火马 - Cavallo di fuoco

Yes, in the end, I’m still pratese. But it’s like going back to the same place again and again and realizing it didn’t wait for you. It moved, changed its skin, spread out. That’s what happened to Via Pistoiese. I walked it all through high school. That’s where I ate my first wontons and learned that, deep down, the whole world makes dumplings, just under different names. I watched it fill up with Chinese life and slowly change. It’s the street of “everything full”. Full of Chinese signs, restaurants open at any hour, colors so bright it always feels like a holiday. Shops packed with plastic and unlikely objects, road signs that look hand-painted, white Porsches with Hello Kitty on the side, as if that were perfectly normal. It’s a street where you feel like a stranger without ever leaving your city. Where you understand that integration is a complicated animal, full of sharp edges, and yet all it takes is sitting once a week in the same old diner, at the same table, for everything to fall back into place. You go home without ever moving. Then there’s the Spring Festival, with its silk Dragon held up by bamboo poles. Watching it winds through the squares while someone opens a Tsingtao and someone else bites into a rice sweet has something hypnotic about it. Via Pistoiese is hipster without knowing it, underground out of necessity, eccentric by nature. It smells of fried food, incense, fake and real flowers together. And then I think of my daughter, who will have Chinese friends, who will pair cantucci with bubble tea and find nothing strange about it. And it feels right. That cities change their faces. That languages mix. That features become hybrid.

Happy Spring Festival.
This will be the Year of the Fire Horse. May it be bold, roaring, full of energy and life.