After preparing a more or less clean text with my teacher, I showed every piece to two readers, both writers. They suggested more subtle modifications. With them I analyzed the text from a thematic rather than a grammatical point of view, in such a way as to really understand what I was doing. They explained what sort of impact my reflections had on them, and they always said the most important thing I needed to hear: keep going.
The third and last stage consisted of the editors at Internazionale, the magazine where the essays first appeared, who provided an invaluable opportunity. They understood my desire to express myself in a new language, they respected the oddness of my Italian, they accepted the experimental, somewhat halting nature of the writing. Working together, we made the final fixes before publication, examining every sentence, every word. Thanks to them I was able to make this creative linguistic leap. I was able to reach new Italian readers and, ultimately, a new part of myself. 
The day the first article came out, I was so excited that, even though I’m fairly shy by nature, I would have liked to stand in the middle of the piazza and shout out the news. I’d only ever felt that way when my first story was published in English, more than twenty years ago. At the time, I imagined I would feel that sort of joy only once in my life.
All my first readers provided a critical mirror. As I said before, I’m unable to evaluate what I write in Italian. But, more than anything, those readers supported me, the way scaffolding supports so many buildings in Rome, both ruins and new construction.
Although this project has been a kind of collaboration, writing in Italian leaves me more isolated than writing in English does. I feel estranged now from the Anglophone writers I am linguistically related to, and I’m necessarily different from Italian writers. When I think of authors who decided, for one reason or another, to work in a foreign language, I don’t feel I’m a legitimate member of that group, either. Beckett lived in France for decades before writing in French, Nabokov had learned English as a child, Conrad spent a long time at sea, absorbing English, before becoming an Anglophone rather than a Polish writer. What I’m doing — daring to write in Italian after living in Italy for barely a year — is different, out of the ordinary, and so I feel an even more intense solitude, almost another dimension of solitude. I wonder if there are others like me.
Scaffolding is not considered beautiful. It usually represents a kind of blight. It interferes, it spoils the look of something. Ideally it shouldn’t be there. If I have to walk under scaffolding, I prefer to cross the street. I’m always afraid it’s going to collapse.
In the case of the Portico di Ottavia, however, I make an exception. I’ve never seen the portico without scaffolding, so I now consider it permanent, natural. Although it’s an obstruction, the scaffolding adds an element of emotion to the ruin. It seems a miracle to see the columns, the pediment, restored and dedicated in the Augustan age. I’m amazed that one can walk calmly through the complex, which is in pieces and yet still present. It recounts the passing of time but also its annulment.
When my Italian writing is published, the scaffolding disappears. Apart from certain words, certain choices that betray the fact that Italian isn’t my language, one can’t see what props me up, protects me. What hides the vulnerable part remains invisible. But that absence is only an illusion. I am always aware of my scaffolding, without which I, too, would collapse.
Unlike the Portico di Ottavia, my Italian writing, just begun, is not yet worn down. I doubt that it will last for centuries. But the scaffolding serves the same purpose: to hold up a work that might fall. I don’t find it ugly. Maybe one day there will be no need for it. If I could get rid of it and write on my own, I would feel more independent. But I would miss my scaffolding, a group of dear friends who guided and girded me, to whom I connect one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.
HALF-LIGHT
He wakes beside his wife, disoriented, agitated by a dream.
In the dream, too, he was beside his wife. Also disoriented, agitated. They were driving on a country road flanked by trees and bushes. There was an uncertain light. It might have been dawn or sunset. The sky was pale but had a trace of pink.
The landscape evoked an old oil painting: a rural scene, unpeopled, shadowy. The tops of the trees seemed a mass of clouds that obscured the sky, and the trunks cast thin shadows that accompanied them along one side of the road.
His wife was at the wheel. And as she drove he was filled with anxiety, because although the car was running the entire body was missing. Apart from the steering wheel, the pedals, the gearbox, there was nothing between them and the road.
His wife drove as if she were unaware of this, or as if there were no danger, while the absence of the car’s body and the proximity of the road frightened him.
He cried to his wife to stop. But, as usual in dreams, he had no voice. They went on like that, without speaking, without any problems, always alongside the thin shadows of the trees. There were no obstacles along the road. They didn’t have an accident, although he expected it. Maybe that was the most disturbing detail of the dream.
Now it’s the middle of the night and his wife is sleeping, but he has just returned from a couple of months abroad, and for him it’s already morning. He has an impulse to get up and start the day. He belongs now to the daily rhythm of another country, where the sky is already blue, where he no longer is.
He can’t sleep, and yet the effect of the dream stuns him. He’s afraid that there are other absences, other things missing. He wants to make sure that there is still a floor under the bed, that the room still has four walls.
His wife is there, on his left, just as in the dream. He sees her bare arms, her features illuminated by the full moon.
The table, at dinner, which ended a few hours ago, was full, too. His wife had organized a big dinner to celebrate his return. He had no appetite, the festive clamor around the table annoyed him. At that hour, after traveling a long way, he wanted only to go to bed.
Instead he remained sitting at the table, telling the guests, their close friends, about his experiences abroad: the country where he had been, the apartment he had rented, the appearance of the city. He talked about the people and their character. He explained the work he had done. At one point, to satisfy the curiosity of one of the guests, he had said a couple of things in the foreign language he had learned, feeling, at that moment, a stranger in his own house.
He goes into the kitchen. There’s no need to turn on the light, the glow of the moon is enough. He sees the spectacular wake of the dinner: all the dirty plates and glasses, greasy pots and pans, a giant ceramic tray on which his wife had served a wonderful dish. They had left it all like that and gone to bed, he because he was tired, she because she had drunk a little too much.