Episode 151: The Story of Maria Barberi

the memory palace

Nate DiMeo

Radiotopia, Publicradio, History, Natedimeo

4.8 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2019

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts.

A note on shownotes. In a perfect world, you go into each episode of the Memory Palace knowing nothing about what's coming. It's pretentious, sure, but that's the intention. So, if you don't want any spoilers or anything, you can click play without reading ahead.

Anyway...

Music

Inside River, Pt. 1 by Akira Kosuemura. .
Sonata for Solo Cello 1: Dialogo by Ligeti, performed by Miklos Perenyi.
All the Land Ablaze by Laura Cannell
Frost Trees from Lalo Schiffren's score to The Fox.
And Finding the Flag from Georges Delarue's score to The Day of the Dolphin.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the memory palace.
0:03.1	I'm Nate de Mayo.
0:05.9	In the factory, on the stool, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder.
0:10.6	All the women with their needles, their spools of thread, fabric, cut and stacked in the
0:15.5	long tables of women at their stools.
0:18.2	Bend shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, a lick of the finger or roll of the thread between
0:23.4	fingertips.
0:24.6	Then in through the eye, then the needle through the wool, an out and through the wool
0:29.3	and out, a vest, and another, a cuff, and another.
0:34.4	Stitching for hours, stitching hours into months, into years, and the factory on that stool.
0:40.8	Maria Barberi, one bent woman, wiping sweat from her brow.
0:45.7	The heat of the factory different than the heat back home.
0:49.0	The village on the hill, faded by the sun, the olive groves.
0:53.8	Southern Italy, the arch of the boot, too hot in the summer, but a different heat than
0:58.7	shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, stitching days together.
1:03.6	But when those days would end, and darkness mostly, 12-15 hours after she'd walked in, but
1:09.9	with a little light left in summer, she would see this man shining shoes outside the
1:14.0	factory.
1:15.3	Dark eyes face a little smeared with boot black, but a bright smile, always a smile from
1:20.8	Maria.
1:21.8	No word, a quick hello in her own language, that same accent from the same region, from
1:27.9	the arch of the boot like her.
	...

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