28 machine already seen in a craft café in Lisbon. «Here is the roasting machine» Claudia continues. «Slow roasting», Paola specifies. «Not like that of other coffee roasters. We’re in no hurry». The roasting lasts 20 minutes and, according to the secret proportions of the Lazzarelle recipe, it churns out a ground coffee. Claudia continues: «It can be a classic blend, therefore 50/50 between Robusta and Arabica; a mixture for bars, which has an 80/20 percentage, or 100% Arabica. And, behind there, the so-called hulls are expelled». Now, if I had to tell you a single secret of Neapolitan production, it would be this. It is very simple, and hardly equalled. By purchasing beans on the market of fair-trade producers from all over the world – in particular, from Shadilly for the 100% Guatemalan very precious Arabica – Lazzarelle discards and puts aside for recycling all the peels, expelled during roasting, of coffee beans. The same that, edible, some roasters pack as ground coffee and sell without any problems. «This obviously makes you fill a brick with less coffee, but we could never do it» comments Paola. From here on, the shyest Teresa shows me what happens with the ground coffee. «After it has been roasted, the coffee is moved to the silo. I'll show you how». Teresa takes a large container and, with a noise that sounds like music to me, I hear the beans first poured from the roasting to the bowl, and then sucked into a visible silo in which, thanks to four windows, I can see how, and how much, compartments are filled. Three are dedicated to the blend, one to the Arabica. Written in felt pen, in front of each flap, there is the toasting date. Protected from the sun and from the temperature changes – the four-door silo is located in another corner of the room – roasted coffee beans need to rest for at least ten days. «When they have completed the rest period – Teresa resumes – we go to the grinding machine, if we have to bag them». The process that, in the final part, I had seen entering the roasting. Currently, we have all witnessed, even in cafes, the coffee grinding, but if I had to describe in words the scent that it emanated in Pozzuoli, in prison, I couldn’t ever do it, and I should improperly fall back on De André and his ricetta che a Cicirinella, compagno di cella, ci ha dato mammà9. It awakens in me the memory of the perfume released, never a word being more appropriate, by the grinder that my grandmother had in a pantry of her kitchen with wooden doors, covered with a hideous blue plastic, about thirty years ago. «Can I have another coffee?» I ask now, knowing blow by blow how it is packaged. This time Claudia remains near the machine, and while Teresa and Paola go out to smoke a cigarette, she tells me her story, which is nothing but the tale of a bad company and a toxic relationship, up to the excesses of a sentence and the prison. If I had met her out of here, I would never have imagined her in a cell. I only ask her if she managed to forget her ex. «When I ended up here, and he left me alone, he died for me. Then he wrote me a year after a long letter, saying sorry. I answered him out of courtesy and to free myself from the burden of what I had to say to him». Now Claudia works, despite a monetary penalty added to the prison sentence, waiting for her when she finally will be free. And she studies, as well. She attends the Pharmacy Faculty twice a week. «I have a permission for the lessons and I can come back at 10 pm, but to tell the truth I don't have much to do, out there. I go out, take the phone, attend the class, and then in the cold evenings I come back even before the scheduled time». Oh, yeah, the phone. «So, you have one...» «Yes, and to take it when I go out, I have to fill out the domandina10». Meanwhile, Paola and Teresa have joined us again. Teresa tells me how sometimes, in the dormitory, they joke about that: «"I have to go pee" someone says, "Well, fill out the domandina" we reply. Pretty much everything, in prison, needs to be requested through the domandina». «It is a form – Paola explains – containing their requests, which is then examined by the prison commander (of the penitentiary police, ed.’s note) or by the director. Symbolically, the domandina represents the prison itself». Maybe that's why when, thanking God and having enjoyed my last coffee (this time sweetened, and even better), the prison doors close behind me and I find myself again in front of the sea, the flight of seagulls over the harbour and my motorbike, an adrenaline rushes through me, and a kind of dizziness takes hold of me until the end of the day. At least, until entering the next prison. In Syracuse, after a few more weeks of waiting. Syracuse - «I'm sorry Salvo, it hasn't been raining here for four months...» says the owner of the house hosting me, on a rare rainy day on the outskirts of Ortigia, at the marina of Syracuse. In Sicily, wherever I go, when I introduce myself I am «Sandro, nice to meet you», but then, as I go on, I become Salvo (trans. Safe) almost for everyone. Or even Santo (trans. Saint). I find nothing wrong with being safe or saint, and although I would not bother the celestial spheres, I welcome my change of name. She thinks I am here for tourism, and if she will ever read what I am writing, I feel obliged to reassure her, because whether raining or not, as Mario Fillioley points out in La Sicilia è un’isola per modo di dire, «The sunset, at the Marina, seen from the Adorno Passage, is a show able to touch your heart and squeeze it, until nothing more remains». Maybe that’s why the visit to the prison in Syracuse, where Dolci Evasioni11 takes out 40 different types of delicacies, will have the same effect on me as the sunset in Ortigia. And I write ‘takes out’ not in a metaphorical sense, but in the literal sense of the term, given that the oven was one of the first tools used by Arcolaio12, a cooperative founded by Giovanni Romano and Pippo Pisano in 2003 to launch a social enterprise that, after 16 years, manages to employ, only within the medium security section of the prison, five pastry chefs, prisoners hired according to the national contract, and to invoice one million euros only in the last year. «At the beginning around the oven, bought jointly between the district house and the cooperative, a bakery project was born» explains Felicia Cataldi, the educator, calm and reassuring, who has been working in penitentiaries since 1989 and takes care of the path of reintegration of the team of pastry chefs hired by Dolci Evasioni. «But the hours of a bakery, a purely nocturnal job, in addition to the constant need to enter and exit through long corridors of doors not yet automated at the time, would have become unsustainable, in the long term» she concludes. The winning idea came shortly after, not too far from the enclosure walls. I want to clarify that the Correctional Facility of Syracuse is located outside the city, on the road of the Monasteries, surrounded by 9 trans. Oh, what a great coffee, even in jail they know how to make it, thanks to the recipe given by his mum to Cicirinella, my cellmate [Fabrizio De André, Don Raffae’, 1990] 10 That’s the Italian short for application form. 11 trans. Sweet Escapes. 12 www.arcolaio.org/en
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