Four years ago I had a weird idea: to found a city. I needed people but, certainly, this is not the sort of thing you can go advertising around. On the other hand, the family cannot be the first brick of any political initiative. That is why I talked first to a couple of friends who know me and who love me: among us shame is almost discarded. They joined the initiative. This is what I coined as phyliarchia, a political principle.
I ignored almost everything about where this initiative would lead us. I just knew from the beginning that my boutade was a collateral effect of my recent fatherhood and I was perfectly conscious about the cause-effect relationship between Mauro’s birth and my sudden need to leave the World and build a new and decent place for us. This is probably an archetypical pattern or maybe just a naïf and silly idea. The positive thing is that my friends and me engaged in a political adventure which is taking us to places and revelations never imagined.
None of us had a clue of what “to found a city” should mean. We discussed a lot and said a lot of non sense. Then we realized that all we could do was to behave as citizens of our city. At the beginning we could not feel at ease in such a chaotic city made of only three citizens who live about 15 km from each other, surrounded by thousands of people ignorant of their sudden condition of barbarians. Every object was there to separate us instead of keeping us together: buildings, roads, cars, railways,… but we designed some strategies to minimize these inconveniences. We had nothing except freedom of speech when we were together.
Since hospitality and pacifism are our flags, since
our immigration rate was nil and military conquest is discarded, we implemented
for a while what we call “il cibo è pronto” policy. It consists in inviting people
for lunch or dinner, free of charge, no need to cook or to wash the dishes, etc…
The results of this policy were mixed: citizens multiplied but they came just
for lunch.
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