Salerno, the “seafront of the damned” between alcohol and illusions

And lad passes slowly talking on the phone in Arabic: neither the origin is understandable nor is it clear, as often happens to an Italian when he listens to them talking, whether he is arguing on his cell phone or it is a simple exchange of information. A little further on a group of Bengalis chatter in an equally incomprehensible dialect. Then there is the Italian mixed with the French of the migrants arriving from the former colonies and the English of the tourists who speak to each other or ask for information. In a few meters of Seafront you hear so many different dialects than even in the rest of the city. It seems paradoxical, but it is precisely along these few meters, symbolic and beautiful, that integration is experienced and that one encounters various people who cross the city and mix with the routine of the people of Salerno: from the tourists who remain astonished in front of the panorama on which they protrudes the seafront, to the young mothers and grandmothers of various nationalities who take their children for a walk childrento the black boy sitting alone on the bench with the hood over his head who, at 11 in the morning, is already on his second beer and to the couples of pusheralways the same, always in the same place.

The symbolic places

A few meters, among the most panoramic and symbolic of the city, which are also the place where beauty and damnation, marginality and urban revenge projects are concentrated. And there is a before and an after, a sort of border that divides the worlds: towards Concordia square “the damned”, a Santa Teresa “i beati”. «It’s the alcohol that ruins them» explains a thirty-year-old Gambian sitting next to an even younger boy, originally from Senegal.