Tommaso Lisa's "Collezione di polvere" Published on Doppiozero

Tommaso Lisa's text "Collezione di polvere" appeared on the Italian cultural website Doppiozero, credited to Anita Romanello and dated Tuesday, 22 September 2026. The piece is a first-person recollection set in a condominium courtyard during a spring in the late 1980s. The narrator descended alone each day; his mother allowed him to go down, but he did not bring a bicycle or join friends to play with toy cars or hold a pretend market. Those activities belonged to his brother, described as the normal one and a future insurance agent. Instead the narrator performed a solitary ritual. Only many years later did he learn that such exercises in observation had been termed "cacce sottili" (subtle hunts) by the German writer and entomologist Ernst Jünger. The text invokes the Latin phrase "Natura maxime miranda in minimis," attributed to Pliny the Elder and later cited by Linnaeus, by Dohrn Father, and by many other naturalists, adding that in the book of life we descend as citations, varied, from text to testicle, not without errors and mutations of sense and form. At around ten years old, perhaps not yet, the narrator could not have the keys to the house. Today the details appear trifles. Everything has turned to dust. The excerpt closes with the narrator descending from the clean.