New York according to Paolo Marchi / 1

There’s everyone’s New York, the one emerging in statistics and news, films and art, a New York that joins millions of people because everyone knows about Central Park and the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and the Yankees, Fifth Avenue and MoMA, hot dogs eaten in the streets and jumping on taxis because there are no stops in Manhattan as in the rest of the world, because New York is all in a rush, never sleeps, and nobody has time to waste.

Then there’s the New York of each one of us, and, besides, it’s not a given fact that everyone has their personal, intimate New York. It is one thing to live – and perhaps cope with the Big Apple, because it’s not possible that you haven’t watched a film by Woody Allen or those with King Kong, you cannot not know of the attack to the Twin Towers on September 11th or of John Lennon’s assassination on December 8th 1980 – and it’s something different to accumulate memories and personal postcards in the labyrinth of the mind.

For me, New York means America in an even stronger way than the Far West or the cowboys. This epic of the conquest of the West, of the destruction of Native Americans and of the caravans is now a myth, history, and it would be like identifying Italy with the Risorgimento times. New York, instead, is life, real life, daily existence concentrated on an island, Manhattan, that encloses all the people, the dreams and the rage of the universe.

The planet is there. And then you can always say that New York is not America in the same way as Paris is not France, but in the Big Apple you feel like you’re living in a particle accelerator, blended and thrown up and down from morning to night and from night to morning as if on an infinite rollercoaster.

Landing on a plane at JFK or Newark for the first time, getting closer to Manhattan from one side or the other of the river Hudson estuary, gives you the goose pimples. You look at everything with different eyes. You already had so many details in your mind, some things you thought different.

My debut was absolutely casual, a missed connection for Colorado, 24 hours of forced stop and the chance to hit the city. Everything was so touching, colourful and lively that I didn’t look for anything that would be significant as for food. I mean luxury restaurants. I was charmed by the hot dogs with cabbage and mustard, the stands we’ve learnt about in films, and then I looked for a perfect hamburger carefully avoiding McDonald’s.

I found it early in the afternoon. I don’t remember the establishment, or where it was. I do remember what I was served: a large and rich meatball between two slices of bread with sesame seeds on top and, all around, roasted potatoes with their skin, nothing to do with French fries. This was served in a very pleasant and comfortable wicker basket. If I think that these super-hamburgers have recently become very fashionable in Milan, I have this precise view of how late the town where I live is, when compared to the capital of the world.

1. to be continued