"The tourist is the one who thinks about returning home from the moment he arrives, whereas a traveler may not even return at all". These are the first words that Kit, Port and Tunner exchange upon arriving in Africa, sitting on their enormous leather trunks in the silence of the white port of Kabula; This is how Bernardo Bertolucci's film 'Tea in the Desert' begins.
I am sitting at the back of the bus and with tired eyes I try to reach the sea in front of me; we are waiting for the "latecomers" for the visit to Palermo and the guide, standing next to the driver, is shouting at us from the microphone that Italian tourists are always the least punctual, while foreign ones and in particular the Japanese always arrive early.
It's Easter Eve, we're headed to the Palatine chapel. The road we are traveling on crosses the Conca d'Oro, a plain lying between two headlands where the sweetest oranges on the island were grown: but there are no longer any citrus groves to be seen, entirely devastated by the summer villas of the Palermitans. The guide tells us about the program for the next few days: Erice, Monreale, Segesta, Selinunte and the villas of Bagheria. All in a few days, everything already organised, already planned.
We arrive in Palermo crossing the port area, the eighteenth-century buildings "bleed" on all sides, I had never seen the effects of the bombings on the buildings so closely; in Palermo even the war seems to have been the lesser evil. There are entire rows of abandoned buildings on the street that runs along the sea, rubble forgotten even by the young people who parade along the seafront in the evening, indifferent to their past and who, perhaps, dream of a bombing to start all over again as the only alternative.
We arrive in Palermo crossing the port area, the eighteenth-century buildings "bleed" on all sides, I had never seen the effects of the bombings on the buildings so closely; in Palermo even the war seems to have been the lesser evil. There are entire rows of abandoned buildings on the street that runs along the sea, rubble forgotten even by the young people who parade along the seafront in the evening, indifferent to their past and who, perhaps, dream of a bombing to start all over again as the only alternative.
They say that the money for the restoration has arrived and someone is already thinking of demolishing and rebuilding: I want to go down and talk to those people of Palermo who for forty years have spent with their eyes lowered under those facades with barred windows, I want to ask them why they wait for everything to rot inexorably. What more do they have to fear from the mafia that has already corroded everything? A city of concrete is what awaits them.
Images continue to flow from the windows that I can't fix. From the stories of Eugenia, our guide, the Palermo of tourist guides emerges, the same for everyone, and of all the characters in the stories that she quickly continues to tell us, only that of Queen Giovanna manages to linger in my mind and settle in my memory. I would like to walk through those alleys where the sun has difficulty entering and where children chase each other without shoes, and still sit on the edge of the fountain of the naked queen to imagine the story of that sacrilege, but the guide continues to fill my mind with legends for tourists with impunity... depriving me of the pleasure of imagining stories, a bit like when they turn a novel into a film...
We arrive at the Royal Palace; the Chapel can be reached by crossing a splendid seventeenth-century courtyard. Our group is overtaken by a crowd of Japanese who in line follow their Cicerone who with a strange gesture keeps his hand closed in front of his mouth: he is stronger than me. Every time a group of Japanese tourists passes by me I want to follow them for a while: perhaps it's just curiosity for all the technology they carry with them. But this time I noticed a black object climbing on their ears, similar to those hearing aids, and I just couldn't help but follow them to understand the meaning of the mysterious object.
I was caught off guard; accustomed to seeing them all moving compactly behind their guide, this time, as soon as they entered, they immediately became confused among the crowd of tourists occupying the Chapel. I began to follow them among the golden mosaic tiles that illuminate the internal space with the same color as the Sicilian sun. And after a while I understood the meaning of that strange object: their guide holds a radio transmitter in his hands with which he communicates in real time with all his compatriots, who, with a small earpiece, listen to the wonders of the Palatine Chapel and are aware, at all times, of the position of the others so as not to get lost.
I was caught off guard; accustomed to seeing them all moving compactly behind their guide, this time, as soon as they entered, they immediately became confused among the crowd of tourists occupying the Chapel. I began to follow them among the golden mosaic tiles that illuminate the internal space with the same color as the Sicilian sun. And after a while I understood the meaning of that strange object: their guide holds a radio transmitter in his hands with which he communicates in real time with all his compatriots, who, with a small earpiece, listen to the wonders of the Palatine Chapel and are aware, at all times, of the position of the others so as not to get lost.
So, no more colored balloons or umbrellas raised to unite the group! And never again have hateful multilingual litanies sung by guides from all over the world in front of the works of museums and the altars of austere cathedrals.
The guide surrounded by his group, emblem of the latest generation of tourists, will perhaps disappear. replaced by the latest electronic invention of the people who invented the "organized trip". Perhaps we will no longer see the compact crowds we are now accustomed to of new conquerors armed with enormous cameras but, I believe, the idea of the organized trip will still remain the same: they will all be linked by an invisible electromagnetic network, dissimulating the group, but more linked than ever to
follow the "program".
The organized tour that now fills the windows of agencies all over the world, I believe, betrays the profound essence of every journey.
Speed, punctuality and optimization of time: the three essential rules to be respected which, added to the brevity of the stay and the quantity of things to see, makes any 'true' relationship with the place visited impossible. Just leaf through one of the many travel brochures: in ten days at most, the tourist is subjected to an infernal tour: museums, cathedrals, monuments, parks and squares all visited in just a few hours!
In Palermo I would have liked to walk through the fish markets and smell the smells, sit at a bar table and leaf through the pages of a local newspaper to imagine the future of the city, and I would have liked to stay for hours in one of the famous pastry shops observing the shapes that the sugar was able to hold under that suffocating heat...
And then afterwards, all the works and monuments! Otherwise the visited city does not have time to react, to overlap with the symbolic image that the agencies have built for it and our memories and judgments are irremediably falsified and massified.
"Today we know many more things, but we understand less and less, because we lack the time for reflection": the secret of rhythm is in the pause and repetition; reflection is a fundamental return, the traveler has his own time that the organized tour does not respect in the name of economy of time. Speed becomes alienating if it breaks the rhythm. Thus the tourist will remain a stranger for the entire duration of the trip, making the magic of the encounter disappear...
On the way back, during the ship crossing, I thought about all the times that in front of the Venus de Milo at the Louvre I saw dozens of Japanese tourists posing and taking photographs: perhaps they were trying to bring home as many images as possible, there they would form their memories that in the whirlwind of the journey they had forgotten...
(from "Uqbar Notes for the Next Millennium", n. 0, January 1998)
"Today we know many more things, but we understand less and less, because we lack the time for reflection": the secret of rhythm is in the pause and repetition; reflection is a fundamental return, the traveler has his own time that the organized tour does not respect in the name of economy of time. Speed becomes alienating if it breaks the rhythm. Thus the tourist will remain a stranger for the entire duration of the trip, making the magic of the encounter disappear...
On the way back, during the ship crossing, I thought about all the times that in front of the Venus de Milo at the Louvre I saw dozens of Japanese tourists posing and taking photographs: perhaps they were trying to bring home as many images as possible, there they would form their memories that in the whirlwind of the journey they had forgotten...