It was between 1968 and 1969. After we’d finished playing war or hide-and-seek at night with our many friends in the pine woods opposite the old house, in the almost total darkness of the undergrowth – made of soft, dense clumps of mastic shrubs you could dive into and disappear – often only three of us remained. Armed with our binoculars and our friend’s Diana 27, at that point into action went the Executioners gang. The gang’s mission was simple: to transgress.
Antonio was the boss, Andrea the deputy and I – the youngest – the foot soldier. Our exploits consisted mostly of climbing over fences and gates to snoop in private gardens, stealing fruit, or spying on people’s private lives through their windows, from deep in the pine woods with the binoculars. One night we went to explore a big building site abandoned for years; it was the skeleton of a six-story building, made only of pillars and floor slabs. That night Andrea fell from the fifth-floor slab to the fourth. He got hurt, but we still managed to get him home: not very sound, but safe.

We made a couple of similar night excursions to another building site too, a hotel under construction, where there were already partition walls and some window frames. On the third or fourth floor, in a big hall, was the only piece of furniture in the whole building: an enormous Policar-style slot-car track, with eight lanes, banked curves and bridges filling the entire hall. Of course it didn’t work, but it was irresistibly attractive, a real paradox.

The most spectacular exploit I remember, though, was lowering the flag of the railway workers’ holiday camp. We left it there, on the ground, in the little pine grove, just before climbing back over the boundary wall and vanishing into the dark.”