Book Description

Life on the streets is very hard. Between 2016 and 2017, I spent an entire year as a homeless person on the streets of Rome. This short manual, or guide, is a more or less detailed account of the experiences I had during this time and the "skills" I learned there to survive in a hostile and sometimes ruthless environment, where dangers are always lurking around the corner and present themselves whenever you least expect them. I hope it will come in handy both as a "handbook" for those who in the course of their existence should find themselves having to walk this sad and dangerous path; and for those who want to understand what it really means to live on the streets in the 21st century. This is not an official handbook or guide, like a programming manual or one on Army tactical warfare. It has a personal slant and is somewhere between an account of my experiences and a list of practical, common sense advice that would be useful to keep in mind if you find yourself in that sad condition of life. It is not a list of addresses or emergency phone numbers (which though is provided at the end of the guide) when an attempt to share what I learned during that long year spent in Rome in 2017. Hence my idea to publish it in three languages (English, German, and Italian), so that it may also be useful to a broader, international audience, as I did previously with my essay "The Yoke." Undoubtedly the "street" is also a school of life, but it is a hard school, sad and from which one often never returns to normal life, as it is easy to be sucked into what I would like to define as a parallel dimension of existence that beyond a certain threshold no longer has any connection with the "normal" world. It is a dimension in which I, at times, was also happy, if I may use this term, in that I was relieved of the burden of bourgeois existence, made up of debts, bills to pay and commitments to fulfill, ending up even seeing glimmers of a more authentic existence, thus confirming the Gospel teaching on poverty and simplicity. I, on the way, was at times "freed" from my slavery to money and success, and saw things in a different light that made me feel freer than I do now in my daily life as a writer and translator. Having said that, I don't want to make here either an apologia for poverty or a suggestion to undertake this life because it is not chosen, but imposed by chance and often by misfortune, and of course I am careful not to say that it is a life like any other or better. Absolutely not. Nor do I think I will ever return to it, as that would be profoundly wrong and immoral. Those who can, have the right and the duty to do what is possible to climb the slope and return to the world of men, but this does not mean that even those who lead the nomadic and stray life of the homeless out of sad necessity, among a thousand hardships, deprivations and dangers, do not also have the opportunity to be, if not happy, at least perhaps somewhere and at some time truly free.