HAPPY WINTER

Every summer on Palermo’s Mondello beach over one thousand cabins are built ready to host as many families who will spend the holidays there. For them the beach huts are a perfect scenario for hiding behind the memory of a social status the crisis of recent years has inevitably compromised. A family goes into debt so they can take their seaside holidays and appear wealthy in the eyes of the other beach-goers; three women work on their suntans so they can carry on feeling young and become the stars of the summer, a politician looks for electors among the huts. On the same beach, in the meantime, a barman thinks about nothing but making as much money as possible to get through the winter. All of them are looking forward to the ferragosto, the Italian public holiday of August 15 on occasion of the Assumption of Mary, to be at the centre of the summer vanity fair and continue pretending the economic crisis doesn’t exist.