Home » Riccardo, the “narrator” of Costalissoio. On his website the diary of everything that happens

Riccardo, the “narrator” of Costalissoio. On his website the diary of everything that happens

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Riccardo, the “narrator” of Costalissoio.  On his website the diary of everything that happens

Zaccaria is 75 years old, he has been telling the “fattarielli” for 20 years, he updates on those who are no longer there and proposes reflections especially to emigrants

THE CHARACTER

“My main source of information? The billboard on the square ». Riccardo Zaccaria, 75, has been the author of the small village diary of Costalissoio for over twenty years, a hamlet of Santo Stefano of 250 souls gathered on the mountain coast, at 1250 meters above sea level. It is not easy to find it, to understand even who is the author of that small internet site that reports the village “fattarielli” almost daily: road works, snowfalls, village festivals; and then obituaries and small reflections on the events of the day. Modest and reserved as he is, Riccardo does not sign his writings and even in the photographs he is mentioned as present but with the specification of being “behind the car”.

A lifelong passion

“I remember a gentleman who lived above my house, of those who have always lived in the malga”, reflects Riccardo Zaccaria, retracing the thread of a passion that is lost in the mists of time, “he continually told stories of the town, some true and others certainly fantastic. I could have written to her, remembered them ». It is the small regret of a failed historian who, partly out of humility and partly out of modesty, would like to tell the past of his country without realizing that he is the one who contributed to writing that story from 1999 to today. To read his diary are the residents of the country, of course, but above all the emigrants who have settled from Costalissoio over the years especially in Switzerland and reading it weave a web of ties with a house that they still feel is their own although far away. And then there are them, the many vacationers who over the years have taken a second home in the village and who crowd it especially at Christmas and in August: “An upheaval that came in the early 2000s”, admits Zaccaria “the church is what it makes us bond with the owners of second homes: after mass we greet each other, exchange a word and thus become a moment of aggregation ».

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The tourism business

It should not be seen as a criticism of tourism but rather as the awareness of changing times: to the depopulation of the Alpine and Comelian villages, often the alternative to the degradation of buildings emptied and divided among dozens of heirs is the sale to some real estate company, capable of to obtain apartments to sell to vacationers. You recognize them immediately, the condominiums of second homes: just look at the fence, the low wall that delimits the land. «Maybe it’s to compensate for the fact that they don’t have who knows how much space in the city», Riccardo Zaccaria says with a friendly smile, «so they feel the need to reaffirm that that piece of land is theirs. We do not have this habit, it will be that we have plenty of space: if we need to go from one terrain to another we pass, as in the past with sleds. There is no need for fences, except to limit the passage of the herds ». Costalissoio is only one of the many cornerstones of that small world that is always the same and always different that is gradually disappearing and that is inevitable to associate with the stories of Guareschi where the mayor and the parish priest, sacred and civil, confronted each other, one with the awareness that the other in his own way worked for the good of the country.

All around the church

Here too, as in the Bassa, it is the church that dominates the square, with the small shops overlooking the perimeter and the bar which, in Costalissoio as in Brescello, with the nearby bulletin board, when it is open becomes a reference, school and community court. Everything passes from bars, loves and skirmishes, and everything in bars is recomposed even now that only one is left of public operation and another, outside the town, begins to prepare the openings for the season. “Ours is a quiet, hard-working and not at all quarrelsome village”, concludes Riccardo Zaccaria, leaning with his hands in his pockets on the fence that surrounds the war memorial of the town, between the church and the bell tower, “we are few and those few are mostly retirees. And retirees don’t want to fight ». And in the meantime, with his hand, he greets two gentlemen seated on the benches on the other side of the square. «They too are second homes», he specifies with a smile.

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