After all kinds of difficulties, we take the initiative. With the marshrutka let's go to Yasenavataia, the town close to the front line. No one would think of stopping a bus from babuskhe and commuters; with 25 rubles we pass all of them unscathed check point. An hour and a half between abandoned mines and cultivated gardens.
On the bus, gestures, looks and smiles are the key to a surreal speech. Sometimes it is needed, sometimes less: as soon as we arrive, instead of accompanying us to the Doma Administrazia they deliver us to three soldiers with Kalashnikov ...
After checking the documents, they accompany us to the town hall: greetings, smiles, incredulous looks ... dressed as Santa Claus we would have aroused less surprise.
In Yasenavataia he takes only phoenix, the DNR telephone company. We are given the password to access the wi fi of the structure. After a while the English teacher of the city who acts as interpreter arrives.
We are ushered into the mayor's room; sturdy build, look that does not allow replicas and a tattoo on the forearm. He takes a 9-gauge out of the drawer and scarrella… It's a concise way of explaining that the Donbass is at war.
The mayor is actually a quiet man who wants to take the opportunity to give Yasenavataia the right international prominence. Here, it's just us.
After 5 minutes we have a car with driver and an English teacher as interpreter.
It goes around the town, a significant railway junction, land of car and mining factories.
Bombed houses and lost looks of people who have lost everything. It is a constant refrain.
Entering these gutted houses is like opening the drawer of someone else's memories. It creates embarrassment and at the same time stimulates the imagination: floral wallpapers, trinkets on furniture still standing ... everything smells of memory. The rubble smells of horror and these dignified women have in their eyes the bewilderment of those who do not understand. Yelena, our interpreter, translates with tears in her eyes. 
A living room, a bedroom with a calendar still in 2014 and a kitchen: inside there is a child who in the morning light looks like a young Saint Sebastian. Mom is drying the linden flowers used for herbal teas.
Let's go back to the mayor: who proposes, filtered by Yelena's incredulous eyes, to go to Spartak, on the front line.
We must run because the evening is upon us and with it the bombs. Many, many bombs ... And with them fear, just as much fear ...
The mayor gets on his X3 us on the driver's Volga ...
Convoy of war, with the night looming and not a minute to lose ...
We arrive: in front of us the sculpture with the name of the city now buried by the vegetation recalls an indigenous totem placed at the entrance of a village in the jungle.
The heart beats; legs wobble; the shots echo ... It's not a movie, it's war. We are in a real war in the heart of Europe. A live horror omitted by Western media.
We move among the desolate and desolate avenues: acrid smell of gunpowder, high-pitched sounds of near and distant gusts. A militiaman on a bicycle crosses us: it's all surreal.
It leads us to the house: porch with vine, barking dog, smashed windows covered with sandbags, kalashnikovs resting on the walls.
It was a small Dacia turned into a military barrack.
The commander begins to talk to the mayor: a few words in the Slavic manner and then the response: we stay for the night.
let's take a glaciers, a tea, a sign of Slavic hospitality.
The station commander explains the rules to us:
- nothing is photographed that can reveal the position
- in the evening no outdoor lights
- you go out only accompanied
- at the first tree you remain there until further notice
He shows us the bunker: on the right a staircase leads to a basement protected by a reinforced concrete floor. 
Inside humidity, smell of mold, mosquitoes, cots, seats of Lada uprooted and transformed into sofas, pickles and canned food ...
Out of that unhealthy place the smell of gunpowder that lingers everywhere is almost balsamic.
Two boys from the battalion take a ball and begin to dribble in the avenue.
A look of understanding between us and is already a match: Italy-New Russia ... On the hard asphalt ends 5-2 for us.
One of them offers us one russian shower to remove sweat and fatigue.
The water taken from a well and poured with a bucket on the head is pure Siberian ice.
The time for dinner arrives.
The soldiers are precise, tidy, clean and meticulous, every gesture is necessary ... There is no trace of the Brancaleone army of the early days: these are real soldiers.
Let's have lunch kasha, like yesterday, like tomorrow, as always. Only the seasoning changes.
After dinner, four of them retire to a corner and start playing dorac, traditional Russian card game while commander Yuri entertains us.
A notebook, a pen, some easy words of English and a great desire to communicate do the rest.
Time passes slowly marked by the ticking of a Snoopy clock hanging on the wall, a tender legacy of the old hosts.
In the background, as darkness falls, the battle rages in the face of those who have turned away.
The artillery roars, heavy machine guns repeat their monotonous refrain.
And then in the distance, a double is almost imperceptible pum pum.... We chat, on the side we play, inside we sleep.
And then two quick whistles like a swooping raptor; screeching like nails on the blackboard; violent like a superfast train hurled full force on a concrete wall.
The heads get up, time stops, the brain reacts ... Down the belly despite the camera hanging over his chest, despite the concrete floor, although there was no time to understand.
A whistle of three seconds and then a roar, a dazzling flash and finally a rain of debris everywhere.
And then to follow a second, stronger more cruel closer ...
No time, the bunker, a run, the stairs ... No one has thought. A sort of collective intelligence has led us to the right place ... The light is blown, we are in the dark, we get disgusted ... We can count on it ... There are three that are still above.
One more whistle, one more roar, everything is shaking. The plaster falls from the attic like flour, the commander runs to the entrance and yells at the house where voices come from. Then again that damned whistle and again everyone on the ground ... The commander always near the entrance as if to be with his soldiers left in the house ... And then again those screams and again those screams from above.
In the bunker someone stops his ears, someone prays.
Two more whistles two more blasts ...
Death comes from heaven and looks for us ...
It is now clear that the emplacement has been located and someone a couple of kilometers away is simply fixing the shot.
Then ten seconds of truce a scream from the commander and three figures emerge from the darkness and launch into the bunker ...
They are dazed: they touch their heads, they squat in a fetal position. It's terrible.
One of them is in a state of shock: his name is Mahoy and it is the second time he has been bombarded a few steps from his post.
He turns his head around, he looks without seeing, he touches himself as if his body were not his ... the eyes of a child grown too fast are looking for emotions impossible at the moment ... Then still whistles and still barrels ... More and more distant less and less threatening, a sign that the danger goes away like a hurricane running elsewhere.
It's a good time to run inside, take helmets, flak jackets and blankets.
The night progresses and the temperature drops.
Mosquitoes give no respite, cigarette smoke is worse than tear gas.
The faces clear up.
That of Mahoy no ... He continues to hold his head and turn around without understanding. (He will be sent home after two days nda).
Seconds, minutes, hours pass ...
The background sounds are always the same, but the roars are now distant… The hurricane is gone. The commander goes out, we all go out. He smokes yet another cigarette. Impossible not to smoke at the front.
He sighs and then orders them to go home.
Damage is checked: two skipped windows, glass everywhere, sacks of fallen sand, crumbling plaster and cracks on the walls.
The commander tells us to lean on the beds but keeping our ears open. You sleep little, you sleep badly but eventually dawn comes.
Silence comes, good to understand what happened.
One senses it from the debris that covers the atrium, which was previously uncut and clean; from the gate where the fragments of torn asphalt can be seen; on the first crater twenty paces from the house; it is even better understood on the second crater perfectly in line with the previous one.
The baby is normal in size as many see it especially in Spartak ...
The second generates dismay ... Three meters wide and two meters wide has generated a shock wave that has literally uprooted the reinforced concrete wall in front.
The splinters are everywhere: in the ground, in the asphalt, on the walls and in the metal gates.
The first crater was generated from a piece of 122 mm; the second from a piece from 152 of the Ukrainian army.
A little farther on there is a second hut, half destroyed and half remaining standing.
In the standing half slept an officer who was miraculously unharmed. There is a hole in the ground with a City unexploded like an earthworm in freshly plowed land.
We return to the house.
Adrenaline is a powerful drug and what has passed seems to have left no trace except in the accelerated rhythm of the heart.
We insist on staying a second night. The commander tells us that the post is no longer safe because it is located. We insist and check it. It remains.
The 80% percent of the day runs slow, very slow. In fact it does not flow.
The clock of Snoopy ticks, the leaves of the walnut tree on the doorstep rustle, the pollen of the poplars hovers in the air like a strange summer snow.
The little dog appears at the door with a cub that peeps ... The violence of the war and their tenderness screech to the point of bringing down the tears.
In the evening, in turn, the soldiers begin the daily cleaning of their weapons ... The Kalashnikov freshman speaks for itself: 79, 84, 86 ... Those rifles know it a lot and now they ended up here, fighting a fratricidal war.
In the evening the nervousness decreases. Weapons, backpacks, bulletproof vests ... everything piles up in the bunker ... And then again supplies, pillows and blankets ... The worst is feared, even the breakthrough of the lines of the Ukrainian army, obviously not too far away.
As if by magic someone had started, the sounds of war start again. It is a death switch that passes by on a off and vice versa every evening, every day. The rhythm of death is constant, inflexible, tremendous.
Now we hear them too boom boom away. After a while you get together. Roars, lightning, debris. Everything becomes ordinarily familiar.
Hours pass in the bunker; flames are lit against mosquitoes, sometimes more annoying than grenades.
The commander asks if the cigarette smoke bothers. His hospitality and concern are embarrassing, especially in this context.
At 4 we enter the house and finally sleep on a bed. Sleep, as always, is one of the first victims of the war.
A military car passes at the 10; time to say goodbye and pick us up to take us back to Donetsk.
We let ourselves be left at the Shcherbakova park.
Dirty, smelly, we enter the green avenues crowded with Saturday people.
Someone takes a bath, someone dives from the bridge that crosses the pond, the brides take the usual photos, the couples walk hand in hand.
It's surreal and incredible.
A few hours earlier we were in the hell of an abandoned house and now we are in the splendor of a summer park sun on a day of celebration.
We meet the wonder of the people. Paradoxically we who come from the opulent hypocritical Europe seem alien.
There is a sort of fantastic door that connects two parallel universes: that of normality and that of madness. The abyss is around the corner: just pass by on a off and turn off the light. Every night, every day.
(photo: Giorgio Bianchi)
