col favore delle tenebre

I am not sure how old I was. Elementary school? Or maybe later on.. middle school (I am not sure if you can say like that in English). Anyhow, I remember, there was this nun that every now and then was asking us to explain the meaning of certain expressions like, for example "col favore delle tenebre". What does it mean? In English it would sound like "thanks to the night darkness" or something like that. Why the night time is making a favour? Why so much generosity? Is it a true favour or not? Who can tell. "Time has told me." (as Nick Drake use to say. Che Dio l'abbia in Gloria). Then let's do it this way.

Other memories: there was this poem called "Il Calcio in Città", meaning "football in the city", where football is meant like "soccer". This poem was in my "sussidiario", one of those books that you are given when you are at the medium/middle schools. I think the author was some famous guy, not Gianni Rodari but someone like him, an old chap or something. Today, I was looking into google to find out who was the original writer and guess what: I discovered that some kids in a class won a prize because of this poem, as if they wrote it themselves. Here is the link: it is a pdf file.
Maybe I was wrong, and it is really those kids who wrote the poem. Who can tell?
But the reason why I like to remember this is because of something I was specifically involved with. When we were kids, at school (actually it was a private school held by nuns) we use to do something extremely dangerous: playing soccer on the top of a roof, among the highest roofs in Rome, where the barriers were so low that we could have fallen very easily... the good thing is that we were kids, therefore we were short and proportionally the barriers were higher. We were really doing the "calcio in città", soccer in the city, on the roofs. We were not using a reall ball, actually we were using the little metallic leads of the fruit juices of Joga for example or Zuegg or Valfrutta. That was soo cool at the time and so stupid if I think about it now.. I mean.. not really stupid but at least naive. Which is cool anyway.

After that (or before that) the other competition: we use to read that poem, "Il Calcio in Città". The competition consisted in being able to read it as quickly as possible and being able to make sense at the same time. I mean, you should have been able to understand all the words. That was the difficulty: we needed a referee, someone who could have judged the spelling and take the time (at the same time).

You can try to do it your self, the text is up there, on the pdf link.

Ok, I bored you enough, expecially if you managed to read up to this.
Take care and speak you tomorrow.

PB