VIAREGGIO – A book of memoirs, but one that should make you reflect

by ANTONIO NICOLETTI – Other times! It will be said. It doesn’t seem to me that heroes existed, simply men and women attached to their city.

by ANTONIO NICOLETTI

(from the book “The boys of the Arcobaleno Bar” – .IT editions April 2024)

… The void that I come across every time I cross the pine forest at that point represents a greater void that I still can’t explain. Here the memories change into bitterness, just thinking about men like Spartaco Zappelli, about many of those people I met in my life and who considered Viareggio as something that belonged to them, where they were born and would have liked to die – quoting our great fellow citizen Mario Tobino.
A miserable story, no less than the collapse of the theater that Ermete Zacconi wanted to build in Viareggio, the Politeama Theater linked to the name of Enrico Pea, the splendid Piazzone, the heart of commerce imbued with humanity. Streets scented with oleander.
Who today travels along the avenue that separates the two lungs of the western pine forest which stretch one on Via Antonio Fratti and the other on Viale Michelangelo Buonarroti up to the extreme border of the Municipality marked by the Fossa dell’Abate, one cannot realize what this lush park full of sunlight was since the 1930s to the sixties.
At the Trocadero ball, at the Pirate and at the Black Cat attendance was a little higher with age, they were very popular places, while the younger ones preferred La Capannina and Il Pino sul Tetto.
Don’t think, however, of a kind of entertainment islandin the sense that almost everywhere Viareggio in those decades was bursting with life (and one might wonder how it could have happened that all that ageless liveliness disappeared into thin air).
There weren’t just the Promenade cinemas (Politeama, Supercinema, Odeon, Eden, Eolo, and even Principino), but films were also shown at the Cinema Centrale, at the Goldoni, at the Tirreno in Via IV Novembre, there were also the open-air cinema in via Duse and the one in Via dei Comparini, and Torre del Lago (where the Diana salon was all the rage after the war) also had its own cinema. Like the rest, there were numerous football fields.
Other times! It will be said. But, after all, why else? It doesn’t seem to me that heroes existed, there were normal men and women for whom normality meant nothing more than feeling, each with their own abilities and with their different economic resources, part of a shared community.
The owner of the Casina delle Rose Eradio Tigrati transformed a former skating rink into a sparkling venue. The Capannina, however, needed particular management….

On sale at the Lungomare Bookshop in Viareggio