Chewing gum, precisely known as American gum, was introduced in Italy with jeans, nylon stockings, and the boggie-woogie of American soldiers during the liberation. Its association with a feeling of euphoria, redolent of change and freespirited youth, somehow progresses in subsequent decades. Even for people like Maurice who was born in the sixties, chewing gum grips through the maze of the mind linked with childhood and adolescence, and a light pressure of a future still to be built and dreamt and the slaughterhouse of personal and collective memories of the past which is gone, no one knows where when and with whom.
