I arrived in Civitella with a precise target in my mind: to work on a sort of memoir about my experience as a moviegoer. During the first two weeks I was focuse just on that, following the precise schedule Iplanned when I was still at home. Then something happened. I became more sensible to the place and the other fellows. I started enjoyed the conversation. I stopped to work on my memoir and wrote a short-story inspired by a film made by another fellow. At the same I had new ideas, new thoughts. I reconsidered the book I had in my mind from a fresh perspective. So that’s what I got from my stay in the Castle: inspiration and new friends. The most valuableI could ever get.

We arrived at the black island earlier than I’d expected and earlier than I’d wished. «Get down/off» said Penelope, and I got down/off, and when my feet were on the ground, Penelope pushed away/off in the boat. I watched that woman rowing in the direction of the open sea and I tried to find something to say before I was left alone. «Penelope». It was the only thing I could say. She was already far, so I’m not sure what I heard. «I am Gabrielle». That was what I heard but maybe it was just the sound of the waves. I waved a hesitant goodbye and I couldn’t tell if she replied in any way because the shadow of her hat darkened her greek column dress almost completely. I stared at the sea until she disappeared in the water. Then I started to climb the cliff and I realized that the ground under my feet was not made of rock. I also realized that I had already seen this place before, in the video I had been watching/watched? in the castle. I was on an rubber island, an island of tires piled up by the ton. Tires everywhere and nothing else. I could smell the roads those tires had run along, the miles they’d run. The smell of places where they went when they had a car, when there were people at the wheel. And that smell made me think about when I was still a kid and would heard the word vanishedon the radio, in the news or pronounced by the adults. They said that someone had vanished and someone else had gone. I was disoriented because from the tone they used for/to say that word, «vanished», I suspected that nobody would look/was looking for the vanished ones. Everyday someone vanished and I wanted to say, Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you look for those people? But I held back because I suspected something else: that it was impossible to go where people went when they had vanished. So I stayed with my thoughts, trying to imagine where they went — the place of vanished — and sometimes the place I would see in my mind was not so different from the island where I am now. I can’t say how long I have been here. The only sense of time comes to me from the sea and the sea is always the same, a mirror of light. During the wintertime I go deep in the island, sneaking into its rubber caves of tires. But when the warm season arrives I get out and climb the hill, crawling to the top on my hands and knees and I sit there to watch the sea and wonder, What brought me to this place? And Why me? Why just me? There is a tire a little bigger than the others on the top. Maybe it is not actually bigger. Maybe it just seems bigger to me. Bigger or not someone has written my name on it and few inches below two other words: Vanished today.