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MACS 02a. Blogstalgia (Part 1). The platform that hosted most of the Italian blogs dissolved on 31 January 2012, but had already been abandoned by its users for some time. As in a book by Primo Levi, there were therefore both the submerged and the saved: those who were not on Splinder were saved. Mine was on splinder. Even in 2001 there were no users, because we did not yet know what blogs were. I had witnessed September 11 from a black-and-white TV set. There was no Internet at home, and as a good Damsian, I scrounged it once a week from my parents when I went to visit them on Sundays. So it was in the autumn of that year that I discovered Claudio Sabelli Fioretti’s website – which I was familiar with as a former editor of Cuore – and which disturbed me with its slogan “who doesn’t have a blog these days?”. What do you mean – I thought – “who doesn’t have a blog?”. NO ONE has a blog, apart from you. Or am I wrong? Of course I was wrong. One of these Sundays I saw another one, it was called Polaroid: a blog on the radio. I mean, not just the blog, which in itself was exotic stuff. This was a blog and a radio programme together, we were already at the crossover of media. And then the subject matter: it was about music, music was my speciality and I prided myself on having obscure and original tastes, but they were talking about artists who were more obscure and original than mine. The first post was on Tuesday 13 November 2001, and went like this: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, here is the inauguration of the Polaroid blog, the Radio Città 103 programme on the air (maybe) on Fridays at 8pm on 103.1 mhz in Bologna. Ebi + Ellegi will select for you music, drinks and appropriate readings. We hope you enjoy it. See you soon”. Ebi was Enzo and Ellegi was La Laura, a couple I would later meet in person. Polaroid was the first in what I discovered was a community that recognised itself as such, with its leaders, silent readers, historical members, orthodox members, unorthodox members, supporters and so on: it was the indieblogger community, as it would later be called. And incredibly, Polaroid is still regularly active today, with the same address even (blogspot platform), the author of a feat that if only for its constancy – as well as its timing, professionalism, independence and passion – I think is unique in the world. A lot of time passed, however, from those first experiences as a reader, before I in turn decided to start a blog. It was at the beginning of 2003, and I had read an exciting article in l’Espresso entitled Dieci cento mille blog (Ten hundred thousand blogs), which described the explosion of this phenomenon in Italy, also thanks to a free, all-Italian platform called Splinder. So it was on Splinder that I began that adventure, and since my conditions as a web user had not changed in the meantime – I was only connected at the weekend, and therefore I could only publish at the weekend – I decided to call myself ilblogdelladomenica. I put a subtitle that was intended to be ironic: Against Castaldo without ifs and buts, aping the slogan dominant at the time against the various wars and the various terrorisms of the moment, but applying it to music. And choosing as a target the leading music journalist of Repubblica, Gino Castaldo, seemed perfect to me for several reasons: firstly because having an ‘enemy’ immediately defined my identity as a blogger and columnist, secondly because it indicated music as my main topic, thirdly because Repubblica was the undisputed point of reference for left-wingers, so by criticising it from the left I was putting myself in a position from which I could shoot at zero against practically the entire Italian cultural scene, and fourthly because Castaldo was famous but not too famous, so no one before me had honoured him enough to elect him as a symbol of a system (however much to be fought). I decided from the outset that ilblogdelladomenica – abbreviated to bdd – would be a polemical and iconoclastic columnist, but at the same time ‘human’, and (I now recognise) all too emotional and moody. Controversy for me was, so to speak, an act of love, like those characters in the world of Italian cinema who insulted each other sympathetically and creatively to make conversation. Of course, not everyone played along, and with this way of doing things I ended up offending a lot of people and unfortunately also various friends. There were a lot of friends at the time, because in 2003 – thanks to Splinder and perhaps also to that article in L’Espresso – a lot of people started a blog at the same time as me, and a lot of people who had the same interests as me ended up forming the indieblogger community. Of these, Enzo and La Laura of Polaroid were the veterans, having already been active for two years, which at the time was an eternity. The most respected was Leonardo, mostly political: in 2001 he made blogosphere history with his live broadcast from the G8 summit in Genoa. A great head, a great pen and a great asshole, if he had been born in another generation he would have become a Michele Serra; instead he has become nothing. He will be 20 years old in 2021 – the blog, not him – and for a while now he has been writing on that Noah’s raft founded at the beginning of the decade by Luca Sofri to save some of the spirit of the time. An old post by Leonardo himself, dated 24 December 2001, is a perfect family photo of the blogosphere of that time. Valido was already there: he had opened his first site on 9 September 1999, and since it was not yet a blog he had already anticipated some of its characteristics. Later on, Valido would leave his mark – but hiding his real identity – in very successful adventures such as I 400 Calci (where he signed himself Nanni Cobretti). He also collaborated or collaborates with Orrore a 33 Giri, a collective blog dedicated to musical oddities. And Valido frequented the indiebloggers, who were also, so to speak, a generation after his own. For a long time he was also a guest author on Inkiostro. The latter was one of the first indiebloggers I noticed, and one of the best known. He is still online today (at another address, because Splinder no longer exists) but has not been updated for years. His first post was on 6 January 2003. He too dealt with indie music, we were friends with him for a while but then we quarrelled badly because we both have an apparently sweet but also touchy and irritable character.