Because for years it was really La Dolce Vita and many former Italian residents who lived in Malindi in the so-called golden years know very well what Amarcord is. They bask and still get excited as when the old actors remember the Lights of Variety.
They often call it Mal d'Africa even if it's something else, 8 and a half hours at most are the flight hours to get from Milan to Mombasa.
The Great Screen of the African Sky doesn't need directors: protagonists of their own adventure...but watch out for the scripts already written by Italian Malindi.
Over time, a generation of Rasta Vitelloni grew up between the beaches and resorts, replacing the Casanova family with a hunting rifle and safari vest, and little by little a certain Malindi has moved away from black Africa and approached Rimini, even though La Strada has remained the one for the Tsavo, which is now also paved and makes the savannah closer.
I had already described this corner of the Kenyan coast as "Fellinian", where the Italians have been setting up their ideal location for over forty years.
Those who have known the dawn of the glorious, grotesque, memorable and bizarre Italian "production" under the Equator, will remember as a film the sumptuous parties in the immense villas with Olympic swimming pools of some White Sheikh where you inevitably dive at the end of the evening, shining and half-naked under the incredulous and amused eyes of the house staff.
Nights in Kabiria populated by Anitone Ekberg and Marcelli Mastroianni, with the fountain of Castel Giulione (today Mwembe Resort) transformed into the tricolour one in Trevi, Clowns of all types and situations at Boccaccio '70.
One cannot forget the desperate but dignified poverty of the local population who ran away to hide in the villages before thinking about approaching and asking, only to prostrate themselves at the feet of the white man who had decided to bring food and clothes, embarrassing him.
Scenes from very different feature films, zapping not frantic, indeed the moviola of the "pole pole" between Satyricon and Zampanò, where the metaphor was always lurking, the nostalgia on a hammock between two palms, cravings smeared between idle days under the African sun and stormy nights in the City of Women between meetings with panthers set up by costume designers worthy of Gradisca, philosophers (with) small change in front of a Tusker and no one who climbed on a baobab like Ciccio Ingrassia to shout "I want a womanaaa".
Yes, if the Maestro had passed through Malindi in those years, he would have been even more convinced than he has always been, that by observing and describing any Italian reality, anywhere in the world, in an uncritical, apolitical, passionate and somewhat adolescent way, as in dreams, human beings are told, and one understands how tragicomic but also poetic life is, if one can accept its thousand paradoxes and chilling truths, to finally grasp every aspect with lightness.
So was Fellini, so was the Italian Malindi, whose legend even today, if you stretch your ears to the sea, your eyes to the sky and your imagination to Nature, you can hear the Voice of the Moon whispering over the Indian Ocean.