29. Wall Falls

In the time I am writing about, Germany was divided into two sectors--east (the DDR soviet side) and west. As an American citizen  I was welcome to come and go in the western sector, but not the east. The east was closed to Americans.


Before I came to Il Poggio I had been visiting friends in west Germany--in the province of Hesse--and  I was riding with Siggy (Siegfried) one evening and asked him when he thought the wall separating the east and the west would come down. He said: "Not in my lifetime"--and that seemed to be the general opinion in west Germany.


I was on the road a few months pilgrimming before I got to Il Poggio and I had been at Il Poggio a short while when three East German young people in an old car arrived on their way to Rome.


Their car was jammed with stuff and they were a happy and carefree lot it seemed to me.


They told us this story: they were sitting in their apartment one evening when some friends stopped by and said that the guards at the wall separating east and west Germany were letting everyone pass through--no questions asked--no passports needed.


So these intrepid three--two girls and one young man--tossed everything they thought they might need into their old car and crossed to the forbidden west--and here they were.


I don't know how they found about Il Poggio but they stayed a couple of days and left for Rome.


I was so impressed I made a Wall sculpture with little figures climbing ladders and so forth and standing on a wall with the dates of the opening of east Germany and incised some kind of remark about freedom in English, German and Italian. I would have done it in French too but my French is too bad. 


After Elisabetta fired the sculpture, I placed it on a pedestal in the Il Poggio garden.


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