UN MOMENTO MAGICO

Recovering from a gym workout routine devised for me by Rickshaw, I couldn’t decide whether to have a coffee in the nearby hipster café—where solemn-looking people with laptops try and pretend they don’t have to contend with wobbly table legs that threaten to spill coffee over their keypads—or to go in search of something more down to earth.

Cafés are in no short supply in my town, and you can choose your venue according to your self-esteem. Mine was in a non-pretentious funk.

Ironic, then, that my malaise was lifted by a scene that could have been written for an Italian surrealist novel—with not a wonky table leg in sight.

It began with music, as all magical scenes must, as a music-box theme tinkled somewhere nearby while my travel-weary Italian friend (returned from Abruzzo) plumped down opposite me in a booth, translating in real time from Italian to English as he read comically surreal extracts from a copy of Stefano Benni’s Terra!, while I crunched down hard on the chunky ice I’d shaken free from the bottom of a pint glass of Cherry Pepsi.

Somehow this surreal moment came together in a way that felt true to the tradition of Italian magic realism, shaped by the likes of Pirandello and Bontempelli. It became an accidental homage to a man—Benni—whom I had only just discovered today (thanks to my friend, who had brought the book with him to read over breakfast, after learning of the author’s recent death).

I listened to Vanni read his spontaneous translation while the circus-themed music box played somewhere in the distance—a distraction for a young child absorbed in a YouTube video on an iPad while her grandparents ate a pub lunch—and thought the scene could not have been better directed had it been filmed by Federico Fellini or Paolo Sorrentino.

And where did this poetic little scene—this momento magico—unfold?

Only Wetherspoons—the Noah’s Ark for the great unwashed of Britain.

Rest in peace, Stefano Benni (12 August 1947 – 9 September 2025)