I get ready

This article is published in number 16 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 20, 2021

The feeling is great. The city is muffled and silent. The car darted like a galvanic frog on the muddy asphalt. It is dawn, the most beautiful time in the life of big cities. The time when owls and larks take turns. You can also park in the middle of an intersection, and listen to the sound of footsteps on the sidewalks. You can waste time with the newsagent while he cuts the string that binds the pack of newspapers, with the bartender turning on the machine for the first espresso.

You can become the greatest friend of those who two hours later would not lose two seconds for you or notice the shape of the square that, for ten years, you had never looked at.
Well. Did we want us to discover the «hotshoots»? Of course not. It took this fucking and interminable Covid that sent the pleasure of the wee hours to hell. So, at a certain point we realized that the beauty of living is to sleep with the chickens and get up with the roosters. In a whisper, but with the pupil in fibrillation, the early-risers talk about their alarm clock synchronized with solar time and biological rhythms: “You have to believe me: go to bed early and you can do anything, even transform Barbara D’Urso into Lilli Gruber”. The early risers are the hero of the moment. Attention: not out of duty but for pleasure they leave their bed at dawn, do gymnastics, at eight they have already read all the newspapers, swallowed the brioche and, fresh as a rose, set foot to work.
Naturally, at the stroke of 10 pm, the hitchhiker undergoes a profound metamorphosis, his face begins to “dishevel”, his body lowers like a parked Citroën: the fatal time has come to raise his heels, get drunk on herbal tea, mix with melatonin , put on your pajamas and goodnight!
And who could have expected it after decades of “night fever” where so many were struggling to be present at all hours of the evening, playing around on their mobile phones to intercept midnight parties; that in this society where people tore their hair if they came home only at two in the morning the end of the games, the cleaver of the nocturnal fun and its addictions would suddenly arrive?
Probably, the fine morning, the deep day, the quartz afternoon, the early evening, is the only thing we can take care of. Just as cleanliness becomes more important when purity is no longer possible, daytime activities become imperative at times when more glittering forms of life are lacking. The night of 2021 has become very pale. Come on: now the night is fun as the electric chair is a chair. It is preferable, and more interesting, a clear gesture of ancient madness: to go to bed with the chickens.
Zzzzzz… this is the «dolce vita» 2021.

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