Dear Totò,
It’s been so long since you spoke to me about your time in Amsterdam. “It was in 1971,” you told me, lighting up yet another cigarette. “Italy was gripped by violence and Italians were discovering heroin; I was twenty, sick of my country and longing to see the world.”

The fallen bicycle lies against the wall of the university, unable to move – a wounded beast so racked with pain that it cannot get up and resume its ride.

My brother’s laughing on the other end of the phone. He’s been living in Madrid for more than a year. “Try saying at least one full sentence that actually makes sense. Less enthusiasm, more concision,” he chides gently.

Or maybe, I don’t know, it’s the very absence of mountains; this unending horizon wherever you look. The physical geography of Amsterdam is so different from my own interior landscape. Do the spaces we inhabited as children determine the contours of our soul?

I stroll along the canal under the scrutiny of Amsterdam’s thousand-eyed houses. News of the Lampedusa tragedy has just arrived. The number of bodies still being recovered on the high seas is extremely high; a pitiless figure that keeps on rising, never yielding a final tally.