PESCARA. The parking lot between via Solferino and the park road, when midnight is already past, becomes an open-air bar without a shred of a license: Alessandro arrives, greets and shakes hands with the “bros”, the friends of the group, and throws open the tailgate of his white Fiat 500: inside are bottles of vodka and gin, fruit juices and energy drinks, everything needed to get drunk and spend a night beyond the limits, until the darkness takes on the brightness of dawn. His friends pounce on those drinks like bees on wildflowers: they hug, laugh, toast with plastic cups that make a dull, not ringing, noise. And to punctuate the sequence of “cin-cin”, the sample of curses. Yes, this is how it is used among young people these days: they curse “to underline the concept” and laugh even more. What for many is a disvalue, can now be normal: “What’s the harm?”, think Alessandro and the “bros”.
And so in this upside down normality it also happens that a boy of just 16 years old ends up killed with 25 stab wounds at the hands of two 17 year olds. His name was Christopher Thomas Luciani and he died last Sunday in the park on Via Raffaello dedicated to Baden Powell, the founder of the Scout movement. Only malice, however, for that boy with an already too difficult life behind him: between the soccer field and the railway wall, in a ravine of tall grass, Christopher Thomas was killed mercilessly by two other teenagers, both arrested with accused of voluntary homicide and now locked up in juvenile prisons in Rome and Bari, for a drug debt of around 250 euros. It was 5pm on Sunday; Christopher Thomas, without a breath of life left in his thin body hidden by a white hooded sweatshirt, was found after 9pm when a boy from the pack realized that he had to tell his parents everything he had seen. From that moment, the garden railing between the luxurious buildings has become a cry board with banners, letters and notes “because you can’t die like this”.
Now, however, another weekend to get high has arrived and the Riviera, with its clubs arranged in sequence, is teeming with lights, music and opportunities to not think about what happened just a kilometer away.
The city mourning for Christopher Thomas, two hours of mourning between 4:30 PM and 6:30 PM on Friday to coincide with the funeral held in Rosciano, ended just six hours ago. On the Riviera, “the show must go on,” the kids go back and forth from one beach resort to another and some compete to get drunker than their friends: at the Paolucci roundabout, around the monument with the yellow, blue and red lights, a group arrives and unloads two bags filled with alcohol on the wall. “Oh, come over here,” a boy in basketball pants holds out his hand. On an assembly line, everyone improvises as bartenders and waiters: they mix the drinks, part alcohol, part juice and another part tonic water, then down everything in one gulp. And then curses to emphasize “how strong this drink is.” People drink because everyone does it, they drink because it’s normal, they drink to have fun: this is what happens in the night of Pescara. And every year the age of the first drunkenness is lowered: people drink even at 13 years old. Almost two million students in Italy do it; almost 800 thousand kids get drunk to the point of feeling sick.
But there is more to the night on the Riviera than alcohol: the smell of hashish and marijuana mixes with the scent of deodorants sprayed on the skin and can be felt in the air without the need for a truffle dog’s sense of smell. It is an invasive trail that has no time to die out before it is immediately rekindled by another group. It is the confirmation that Pescara does not escape the law of statistics: in Italy it is estimated that 580 thousand students between the ages of 15 and 19 regularly use cannabis. Groups of kids smoke without even hiding: joints on the seafront as if it were normal. It is the same dazed normality of the day of Christopher Thomas’s murder: while the two kids were stabbing him, his friends were buying “10 euros of weed to smoke at the beach”. In the night of the absence of thoughts, there is not even the fear that a patrol of the carabinieri or a police car might arrive. People drink and smoke during the procession from one club to another, to arrive already “dazed” among the crowd on the dance floor. The soundtrack of the movements is the 120 bpm of disco music that alternates with suggestive Latin-American songs. And then, among minors, cocaine also flows, without limits of age and income: in 2022, 44 thousand Italian students admitted to having tried it.
There are the kids who play at being adults: they live their 16-18 years as if they were already thirty or even older: they go around with electronic cigarettes in their fists, they squeeze them between their fingers as if they were so many Linus blankets, letting themselves behind a white cloud with shifting and uncertain contours. But are they the teenagers who feel older than they really are or are they the adults, too busy with themselves between padel and cosmetic surgery, who abandoned them along the paths of growth thinking that they were mature enough to fend for themselves?
Selfies with lips smeared with lipstick, index and middle fingers stretched out to form the victory sign, skimpy tops and very short shorts like those of models on the catwalk: they are snapshots of a night to be stretched out until dawn, hours to be stretched out to experience them more intensely. There is no curfew time for many kids: many can return after two; still others return home when they are too tired to continue wandering from one side of the coast to the other. And like the bread crumbs left on the ground by Tom Thumb to find his way home, the bottles of vodka and gin remain on the asphalt.
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