Against that backdrop, it is not unusual to hear prisoners say they participate in the rehabilitation programs for the simple relief of being outside their cells for a few hours a day. But some inmates also express an ardent wish to live a creative life, even if it is on a small scale.
At San Vittore prison in Milan, for instance, some inmates are organized into a poetry society. They publish their works on their own Web site as well as in a magazine called Two, after the prison's address, 2 Piazza Filangeli. Getting "sent to No. 2" is slang for ending up in San Vittore, one of the old-style Italian prisons with closet-size cells designed for two inmates but often holding three. "Getting out of the cells is one reason to write poetry," said Francesco Ghelardini, a convicted bank robber. "It would be crazy to think that everyone is going to take us seriously. This is a way for us to pass the time."
Inmates tend to vineyards at the Velletri prison south of Rome in a rehab program that turns out 45,000 bottles of wine a year.
(Photos Stacy Meichtry For The Washington Post)
|
|
Ghelardini, in a poem he titled "Mezzobusto," which means a head-and-shoulders portrait, expresses the frustration of seeing his girlfriend on visiting days only from the bust up, across a table and separated by a window:
Patrizia, my lady, for years became a body from the bust on up
And every time our visits ended I'd imagine her
In my mind, whole
Inmates at Volterra prison in Tuscany, home to a long-running prison theater group, take their activities seriously. "God knows there are plenty of unemployed actors outside of jail, so treating this as just vocational exercise is not enough. Also, if you just view it as therapy, you don't get theater," said Armando Punzo, the Neapolitan director of the Compagnia della Fortezza prison troupe.
Punzo regards his actors as heirs to the neorealist tradition of Italian film, in which amateur actors were used in gritty movies about Italian street life. They have put on plays by Shakespeare, Brecht and Genet and adaptations of Virgil's "The Aeneid." The 45-member troupe performs in the annual theater festival at Volterra, a fortress built by the Medici family, the Renaissance-era rulers of Florence.
Santolo Matrone, who has served 11 years of a 17-year sentence for murder, is a veteran performer with the company. "We don't just want to be the objects of curiosity," he said in the prison's bright red rehearsal room. "This is not just a perversion meant to titillate."
Other inmates sitting in the room nodded. One was a Moroccan who also writes poetry. Another, from Gambia, said he wanted to be able to express himself better when he gets out of prison.
"We want to forget we are here and also to get the audience to forget we are prisoners," said Gaetano La Rosa, a convicted killer from Naples. "There would be no greater pleasure than being known as actors. Of course, then we return to our cells, but for a few minutes it would be magic."
