Xirsi
by Mattia Ravasi

The restaurant where I wait tables is located on a street of squat apartment buildings in the deepest northern periphery of Milan. Opposite us is a fenced meadow that belongs to a boarding kennel. All through the Summer, when people go on holiday and leave their pets behind, a never-ending ruckus of homesick dogs is the neighborhood’s constant soundtrack, loud enough to drown out our radio, even with the door closed. This is actually a blessing. Gino, the owner, has a taste for melodic Neapolitan songwriters, saccharine and mopey. They remind him of an ancestral home he romanticizes, but has never visited.