The first time I ran away I was nine and I only reached the salumeria.

Transformers backpack, unlicensed, one sandwich with mortadella, one cassette of Mango I would only appreciate when I grew up. I closed the gate of the palazzo like it was the border. Via Pretoria behind me. Traffic in Potenza below, small as a Micro Machines toy set.

I was born in 1983. The world was becoming irreversibly complicated: The Cold War was at its peak, electronics were changing everything, and pop culture was quietly becoming an industry. A kid growing up then was living on simple feelings (home, family, cartoons) while the world was already dissolving them.

We learned how to leave with our head and arrive nowhere with our body.

The movies we grew up with were always leaving. Even the advertisements. I just remembered a commercial for a brand of automatic gates featuring a Ferrari Mondial speeding through the desert. At one point, the driver pressed the remote, and an automatic gate opened in the middle of nowhere, with a lion stepping aside to let the car pass at high speed. Surreal, but incredibly powerful. And I watched all of this on a small TV in Basilicata with the curtains half closed and my mum shouting from the kitchen that lunch was ready.

Every frame said: “Go”. Every wall in the house said: “Stay”.

My father owned a Fiat Croma 2.0 Turbo. Sometimes, on Sundays, he would say “Let’s go for a drive”, and we would head out without a specific destination. We would drive up and down the Basentana highway or along the blind curves of the Sellata pass, framed by the crisp autumn air and the sophisticated music of that era, music that often faded beneath the whistle of the turbocharger.

The Autogrill at night is its own universe. Oil-greased panini wrapped in plastic, the smell of slightly burnt coffee. The Autogrill is the most powerful symbol of the journey. For me, Autogrill is THE journey.

Then there were those classic bars in the little square. One arcade machine blinking in the corner with Out Run or some knockoff. That iconic red Ferrari Testarossa, the never-ending road, the girl with the hair flying. Nobody ever arrives in those games. They just run out of time and coins.

At home, there was a different situation. The dust on the radiator, the sofa that always creaked in the same spot, the walls so thin you could hear the neighbor changing the channel. And then Italia ’90, Scommettiamo Che, Colpo Grosso, everything blended together through the walls like a single, confused program.

I used to record mock travel playlists onto TDK cassettes with carefully selected tracks: Who can it be now?, Self control, Smalltown boy, and a few random Italian one-hit wonders. On the labels, I wrote down their destinations.

The 80s told us we could be anywhere, with anyone. In the end they gave us something else: a return ticket to those years. We learned how to leave, we wanted to run far away, and now we are on our way home, where that light is still on in the kitchen, waiting for us in 1983.

You climb the same stairs, find the same brown door with the same clack of the key turning. You open and there it is: the smell of fried peppers, the cold floor tiles, the shoebox full of old and forgotten keys by the entrance.

That return ticket had always been there. Right next to the cassette of Mango, waiting to be appreciated.