On October 13th, 2010, Giovanni Callea posted an article in the blog Rosalio describing the immense and mostly unused open area in front of his apartment. He writes:
I see this green lung every morning from my balcony. Behind it the city unfolds, in the background you can make out the sea. Lots of cement in valleys and mountains. This morning I went for a walk with my daughter, it was just us, in a green space, immense, silent, just a few meters from one of the principal arteries of the city drowning in cement: surreal!
I met Giovanni on the way to a convention where he and Manlio were giving a talk. Flora was around 6 months old, so it must have been about a year after his post. He was there to present the Parco Uditore, that "green lung" that he described in his post. He talked about it in the car excitedly and I half listened. But I must admit that, at the time, I felt too tired, strung out, sucked dry by an infant that nursed every 20 minutes, resentful of my husband for not being able to carry some of the load, disappointed with Palermo and most of all wrapped up in too much self-pity to really listen or care. Sometimes I really am a solipsistic piece of scum. I spent most of the convention in the back rooms nursing to keep Flora quite, and never heard his presentation.
Piazza Einstein, Via Leonardo da Vinci, Via Uditore, the Viale Regione Siciliana Nord Ovest...caught up in my little life in via Lincoln where my consciousness of the city was confined by the University, the Sea and Piazza Politeama, these names meant nothing to me. That is, until we moved. Only after Manfredi Leone, the Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Palermo, and the graduate students who had formed the association Parco Uditore came to our new apartment in via Sciuti to have a pow-wow with Manlio on the plant species in their project did I remember Giovanni and his vision.
In the almost two-years that I had just been struggling with being a mother, the project had exploded.
6,500 signatures had been collected, mostly through Facebook. Both the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Architecture had become involved. Professors had mobilized there students to write theses on the park, and thus a huge amount of information had been created and applied to the park's design (under Prof. Leone). The Urban Planning Commission had approved the project, the Region had provided funding, and now construction has begun and the park is scheduled to open to the public at the end of this month...in short, it worked.
I met Giovanni again for the first time since that car-ride while taking a walk through the park on a blustery February morning. We were with Professor Leone (another dedicated father who has really put his heart into this project), Peiro D'Angelo and Gerlando 'Jerry' Presti (two of the grad-students that created the Association Parco Uditore and are doing a large part of the grunt work - clearing out trash and plant matter, mapping out trees, marking pathways with flags and chalks, overseeing their construction...etc.). With it's rolling grass, gentle topography and vestiges of agriculture (prickly pears, loquat trees, olives, carob trees, and almonds in bloom) the park is already quite beautiful. The Region's 100,000 euro will add a playground, a fitness circuit, a fenced-in dog area, a bocce court along with all of the necessary pathways, benches, water-fountains, irrigation, etc. rendering it a usable open space unequaled in this city of giardini storici and direly needed in the high-density, concrete "New Palermo" (see last post).
Giovanni's daughter is about the same age as Flora. The two got to playing right away, picking dandelions, holding hands and trying to get a scooter to move on the not-yet-paved muddy pathways. I admire Giovanni so much. At the end of his fateful post he writes:
I'm tired of complaining about what others don't do!If there is anyone that wants to invest themselves in a project that won't repay anything other than the sensation of being a free man in a city that simply aspires to normalcy, knock once. And lets search together to understand how it can be done.
Happy St. Joseph's Day, Giovanni and Manfredi. You did it. You gave your daughters a park, when its a triumph for any parent of a toddler to just get dinner on the table.
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