The homeless man (from ex-Yugoslavia) sans papiers, trying to get Italian citizenship (grandma from Bari, Puglia) sleeping on the edge of the park. White beard, wrapped in a sleeping bag and typical looks of who’s been outside for long. We spoke about food for a while…as he described how delicious is the pizza he used to get from a shop near the university (pizza Alessandra, he said, which we never heard of... he mentioned how pizza is the real communist food, as simple as it is.. Then he asked us about “focaccia”, which we described accurately only to find ourselves with a groaning stomach) Suddenly the conversation somehow went deeper and I found myself day-dreaming, as he was telling us in broken French on when he crossed by bicycle the border between Slovenia and Italy in the middle of the night (the police caught him, sequestered his bike and bags and in the end let him through). It’s almost raining and he’s perched on a sidewalk on top of a big road junction a few steps away from the fortress palaces of the European Commission. Runners in fluorescent lycra listening to their earphones speed past us. We never understood where he’s from…although I believe he mentioned a couple of times the city of Dubrovnik. Good knows what other stories he lived, what he went through to get here and what he goes thru every day, living as ghost (Balkan wars, epic border-crossings, improvised friendships on the side of the roads, but also mistreatments from the police, doors closed on his face, solitude…). We gave some of the food we were carrying – a lot of it- although my impression was that he needed something else.
We left and he greeted us repeating our names (which we mentioned early in the conversation, ages before). In a world of inequalities, we are required to rise up and give back.