Wake up call at 7:30 in an unfinished six-lane highway with numerous new overpasses. We call it the "dromodromo," a space that is perfectly adapted to holding camel races, due to its compressed sand roadway. The viaduct that crosses the valley where we are camping is strangely peculiar. Nothing goes by on it other than tourist buses. In one direction the buses go by empty, and in the other they are filled with tourists. We attentively studied the question. Our first hypothesis was that these tourists already know we intend to hold camel races here, a hypothesis immediately rejected. After a bit more reflection we hazard a theory that is more plausible. Given the importance of the tourist industry in light of the upcoming millennium jubilee, it is possible that right here on the Portuense is a factory that anticipated the production of those twenty million tourists that everyone talks about and that are expected in Rome in 2000. In the meantime yet another bus filled with tourists has gone by and we photographed them. Through the smoked glass windows of the Pullman we were able to capture their expressions of stupefaction. They saw us; some with paternalistic pity waved hello. Out of decency almost no one photographed us. But when we turned our photo and video cameras on them, we read in their faces a crisis of identity–a group of German tourists photographed, crossing over a viaduct, by some nomads camped below. There is a good chance that some of them will be experiencing shock for some time to come.
What happened yesterday?
We started by crossing a marvelous valley cultivated primarily with rosemary and sage, an almost uncontaminated place, where the only sign of mutation in process were five huge cranes dismantled and heaped across the fields. After this valley we reached EURS and we went through an amusement park. Then we continued on past the Hippodrome and the nomad camps of Tor di Valle. We had to pass burning fields to reach the banks of the Tiber. We crossed the Tiber using an aqueduct bridge built by the ACEA water authority. Not everyone was with us; a smaller group, consisting of Tromba, Pinnochio, and Piccio, were moving autonomously. We climbed up the small hill dominated by the ruins of the "Trullo," from where one could enjoy a magnificent view of EUR. We reached our evening rendezvous tremendously tired and behind schedule. What really did us in was finding a dozen friends waiting for us to see who knows what. We had early organizational difficulties, and we made a poor choice with this camp site. No one had brought anything to eat, and so everyone disappeared. So we installed ourselves in this magnificent place where now Guido, the geologist, is playing his clarinet. The sound penetrates into the openings of the sewage canals just built.
