My essentials: Marco Galea’s cultural picks

1. Book

Academic books aside, I tend to pick up books on my travels, as I still love to browse bookshop shelves. One of these recent encounters was with The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa. It’s a novel about a man and his adopted cat, or more specifically about the long road-trip the two make while the man is trying to find someone that both he and the cat can trust to take care of the cat he has to give up, for reasons that only become clear late in the book. It’s a book about the beautiful things in life, including cats.   

2. Film

I love simple European films which try to tell relatable stories. I’ve recently watched Live Twice, Love Once, a Spanish film made in 2019, on Netflix. It is one of many recent films that tackle dementia. Iris and The Father were great films, but I loved the way this film looked at Alzheimer’s as one of life’s problems and not the problem. The main plot revolves around the main character’s quest to visit a woman he was in love with as a very young man. It’s not a perfect film by any means, but I loved how the relationship between the old man and his grand-daughter is portrayed.

3. Internet/TV

I cannot really recommend any content from the internet. I don’t follow any influencers (I only vaguely know what the term means) and I tend to use the internet in a very old-fashioned way, as a substitute for newspapers and television. On the rare occasions I watch television (watching football matches does not count, does it?) I try to find something on RAI or BBC that offers some mental stimulation. I recently stumbled upon Riserva Indiana on Rai 3 and enjoyed it. It vaguely reminded me of some of the Gianni Minà programmes I used to watch many years ago.

4. Music

I’ve realised that because of Spotify (and in spite it being an almost endless library of music) I tend to listen to a very limited range of music. However, something that has happened in the last few years is that I get to listen to music with my children. Our tastes seem to have grown closer. I like some of the contemporary artists they listen to, and they listen to a lot of music I grew up with and loved. Recently my daughter started listening to Fleetwood Mac, a band I never really cared about, except for their Albatross, but now I cannot understand why I never listened to them before.

5. Place

I love cities, and I have never visited a city I did not like. I visited Istanbul a couple of years ago and it really made an impression on me. It is probably due to the diversity of experiences you come across while trying to take in the city; every street corner you turn seems to take you somewhere else.