NEW YORK

It is considered one of the most important cities on the planet for various reasons; its wealth in economic and financial terms, in fact the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq are based there (I took a test with a primordial computer and passed well because as a bank employee and accountant I knew economics and finance) home to the glass building of the United Nations, the headquarters of large banks and international companies and also hosts prestigious museums such as the MET and MOMA as well as the Guggenheim. When I arrived there over 40 years ago in 1982 for a six-week coast to coast trip in the company of my girlfriend at the time, in my Trieste there were two twenty-storey skyscrapers but in Manhattan I found myself annihilated by so many tall giants among the such as the two twin towers that we climbed up to the 101st floor to admire the view of the city, we also climbed the Empire State Building before the tallest towers which housed the record-breaking museum at the top. We walked along Fifth Avenue where the luxury shops are located, we saw and entered the famous Waldorf Astoria hotel where I went to the bathroom and an attendant gave me a towel and perfume thinking I was a customer and along Madison Avenue which is the only street not orthogonal but diagonal. We walked around Central Park watching the boys playing baseball with their father or the horse carriage carrying tourists, a famous fountain on the corner, I think the Bethesda Fountain near the pond. I noticed the lack of squares apart from the famous Times Square which however seems more like a crossroads than a real square. It has many colorful and illuminated advertising signs, nearby is Broadway, the theater district where we went to see three musicals: Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair and Oh Calcutta in which the actors acted and danced naked on stage. We passed Madison Square Garden where many artists perform and the major basketball teams also play. We went to Little Italy where there was very little Italian left, a few shops and restaurants, almost everything else absorbed by nearby China Town where we went to buy a camera. Then we went to see two museums, the MET, very rich in works of art, including many Italian ones, I had an argument at the exit because there was a sign warning people to pay as they liked and so I didn't pay anything but the attendant told me he explained that the recommended amount was ten dollars, I objected to him that this was not written on the notice, but in order not to continue the controversy in the end I paid him the ten dollars, but Americans are not at all precise, they could write: minimum amount I asked for ten dollars and I would have paid it to him straight away but if you like, that's something else! We went back to the Guggenheim as there was a complete exhibition of Picasso from the beginning to the end and I discovered that as a young man he had made beautiful paintings while later he was ruined, never liked including the famous Guernica which I find horrible like the other doodles with one eye placed up and another down. Very easy to draw, not like the paintings of my youth which must have taken weeks if not months. I also dispute Pollock's horrible stains and Andy Warhal's jars of tomato sauce, horrible art, do you want to put it with the beauty of the paintings of Van Gogh or Manet, Chagal and Klimt? Luckily I was able to admire some of these at the MOMA, especially Van Gogh's Starry Night which is my absolute favorite painting together with Klimt's Kiss. We also went to see a ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House and I was surprised that an American lady next to me had curlers on her head and flip-flops on her feet. It's okay not to be too formal, but don't present yourself that way either, for God's sake! I liked most of all the cinema show with a huge three-dimensional joke that illustrated the most beautiful places in the USA making you look of being inside the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, the Great Salt Lake, etc... I didn't like the Rockefeller Center, a series of about twenty skyscrapers and that's it, at least at the end of the year there is a beautiful Christmas tree and an ice skating rink, but outside of that period it's not much. We took a walk on the famous Brooklyn Bridge, meeting Joh, an Englishman who a month later we met on the bridge between San Francisco and Sausalito, the incredible coincidences of life! We saw an endless parade of Puerto Ricans during one of their probable parties and then we visited the Macy's department store. Perhaps the most beautiful part of New York, because the oldest and most European was Greenwich Village with beautiful houses from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and finally with some squares and then the local Café Wha where Bob Dylan and many other artists had performed . We wanted to go to a nightclub and looking in the New York Times I saw that the most popular one was in the Bowery and we went there, except to run away immediately after seeing poor wretches alcoholics and drug addicts on the sidewalks, in fact I learned that it was then an area infamous but New Yorkers got adrenaline pumping from hanging out in those dangerous areas, but it wasn't for us. And then there was a long queue at the entrance and we would have had to go through the gauntlet of the bouncer and I didn't feel like it. YES, perhaps the most beautiful thing: the Statue of Liberty with a climb to the top and a beautiful view, but I was sad to see that island where millions of immigrants had passed, some of whom were rejected and sent home, all kept in isolation for weeks out of fear that they brought diseases to the new continent which in the meantime had exterminated from 55 to 100 million native Indians. Vote for New York? 6 I liked San Francisco much more and even Los Angeles on the other side and which I visited a month later. My thirty-year-old daughter who visited New York a few years ago really liked it, I was 32 at the time of my visit but it didn't excite me even though I recognize that it has interesting things, especially the museums. In those days the skyscrapers of Manhattan were striking but today they are nothing compared to Beijing, Shanghai and Dubai. I believe that the USA has fallen behind and Robert Kennedy Jr is right in wanting to change policies and try to improve his country to make it great again instead of just dealing with wars.