Latina is a lazy and sleepy city in the Lazio province. It was previously called Littoria and is the daughter of Fascism and the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes. It has enchanting landscapes, the sea, the lake, the cool neighborhoods, the rational center with its terribly linear fascist architecture, but also the disorganized buildings of the post-war years and an urban planning policy that is questionable to say the least. It’s a strange city, it’s not ugly and it’s not beautiful, it’s not chaotic but it’s not stimulating either, it always seems the same. She is the sleeping beauty in the woods waiting for a prince who perhaps will never arrive. If you were born there you can’t help but love it but you always want to escape a thousand miles away…
It is a young city full of young people to whom, however, it does not offer answers, horizons, for whom it does not know how to build dreams… like a prostitute it seduces them, trapping them in an existence made up of appearances, habits, clubs, dinners and aperitifs… .is the “Latina to drink” … which seems to have overcome all resistance, all cultural and human liveliness, all prospects for change.
Maybe this is why when I met “Lestrella pop” I was left speechless….
It is a socio-cultural center born in 2023 in Q4, a difficult and popular neighbourhood, where young people often end up “getting lost”. It is financed by the CGIL but is managed by young volunteers: Filippo graduated in political science, Chiara recently graduated in ancient history, Francesca a student of philosophy, Leonardo a student in political science, Sergio a recent graduate in aerospace engineering, they put their heart and passion into it. They organize many activities, free tutoring for local students, after-school activities twice a week, poetry competitions open to all (but then poetry still exists in this city!), shopping for the elderly in difficulty, book presentations, dinners social…
The center is open morning and afternoon… the kids open, close, clean, organize, listen, live and offer their humanity to the neighborhood. Their goal? Being the lighthouse of the neighborhood, the point of reference from which to start or where to return to start again, the place in which to fight ferocious individualism, in which to learn together to be a community…
This year there was a free ceramic workshop every Saturday morning.”A thousand red poppies”, carried out together with the inmates of the Latina prison. The inmates in prison and the children at Lestrella pop created 1000 ceramic poppies to be displayed later in a meeting with the community… I like the image of the poppies, I like the idea that there is a place where no one is left behind, that there is an inside and an outside that talk to each other, in which flowers like hopes are “cultivated”… I like Lestrella pop…
So maybe this isn’t a lost city… and these kids who stay and resist remind me why, despite everything, I can’t stop loving it.
Sara Lazzaro
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