Il blackout

At eleven and twenty on a Saturday evening, all the electricity in Milan vanished.

Not was it gradual. It was a switch being thrown across a city-wide scale: a moment there were the street lamps, the signs, the glow orange of the city seen from above; the next nothing, nothing.

In the building on Via Torino seventeen, the lift stopped stopped between the third and the fourth floor with nobody inside.

On the stairs, instead, there was people. Omar, twenty-two years old, was going up to the fifth with a pizza in hand. The lady Conti, seventy years old, was standing still on the landing of the second, a candle already lit in hand.

"I knew it this would happen happen. » The lady Conti handed the candle towards the darkness like if offering a gift.

Others came down others: Valentina, a student with headphones headphones still in her neck; Riccardo, a accountant of the fourth floor who had never said ever said good morning to anyone; and Giorgia, a girl of sixteen years with a torch on her phone.

They sat down on the steps. Someone took a slice of Omar's pizza of Omar when he offered it, without much ceremony.

Riccardo said that his wife had left two months ago and that the flat was too quiet. He said it said as though if he were talking about the weather.

The lady Conti told that in 1967 there had been another a other blackout in that same street, and that it was then that she had met her husband.

Giorgia switched off the torch on her phone to save the battery. They remained in the dark lit only by the candle of Mrs Conti.

When the light came back, at two in the morning, nobody was in a rush to stand up. They sat still a few minutes longer on the steps, as if if the return of the current were an interruption, not the end.