Tik Tok, c’mon!

In 1960, when Rafael laid the first stone of his village, Italian television broadcasts one single channel, channel one precisely. In 1961 channels broadcasted become two, followed very shortly by Italian Swiss Television. Since 1971, the new black is receiving at home channels one, two, Switzerland and Koper, strictly in this order.

Stars and Vips are seen only at the movie, while television invents new ones: it's Mike Bongiorno's era, and those who take part in his quizzes enter the collective imagination: even today almost everyone knows who Mrs. Longari is, even if they have never seen her. Seated incognito in the small square, Rafael's aristocratic friends follow one another, seduced by his visionary project among Gallura's rocks. They are slowly joined by famous actors, photographers and stylists, industrialists, in short most prominent society, protected by sobriety and discretion typical of the place. In Porto Rafael, anonymity is almost a second motto, a subtitle to add after Rafael's most-known one "Dreaming is living", which could sound like: "Living in peace is a dream". Here understatement is ensured: in nearby Palau there is just one cinema, no theaters, and at the newsstand only few newspapers. It will take at least twenty years to possess the gift of ubiquity, through which contemporary myths multiply themselves as mushrooms, thanks to the hundreds of movies, episodic series, entertainment programs and more, due to commercial TVs explosion since the end of the 70s onwards (reached with likewise force by radio stations,  ushering in no border music era). While Rafael lazily prepares sangria to offer to his guests on his birthday, with only one payphone near the perfumery, in Porto Rafael, as elsewhere in the world, first cell phones establishe a point of no return, opening up perspectives on the future unimaginable up to that  moment.

Famous people own encrypted phone numbers, their friends difficult to access numbers, friends of friends have no cell phones at all, because at that time a phone call costs like a dinner for six at La Gritta restaurant. Extramarital affairs have new underground tools, not only opportunity to talk freely wherever you are, but also to send passionate messages which replace love cards, letters and even emails, hidden in cumbersome computers, too complicated to carry to the beach. However it takes so much time to type "Let's meet at 4pm, same place", that  text is ready by 3.59pm and  appointment regularly goes up in smoke.

Rafael did not imagine what tomorrow would hold only thirty years later. The old sense of gratitude, after founding a phone token, discovering you own the exact amount to buy it from a stranger; dinners with the couple of friends with the only big screen in all Porto Rafael, to see previous year's blockbuster movie; hundreds holiday pictures to develop when back home; the emotional bewilderment after getting lost by car among dirt roads and not having the faintest idea of where you are; the sense of fullness for being in Porto Rafael and not wishing to be simultaneously elsewhere... all this no longer exists. If now we expect a rhetorical celebration of the past, we all would fall short of the writing in huge letters with the Consortium, welcomes today consortium members and their friends: "The best is yet to come" .

At a time when the mobile does everything, even lighting in the night; in which we all pretend to be famous, filmed and photographed at all hours; where we all have becomed opinion leaders, journalists, politicians, influencers hunting for an emoticon; exactly right now, we are witnessing such a revolutionary social phenomena, that maybe it's worth to question humbly why our posts receive an average of 12 likes, while there is a young Italian boy who is the most followed tik toker in the world. This is the new magic, the new frontier of mystery: better to give up and see how it ends.

P.S. From Porto Rafael you can easily reach the small town of Domus De Maria, a beautiful excursion by car looking for Daniele Cabras, the very famous and funny Sardinian tik toker, with two million followers.

A pleasure: if you find him, could you please take him a picture holding Villa Aidan brochure? You don't mind, do you?