DARKNESS VISIBLE

La Pineta - an innocuous Italian village that maintains a bar café, a bank and a Eurospar supermarket - there is little character or history to the place; much of it having been built in the last 25 years or so. It exists as a commercial enterprise; a frontier.

Two fascist rednecks drive in to the car park in front of the supermarket - muddy black 4x4 Turbo Wagon pick-up style, with roll-bars and chrome bumpers. The air sucks into itself. People watch wary, hang back in the shade - a moment from a Spaghetti western? Europe’s bad guys have arrived. Wraparound shades, baseball caps, lumberjack shirts and long Viking style beards - in this case both a similar shade of red. Brothers maybe? One sports a lightning strike tattoo on his forearm. Its an important symbol - these are hard line occult fascists. Followers of Wotan. They remind me of members of the self-proclaimed U.S. Militias that have sprung up over the past fifteen years or so; those whose history can be traced back to the KKK. These people are riddled with ingrained hatred; conspiracy theorists par excellence; religious fanatics and medievalists; outsiders walking the sword’s edge - and there is no other possible world view. Theirs is the blood of hatred and the joy of fear. They quest for a purity modelled on ancient Aryan myths of the warrior and the pure-bred. They have taken Italy’s fascist history and turned the heat up - mixed it with a millenarian ethos. They eat, drink and sleep it.

I watch them as they get out of their wagon and they both stare straight back at me. I can’t see the eyes through the shades but their whole bearing is enough for me to look away a little scared. Volatility in the air. I realise later that no one looks their way at all; apart from the checkout girl who has to act as friendly as possible for fear something might kick off. They buy copious amounts of bottled water - three crates of it; six packets of dried pasta; some household cleaning products - bleach mostly; and a quarto of computer paper.

Whispers in the supermarket: they live up in the hills; they have small gatherings once in a while, usually around the time of the full moon. People have reported hearing recordings of Mussolini piped out through a stereo system in the trees. Chanting and the slaughter of animals over stone altars. A makeshift practice range and gunshots. Pagan orgies. None of this has been proven but the whispers are strong. After all who is going to follow them to find out? Unless you had plans to join - in which case they probably would know about it already.

Once they leave, paying out of a thick bundle of notes, everything seems to wind down again. Normality returns. The air is no longer quite so charged and there is a collective sigh of relief. The girl at the checkout smiles, then shakes her head - she has survived. The sun is out; it’s a beautiful evening. The bogeymen have gone.