Me too, like all the people, since when I was a children, strummed poems on paper; perhaps with too many false notes. But for a boy who lived in a provincial town as Imperia is, writing poetry was as sitting above a rock facing the sea and look at the curved line of horizon.

It meant going beyond, to rip the straitjacket which took linked to the earth, it meant, in short, surfing in the wind and become sailors of infinite.

I wrote poems to free landing-places in the waters shaken of the youth when, during summer nights, we boys came out in group looking for foreign girls; when, on dawn, I went alone for a walk on the pier waiting for sunrise.

And so, between a line by Giacomo Leopardi, a sonnet by Foscolo, between the “pieces of bottle” of Montale and the “steddazzu” of Cesare Pavese, I too strummed my thin thoughts of life.

And  I often strummed them accompanying the mumbling of the waves with the notes of “Vedrai vedrai” by Luigi Tenco or of “Quand on n’a que l'amour” by Jacques Brel.
I entrusted this “habit” only to professors Dedoni and Scaramuzza with which I had a relationship very beautiful and much closer than it usually is a relationship between teacher and pupil. There was great esteem and confidence. Both have regarded interesting my poems and I felt already fully gratifying.
A day, however, my father proposed me to make them read to Renzo Laurano of whom was  friend and colleague as both taught at the Technical Institute “Ruffini” in Imperia.

Renzo Laurano (pseudonym of Luigi Asquasciati), was a poet of Sanremo, known at national and international level, thanks to his friendship with Paul Valéry. I remember he received me in his house in San Remo an afternoon during the summer. It was very hot. Renzo Laurano wore t-shirt and shorts; to see him so déshabillé so seemed to me even more minutes and defenceless as usually appeared when he was dressed in jacket and tie. He received me, let me  say, in a “ligurian” way, without wasting words, coming down immediately on the matter.

The Poet began to read a poem, then a second and, finally, a third… From time to time, he gazed at me as if he would search my mind. I had not the courage to look at his face; I was intimidated, maybe I was a little bit shy, then I took a run with my eyes long his thin and little legs which, in truth, had nothing of poetic..
He red again some poems, finally, he gave me back the manuscript, he stood up with the gesture of keeping me to the door.
-In my opinion,- he said seriously,- you may publish them.
Arrived in the entrance he stopped a moment:
-Ah,- said, - in that your poetry, which begins  “Pearls open in the dawnlight ", there is one certain expression… "with thousand different colours", remove that “thousand colors”, is a phrase so trivial, so common, I do not find it in tone.

I reflected on that "thousand different colours" but, at the end, I decided to maintain the line. Without disrespect for the comparison, inside my mind strolled the lunar landscape of the wandering Shepherd from Asia (by Leopardi), "a thousand things you know, a thousand you reveal, which are hidden to the simple shepherd".
But, without reference that might seem blasphemous, I must say that I like the phrases that crush the words to the bottom, without any pretension to raise them to the sky.