toucans and monkeys, watching them. From the dense forest, it almost seems as if someone is watching them…