marco delogu

The thirty assassins

The Palio jockey is one of those swashbuckling figures, a jailbird who founds a city, a circus combatant, a soldieri fighting for a third party. It used to happen sometimes that these roving adventurers – peasants desirous of promotion or younger sons of the nobilty waiting to regain rank – would no longer be satisfied with their boon, and once the victory was won would turn their arms against the city that had hired them and establish themselves as the lords of those cities. In the chest of obscure jockey, with his dark, unkempt beard, which the glancing and criminal light of photography throws into relief, beats the heart of a usurper. Their eyes mirror their adversary – the photographer, the interviewer, the rest of the world – and say “To the two of us!” they say: “Now you’ll have to come to terms with me!” The eyes of Cianchino, of Il Pesse, of Spillo. I don’t know they’re saying it to. To the rest of the world, I think, or to the canape, or to the spectator, or to the photographer, or to themselves. They squint as if they were taking aim. They know something that we don’t know.
Adriano Sofri

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