Like many other cities, Pescara is divided into two by a river, which is also called Pescara. (We’re really good at coming up with names.)
The river divides the city into a northern and a southern side and, as everybody knows, all the best people come from the northern side. That’s just a fact. (That little pervert and fascist sympathiser of D’Annunzio came from the southern side. Trust me, that’s no coincidence.)
Pescara is not that big. Apparently in the past, when Pescara was even smaller, people from the two sides spoke two slightly different dialects. You could tell which side someone was from by the way he or she spoke.
(I don’t know how these two dialects sounded like, but it’s safe to assume that they both sounded awful, given that their merging did not produce the best of results.)
That fact seems to suggest that people didn’t move around that much back then. Their range was limited, but that was the norm at the time. In fact, most people never left their native village in the old days.
While I do think that seeing the outside world can only do you good, because it gives you a different perspective (before I came to England I had no idea that you could have a TV program without some bimbo just standing there, looking pretty), there is nothing wrong in wanting to live in the place you were born. Why wouldn’t you?
I’ve been living in Cambridge for many years now, but it will never feel as familiar as Pescara does.
I walk the streets of that jewel of the Adriatic, zig-zagging through the dog turds, giving spare change to the heroin addicts hanging around the train station (who need money because "they have a train to catch"), gazing at the brown, murky waters of that fishless, polluted river, and everything just screams "home".
