Giffoni

The same thing is never the same for the second time, and one has to rely on the memory to recapture the sensation of the extraordinary when it no longer comes spontaneously. 

I realized it a few weeks ago when returning to Giffoni Valle Piana, the small town in the mountains south of Naples where Giffoni Experience, the biggest (and undoubtedly the most spectacular) festival of films for and about children is held every July. I still remember what I felt the first time I arrived there. I was on a shuttle bus that departed from Salerno, the coastal city where most of the festival guests stay, watching the curvy road passing through dusty villages scattered around the beautiful Southern Italian countryside. The sun had begun setting when we left, and by the time the bus started climbing up the road towards Giffoni, the dusk had fallen. The main street of the town was busier than those of the towns we passed on the way (many of them also called Giffoni, with various other additions) but it was still a small Italian town, with ice cream parlors and cafes on every second corner and the general feeling of aimlessness so characteristic of the European South. Then the bus stopped, I got off, and following the crowd of children and adults, I turned around the corner. And then I gasped: before the corner it was a small Italian town, but behind it - Las Vegas. 

A gigantic illuminated gate towered above a hall filled with running children, police officers were directing the traffic so that the car could pass and the families cross the road, the music coming from somewhere behind sounded like Rolling Stones were doing a soundcheck, a street lined with booths and cars on exhibit extended to the right, while its left part was welcoming more buses and cars from which more children were jumping out. Below the street level, there was a large playground illuminated by an eerie light, and on it hundreds of kids aged five to fifteen were running, screaming and quite obviously enjoying themselves. It really seemed like those paintings in religious booklets depicting the paradise as the concentration of innocence, the youth.