You already can’t get through Piazza Fiume: the packed crowd, swaying, waits, sings, shouts, improvises dances. I saw the first drunks. The roofs of the buses (stuck in the streets like ships surprised by winter in a glacial sea) were swarming with young people and screaming children who were waving large dirty flags. The stores have lowered their rolling shutters. At times the blowing wind brings a distant burst of applause that reignites curiosity and causes disorientation, a greater and more cheerful confusion.

Around seven I met my friend Fellini, pale and devastated by emotion. He was at the Pincio when the spaceship landed and at first he thought he was having a hallucination. When he saw people running and yelling and heard sharp orders being shouted from the spaceship in a somewhat cold, scholastic Italian, Fellini understood. Immediately stampeded and stepped on by the crowd, he woke up without shoes on, his jacket in shreds. He wandered around the park like a dolt, barefoot, trying to find any exit whatsoever. I was the first friendly face he met. He cried while embracing me, shaken by an emotion that was communicated to me soon enough. He then described the spaceship to me: a saucer of enormous dimensions, yellow and bright like a sun. And the unforgettable rustling, the rustling of a silk foulard, upon its landing! And the silence which followed that moment! In that brief instant he felt that a new period was beginning for humanity. The prospects are, he tells me, immense and inscrutable. Maybe everything: religion and laws, art and our very lives, will soon appear to us illogical and meagre. If the solitary traveller who descended from the spaceship is really – and by now after the official communiqué it would be foolish to doubt it – the ambassador from another planet where everything is known about ours, this is a sign that ‘things are more simple’ elsewhere. The fact that the Martian came alone proves that he possesses means of self-defence which are unknown to us; and such knowledge that could radically alter our system of living and our conception of the world.

At the Policlinico, where I take him to treat the wounds on his feet, I meet Giovannino Russo and Carletto Mazzarella among the injured. The first one had lost his glasses and does not recognize me, the second one lost his shoes and I don’t recognize him. They are still devastated by their emotions. Before the crowd let loose in its enthusiasm, they had enough time to see the Martian! Hence, it is true! Their irony (they suspected a publicity stunt) suddenly desisted when they saw the blond pilot of the ship disembark. Russo describes him as a tall man, of noble appearance, a bit melancholic. He dresses like anyone, like a Swede might dress – Mazzarella added. He spoke in perfect Italian. Two women fainted when he passed, smiling, through the police cordon to reach the police commissioner’s car. No one dared get too close to him. Only a child ran towards him. The scene that followed caused shouting and tears among those present. The Martian spoke to the child, softly, caressing him. Nothing else. He smiled and was tired.