About me
Matteo Della Rovere
The city is waking up, I thought, and there's always the same filth, just like before. Nothing has changed.
Memories of days when I viewed these streets with different eyes came flooding back—the subway roaring by, the signs, the colors, the eccentric characters. Even the smells seemed extraordinary. Magical, enchanting New York. It once represented an exciting and unknown future for me. Now, I saw the same things with melancholy. They seemed like unkept promises, a dwelling for many shattered and suffering lives, dramas more or less silent, here as elsewhere.
I stopped at a traffic light, even though it was still early and the streets were deserted. I rolled down the window and took a deep breath. I lingered watching a man with unkempt beard, in a dirty tank top and trousers, walking with an uncertain step, probably already drunk, among papers carried by the wind. I pressed my foot on the accelerator and drove away.
I had woken up at dawn and had the sudden desire to revisit the small bar-restaurant where I had started playing so many years ago. Back then, it was an Italian place, but someone had told me that the owner, Carlo, a tall and imposing man from Trieste, had died and that now there was an Irish pub there.
I still remembered the bad smell of ashtrays and alcohol, the dirty red on the walls, the shiny, long bar counter. "This is the fabulous Come Prima," Orazio, the drummer and band leader, had said bitterly the day of my audition. It was the fall of 1980. No one else had responded to the newspaper ad. Perhaps that's why I became their new organist…
The city is waking up, I thought, and there's always the same filth, just like before. Nothing has changed.
Memories of days when I viewed these streets with different eyes came flooding back—the subway roaring by, the signs, the colors, the eccentric characters. Even the smells seemed extraordinary. Magical, enchanting New York. It once represented an exciting and unknown future for me. Now, I saw the same things with melancholy. They seemed like unkept promises, a dwelling for many shattered and suffering lives, dramas more or less silent, here as elsewhere.
I stopped at a traffic light, even though it was still early and the streets were deserted. I rolled down the window and took a deep breath. I lingered watching a man with unkempt beard, in a dirty tank top and trousers, walking with an uncertain step, probably already drunk, among papers carried by the wind. I pressed my foot on the accelerator and drove away.
I had woken up at dawn and had the sudden desire to revisit the small bar-restaurant where I had started playing so many years ago. Back then, it was an Italian place, but someone had told me that the owner, Carlo, a tall and imposing man from Trieste, had died and that now there was an Irish pub there.
I still remembered the bad smell of ashtrays and alcohol, the dirty red on the walls, the shiny, long bar counter. "This is the fabulous Come Prima," Orazio, the drummer and band leader, had said bitterly the day of my audition. It was the fall of 1980. No one else had responded to the newspaper ad. Perhaps that's why I became their new organist…
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