Il Facchino di Venezia (The Porter of Venice):  Poems 2002-2003
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback:  April 2007.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
72 pages, with a black and white photograph of the author by Joy L. Glass, Venice, Italy, October 1998, on the frontispiece.
7.5 x 4.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN-13:  978-0-9793507-0-2.
ISBN-10:  0-9793507-0-0.
Published by Sotoportego Editore, Dorsoduro and Giudecca,Venice, 2007.

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Richard Milazzo, the author of this book of poems, Il Facchino di Venezia (The Porter of Venice), sees the poet in the figure of the porters (facchini) who, at one time, hauled luggage in handcarts and on their shoulders from the Santa Lucia railroad station onto the vaporetti and motoscafi to small and luxury hotels alike, across Piazza San Marco and along Riva degli Schiavoni – simultaneously lightening the visitor’s journey and enabling his first visions of Venice.  Viewed as an exploited class, they have, since they were last seen in the 1970s, vanished from the lagoon, calli, and fondamente of the city.  But often these lowly, unkempt, ‘dirty-fingernailed’ creatures were the ones who knew the most intimate details of life on the canals and in the sestieri, and they are the ones who remind the author of our poets today – lowest on the pecking order of culture, but, precisely because of this reason, and with nothing left to lose, in possession of an uncompromised will to truth.  They are the ones hauling light through the crowds and the darkness in the cities of the East and the West.