What do we feel when we meet the boy's gaze on the cover? It is not hard to guess. The connection to images we see daily on television is immediate and direct. People arriving in our country by every conceivable route, crowded into reception centers, hoping for a better future—among them, many children. Perhaps this boy's face is almost too clean, but his eyes seem to speak to us. But who listens? Do we understand his language? Who will look after him?
For those unfamiliar with the Città dei Ragazzi, the title of this book might seem merely the title of a novel. But it is far more than that. It is also the name of a community founded in the years after World War II on the outskirts of Rome by an Irish priest, J.P. Carrol-Abbing. The city welcomes boys alone, from every nation, offering them a second chance.
Affinati tells the rambling, improbable stories of these boys whom he knew as their teacher. He puts himself at stake; he builds a bond with them unlike any other; he learns from them a universal language where words grow thin, where gesture, glance, and silence matter most. He even accompanies two of his students on a journey home to Morocco, the country they had left years before. The line between life and writing blurs, because telling the stories of his "sons" led him to tell his own story—the story of being a son, his difficult relationship with his father, the family he was born into.
Soon we see that this is also a story about his own experience of fatherhood. He, a teacher among boys, discovers he is one of them. He realizes that the condition of Ali, Hafiz, Omar, and all the others belongs to a hidden corner of his own life—the place where he was a child whose father had himself lived without parents.
"Only now that my father is dead can I say he was like you, but he hid it—from himself first of all. He buried his orphanhood as if it were a rotting corpse. Now I see that what he could not do, falls to me. I was doing it as a boy, without knowing it; I was grieving the abandonment he could not grieve; that was the root of my sadness, the source of the solitude that choked me."
Laura Nardini, 2008
