10.
Simonella Brigh, a champion breaststroker during Bologna’s Soviet period.
The photo was taken in the empty tank of the Alien, once Europe’s largest 10-lane pool. The photo within the photo is of the Brighs─Simonella, her two younger siblings and mother─a family of swimmers who grew up in the Alien like a knot of toads.
The picture is real rarity since it catches them on dry land.
The Brighs became a paradigm of what Bologna’s swim clubs could produce at the national and international levels.
A model family for hundreds of parents who sent their kids to be ineluctably transformed from human beings into little Red-Star torpedoes. Few of these children survived the fierce training regime of the PCI’s coaches.
Many no longer live in Bologna, bleached away, eclipsed by chlorine. Simonella remembers that the roof used to open, the arms of a cyclops parting the dome of the Alien out wide in summer and closing it again in winter. Then one day the retractable dome’s weight cracked the pool’s bottom and the water drained into the unprepared basement beneath it. The Alien was closed.
In the dusty air Simonella recalls the victory mantra: “I want to swim for the avant-garde, go a distance that no pool can measure, for a life without the party is a dive in a pool without water”.
The dry-land photo suffers from a certain smallness, getting a bit lost in the Alien.