Lemon is a fruit tree that belongs to the Rutaceae family. The common name “lemon” can refer to both the plant and the fruit.
And lemons is a poem by Eugenio Montale, published in 1925 in the collection Cuttlefish bones: “Listen to me, graduate poets / move only among plants / with little-used names: boxwood privets or acanthus. / I, for me, love the roads that lead to the grassy / ditches where in puddles / half-dried they grab the boys / some haggard eel: / the alleys that follow the edges, / descend among the tufts of reeds / and put in the gardens, among the lemon trees. / Better if the ramblings of the birds / go out swallowed by the blue: / the clearer you hear the whisper / of the friendly branches in the air that almost does not move, / and the senses of this smell / that does not know how to detach from the ground / and a restless sweetness rains in the chest. / Here some amused passions / by a miracle the war is silent, / here it is up to us poor too our share of wealth / and it is the smell of lemons (…) ”. Montale was born in Genoa.
In view of the summit of the eight richest countries on the planet that would take place in Genoa from 19 to 22 July 2001, Silvio Berlusconi, at the time president of the Italian council, decided that it was necessary to hang lemons from the planters of Palazzo Ducale because they were too bare . It is said that to reduce the effect of tear gas fired by the police, you need to wet a tissue with lemon juice and cover your nose and mouth.
Lemons is the title of the podcast of Internazionale on the G8 in Genoa written by Annalisa Camilli. The first episode was released on Wednesday, the other seven will be released one a week until August 4 on the Internazionale website and on the main listening platforms. Genoa was a watershed for the movements and for the left.
We have done Lemons to tell those who are twenty years old what happened on that weekend in July 2001 and to try to give those events a place in the collective memory. In the hope that re-tying the threads of the past can help find a way to change.
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