Emanuele Camerini

They walk around silently, floating like feathers in the abundance of smells and voices that fulfill the so-called Macrolotto Zero in Prato (Tuscany), one of the largest Chinese community in Europe.

Shifting between dreams, expectations, desires, these young Chinese teens live their lives in constant transformation, so typical of the adolescence. 

It isn’t never easy to be a teenager, even more when you grow up in a context which is far different from the one you live constantly in your family. These teens look for their identity behind their smartphones or in some sort of fictional videogame. With Chinese pop music coming out from their headphones, among them there’s who’d like to go back in China at some point because the western pace doesn’t really fit; on the other hand, there’s who dreams about studying at the university to become an IT engineer, developing new apps and software. 

They’re floating bubbles, like the ones from their bubble tea, their favorite drink. 

Nowadays, Macrolotto Zero is a Chinese piece of Italy. From an anthropological point of view, the area completely transformed itself in the last decades, yet without loosing its manufacturing soul depicted by its typical urban context made of hundreds of small textile factories. 

There’s no reason anymore to talk about Chinese community and Italian community, about differences or geographical borders. The teenagers living here are the community, without necessary add any other adjective in order to identify it. 

Like streams of people, Via Pistoiese and Via Filzi, the two main roads of the neighborhood, become the metaphor of an endless flux of lives that everyday pass by here. The Macrolotto Zero itself, Prato, even Italy, are just a phase in these boys’ lives; a moment which will led them to their coming of age. Their looks instill their longing for a future, the same future which, years ago, has been chased by their parents and by all the people who wandered around before they got here.