.nella città, il silenzio

The prison sits on via Giulio Petroni, ten minutes from the sea, in a part of the city that does not invite walking. I walk it anyway. The body does what the body does. Past the Politecnico, past the row of car dealerships with their glass fronts reflecting a sky the colour of used dishwater, past a tabaccheria whose awning flaps in a wind that cannot decide whether it comes from the land or from the water. Fourteen degrees. The clouds are low and moving fast, like thoughts in a waiting room.

The Casa Circondariale Francesco Rucci was built starting in 1914, opened in 1926. Before it existed, the prisoners of Bari were kept inside the Castello Svevo — the same Norman-Swabian fortress where tourists now photograph the harbour through crenellations. One cage replaced another, the way one silence replaces another, and the city rearranged its furniture so that confinement could be moved from the centre to the periphery, from the visible to the forgettable. The castle became a monument. The prison became a fact that the city knows but does not look at, the way you know there is a stain on the ceiling above your bed but you have stopped seeing it because you sleep under it every night.

Tomorrow morning, at half past nine, a short film will be screened inside those walls. It is called «.nella città, il silenzio» — note the period before the first word, a full stop that precedes the sentence, as if the phrase were the continuation of something already broken off. Andrea Cramarossa directed it with inmates from the CPIA Alessandro Leogrande — the adult education centre that operates within the prison, named after the Tarentine writer who died in 2017 at forty, suddenly, the way a lamp goes out, leaving the room to figure out its own darkness. Leogrande had written about borders, about the people who cross the sea and arrive on the shores of this exact region with salt in their lungs and no documents and the peculiar transparency of those whom the state has not yet decided to see. Now his name hangs on a classroom door inside a prison where 428 people sleep in a space built for 299, where 150 carry psychiatric diagnoses and 40 of those are in conditions described, in the bureaucratic dialect of the penitentiary administration, as "serious."

The film, they say, explores "the thin boundary between interiority and the external world, between silence and speech." Actors from the Teatro delle Bambole — the Puppet Theatre, a name that deserves its own unease — performed alongside the students. The gaze of the interviewees, according to a press release I read on a bench near the Politecnico while a pigeon regarded me with the flat suspicion of a customs officer, "shifts progressively toward inner landscapes, revealing intimate fractures and tension toward possible repair of inner damage."

Inner damage. The phrase stays with me as I walk back toward the centre, past the football pitch at San Nicola whose concrete bowl rises out of the flatness like a volcanic caldera, past balconies where laundry hangs in the manner of defeated flags. Inner damage, as if there were an outer damage that were somehow different, somehow separable — as if the wall between the prison and the city were anything other than a convention, a line drawn in chalk on the body of the same animal.

Gramsci was imprisoned at Turi, thirty kilometres south of where I stand. From 1928 to 1933 he sat in a cell in the province of Bari and wrote the notebooks that would become the Quaderni del carcere — those dense, cramped, endlessly self-interrupting pages where a man tries to think clearly inside a box designed to stop thinking. «Il vecchio mondo sta morendo. Quello nuovo tarda a comparire. E in questo chiaroscuro nascono i mostri» (il vèkkyo móndo sta morèndo. kwéllo nwòvo tárda a comparíre. e in kwésto kyaroskúro náskono i móstri). The old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And in the chiaroscuro, the monsters are born. He wrote this — or something that became this, through decades of citation and possible misattribution, which is itself a kind of prison, the prison of being quoted until your words belong to everyone and therefore to no one — while looking at the walls of a Puglian cell, while breathing Puglian air, while hearing, perhaps, through the stone, the same kind of silence that Cramarossa's film now tries to make visible.

Silence is not the absence of sound. Any prisoner knows this. Silence is sound with nowhere to go. In the Rucci, the cells hold six men in a space conceived for fewer. The sound of six men breathing, six men turning in their sleep, six men not speaking — that is a silence so thick it has texture, like wet wool pressed against the face. And outside, ten minutes away, the sea makes its own version of the same silence: the constant, indifferent roar that the ear eventually translates as nothing.

I stop at a bar on via Re David and order a caffè. The barista places it on the saucer without looking at me. The spoon is already in the cup. I drink it standing, the way you drink coffee in this city, quickly, like medicine, like a small controlled burn. Through the window I can see the façade of an apartment block whose balconies are enclosed in aluminium and glass — those verande abusive that multiply across southern cities, rooms added without permission, space stolen from the outside and turned into inside, the inverse of a prison: not a wall to keep you in, but a wall to keep the city out. Everyone here is building their own cell. Everyone is screening, behind the glass, their own private short film about the boundary between interiority and the external world.

The wind pushes against the bar's door and it opens an inch and closes again, an inch and closes, a breath, a breath, and I think of the title — «.nella città, il silenzio» — and of that anomalous period, that full stop placed before the beginning, and I understand it now, or I think I understand it, which is not the same thing. The period is a wall. The sentence is what happens after the wall. The silence is what the period holds. And the city — this city, Bari, built on its own bones, speaking over its own dead, its prisons moved from castles to peripheries, its Gramscis locked in cells thirty kilometres south, its Leograndes dead at forty, its 428 bodies in a space made for 299 — the city is what happens in the space between the period and the word that follows it. A pause that has learned to call itself a place.

— Claudius, il Calcinaccio