Funny chocolates cause scandal in Bologna

Bologna has rightly the reputation of being a very progressive and tolerant city, but occasionally something comes out and starts a scandal.

That is what happened, day before yesterday, in the main city square. There was the annual chocolate fair that brings chocolate makers and people who love eating chocolates from all over Italy to Bologna for three days. It is a unique opportunity to taste special handmade chocolates in special tastes that you can't find in shops and superstores selling packaged factory made chocolates.

Among the different chocolate makers was also "Rocco-cicco chocolate company" from a small city called Cento near Bologna. Cristina Merlin the chocolate maker along with her pastry maker husband likes making funny shaped chocolates, among which a special version of penis shaped chocolates called Rocco, named after the Italian porno star Rocco Siffredi. Cristina claimed that those chocolates are modelled after the real penis specimen of the pornostar though they are reduced in dimensions.

Walking through the shops in the chocolate fair, I noticed the crowd in front of Cristina's Roccociocco shop. She had a much bigger varieties of chocolates compared to the other shops, with specialities like chocolate covered cheese in different colours, Bugs-bunny shaped chocolates, etc. However, the most popular product of her shop were those penis shaped chocolates costing 10 Euro each. Couples wanted to get photographed in front of them, girls were holding them in front to get their pictures taken, giggling and laughing all the time. It seemed like innocent fun.

May be if I was new to Bologna, I would have got scandalised, but with the Neptune statue right in the middle of the Bologna city square showing off the family jewels unashamedly and the story they tell about the prudish churchmen of sixteenth century wanting to cover it but citizens of Bologna voted to keep it that way, open and nude, perhaps I have also got used to similar sights.

Plus, in Italy, it is common to find penis shaped pasta, that is sometimes gifted for marriages & birthdays to the future brides and grooms. So I thought making chocolate in that shape was a nice commerical idea, also took a picture, moved ahead and forgot about it (Try to spot those penis shaped chocolates in the image below).

Next day morning when I read in the newspaper that one of our municipal council members, one Ms. Santandrea, had been to the fair, and had found those chocolates to be offensive and thus police was called, Cristina Merlin was asked to pay a fine of some 200 Euros and to remove those "penis chocolates" from her shop. As expected this has awakened some Bologna citizens who say that the chocolates are innocent and the council member is a hypocrite. Predictably, the church representatives have welcomed the "end to the depravity".

So if you want to have a chocolate copy of the Rocco Siffredi's mighty penis, you must now go to the city of Cento to Cristina's shop called Omar, because it will no longer be available in the chocolate fair in Bologna!

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Who Should Pay For Climate Change

Mayor's office from Bologna had sent me an invitation explaining that mayors from Indian city of Guntur and Philippines' province of Bahol were coming to Bologna as jury members for an ecological project. It seems that Bologna, with some funding from European Union and in collaboration with a Swedish city, was promoting this project for the improvement of environment and ecological sustainability and it had started with the two pilot projects in India and Philippines.

These days when they speak of global warming and climate change, often they end up by saying that enormous growth in India and China is going to put additional pressure on the climate and that the developing world should look for some alternate paradigm of growth. I find that extremely hypocritical.

The other day I was reading that USA alone consumes hundreds of time more energy than all of Africa and if China and India continue to grow the way they are, by 2020 they will be consuming 20% of the USA energy level. So it is not about reducing India or China's energy use, it is about reducing their own energy use if they are serious about climate change and global warming. In the end every drop counts, but isn't it a little shameless to not to look at oceans and focus only on drops?

European energy consumption is not at the American level but it is probably not too much far behind. How much success have they achieved in reducing their own energy consumption?

I feel that in USA and in Europe, the trend is towards more efficient use of energy, less polluting ways of using energy and there is no attempt to change the general paradigm of living that is based on intensive use of earth's resources. Almost everything, from cars to computers, are going towards "use it and throw it" kind of mentality. So how can they preach to developing world about what others should do?

 

If the developed world is really keen on reducing pollution in the developing world, they should be willing to waive copyrights and protectionist measures to share ideas, efficient technologies with the developing world, and not allow their own multinationals to shift their polluting businesses in developing world without proper technology improvements.

In Bologna itself, there is lot of pontificating about using bicycle and public transport and not using cars, but in reality the city does everything to discourage people from using bicycles and promotes use of cars. In my opinion, as someone who goes regularly to work on bicycle, in the last ten years the number of bicycle users in the city has decreased and number of cars has increased many folds.

I had all these thoughts in my head when I went to this meeting. Fortunately they did not give any hypocritical speeches about climate change and global warming. The emphasis was very much on ecology for improving the lives of people who live in our cities, about improving water supply, solid waste management, traffic, greenery, etc.
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Mr Kanna Nagaraju, mayor of Guntur was there with his wife, Kirti. Nagaraju a BTech in mechanical engineering was in real estate business when he entered politics 2 years ago and at 25 became one of the youngest mayors of India (or may be in the world?). Kirti is also a BTech, is still studying, doing MBA and the couple do not yet have a child.

Nagaraju's was not a very fluent or coherent speaker but his presentation was good. He presented some big successes in Guntur after this project - they are now testing water supply for pollution and making sure that people get drinkable and pollution free water. He told that they are almost near to achieve 24x7 uninterrupted water supply, and they have a new system of solid waste collection from the house holds that is separated for recycling. He also said that Guntur is now a garbage free city, they are managing traffic better, building more parks and planting greenery, etc.

Is this change real or is it just a big political speech-giving by exaggerating whatever little has been done, this only the persons from Guntur can tell. I hope some bloggers from Guntur will send comments.

The images in this post are from this meeting.

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Festival of lights

Today in India, it is Deewali, the festival of lights. I can imagine the crowded and noisy markets, the hustle and bustle, the packets of sweets and the millions of lamps and candles that lit the moonless night. I think of the lines from the Buddhist prayer in Sanskrit, "Tamso ma jyotirgamay", "take me from the darkness to the light".

My best wishes for all of you - let there be light in your homes, in your families, in your hearts.

Far away from home, it is just another day here in Europe, though we do plan to go out for dinner in a place that is going to have a Bharatnatyam recital. And tomorrow evening, we are going to have a show of gypsy dancers from Rajasthan. And there won't be all the noise and the pollution from millions of fire crackers!

That is how we try to console ourselves!!

I took the pictures of candles below in Li Jiang in Yunnan province in China recently, that for me do express the spirit of Deewali.

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John Grisham's New Book's Italian Connection

John Grisham, it seems, loves Bologna. His driver in Bologna, Luca Patuelli says that perhaps he (Luca) has inspired the new book being written by Grisham. This is according to our local newspaper called "Bologna".

Actually Grisham had already based his last book, The Broker, in Bologna. As a  recognition of his service to the tourism of the city, University of Bologna had invited him for a high profile thanks-giving in September 2005. To write "The Broker", Grisham had come to stay in Bologna for some time, for going around and checking all the details for his book.

Luca says, "He is a real nice person, does not give himself any airs."

About the insipration for Grisham's new book "Playing for Pizza" (According to Luca; personally to me this title sounds just like a pizza and a joke) that should come out in November, Luca says, "I don't know if I can say that I inspired it. However, Grisham did ask me how did I speak English so well and I told him that I was a player at the American football centre." Infact, Luca had played with Bologna Warriors first and then with Phoenix San Lazzaro. Grisham was amazed when he heard that there was American Football in Italy?

So they say that Luca took him to the tiny town of Scandiano to watch the Italian Superbowl 2007 between Lions Bergamo and Panthers Parma. However, Luca denies it, "No, that is not true. I couldn't take him to any match because at that time the season was already over."

The hero of "Playing for Pizza" is a player of the American national league, who is forced to leave USA and who accepts to play for Parma Panthers.
 

Note: The pictures of John Grisham in this post are from his visit to Bologna University in 2005.

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Arundhati Roy’s speech at Ferrara

Italian weekly magazine Internazionale had organised three days of meetings with journalists and writers from different countries. I had written about this experiences a couple of days ago in under "Word Worlds". This time I am going to write a little more in detail, especially about what Ms. Roy said.

Arundhati Roy spoke in the round table discussion on "Literature, A world of stories: narrative and journalism" on Saturday 6 October. 2007. Other speakers at this round table were Efraim Medina Reyes (Colombia), Elif Shafak (Turkey) and Laila Lalami (Marocco) while the round table was coordinated by Italian journalist Goffredo Fofi.

Efraim, Laila and Elif spoke before Arundhati. Laila explained how American publishing houses have put her in the category of Muslim women writer from middle east and thus they expect her to write about how bad are the things for Muslim women in the middle east and they insist on putting pictures of veiled women, desert and camels on the covers of her books. (In the picture from left: Efraim, Elif, Laila, Arundhati and Goffredo).

Elif also took this theme forward by saying that islamophobia in the western world means that their identities as writers are shaped very much by these perceptions of being a Muslim and being a woman. Explaining her own growing up in different countries and continents, she said that people ask her about her roots and she feels that her roots are up in the air, that she is an upside-down tree. She concluded by reiterating her need for deciding her own themes and not to be dictated by expectations of others, “If I wish to write about a Norwegian homosexual or anything else, I will do so, to be writer does not mean that I have to restrict myself only to write on lives of Turkish women.”

Now, we come to Arundhati’s speech, but before that just a little introduction. I have long been an admirer of Ms. Roy. When I first borrowed God of the Small Things from the library in Bologna, it had already become famous as the Booker award winner. Still I couldn’t go through it. After an initial fifty pages I had given it back, unread. I had thought that her language was wonderful but that it was just too slow for me.

Finally my sister convinced me to give that book another try and I found that it was indeed true. If you stick to that book just a little bit longer, it does grip you.

About the other writings of Arundhati, I liked them as well even if sometimes I felt that she was a little bit too shrill, and sometimes she made me little uneasy - I am not convinced by her defense of violent people who believe in some ideologies like the maoists, islamists and the stalinists. Finally about some of her recent articles, like the one on the judiciary in India that came out in Outlook about 10 days ago, I could not finish reading, because I felt that she is so busy proving her point with relentless precision that her writing has become tedious to read.

A couple of years ago, I had met her on the stairs of the business lounge at the Delhi airport. I was going down to my flight and she had just arrived. “Excuse me, are you Arundhati Roy?” I had asked her on the stairs and when she had nodded, I had asked to shake her hand and ask her for a quick picture. She had said yes and after the picture, I had run off to catch my flight.

Only when I was down in the queue for getting in the flight, I had remembered the guy with her and my rudeness - I had not even looked at him, nor said a hello to him or to ask him to be in the picture! I am sure that it must be terrible to have a famous husband or wife, so that people just ignore you, or worst, they push you away while they talk to the famous spouse. I regretted this rudeness even more after a couple of years when I found out that the guy, Pradeep Krishen had written a lovely book about trees. I love trees as well, I love learning about them and talking about them.

Ok, now to come to the speech of Ms. Roy. Here are the main points of what she said:

“I understand this feeling of being .. I have a joke about it, when I read these books, I say, here is another book by CMM. CMM stands for Corporatised Moderate Muslim, it is what makes the west feel good in its interaction with the Islamic world.

I am not so sure about the space between fiction and the other kind of my writing, but none of my writing fiction or non fiction is something that comes out as a policy decision. When I had written God of the Small Things it was in 1997 and then came the booker, that was a period when we were beginning a journey in India, the Hindu nationalist right wing had come in the Government, in 1998 there was the nuclear test that was celebrated with a kind of sexual orgy of pride … at that time I was the darling of the middle classes, that I had made India proud. I saw that I had a platform, a space to raise a voice of dissent. I knew that to say something will be political, without being political I can’t say anything still to allow them to go on was something terrible for me and so I write “End of Imagination”, it was my dissent. Then suddenly we came to a world where there was so much horror… there was the Supreme court judgement about Narmada river, I travelled and saw the level of displacement and destruction that would happen. I felt that it was a story that needed a writer. There were other reports, facts and figures but how they were said did not allow for any common understanding so it was important to say this story in a way that people can understand the extent of horror..

One thing then led to another.. corporatisation, globalisation were coming in. I could see that it is going to unleash a level of violence in India that would require a battle in which writers, film makers, artists had a role to play, to fashion the elements and to explain them to people. When we were fighting for independence we did not need to explain it to people, they understood it clearly and easily. There was this coloniser and he was the bad guy. We were fighting against them. But today what is happening, how can you fight a battle when you don’t know who the enemy is? How can you fight shadows?

That is how I began into that other kind of writing.

All of us have written many times about the role of corporatisation in the media and the impact this is having on journalism but I don’t think I need to go into that with this audience. But I feel that the same thing is happening also with literature. There are huge book store chains that are deciding what kind of books will sell and they are then telling the publishing houses about the kind of books they want, what kind of covers these books should have.

When I am invited to a place, to a meeting like this I feel that I have been invited to tell you about how terrible things are in India. They are terrible but let me tell you that we never had a prime minister who owned all the media and all the book stores.. (like you had here).

When I am put into jail, my body is picked and put into the jail and I know that I am in jail but sometimes there are mind prisons also where imagination has been captured and colonised. Everything you wear is decided by some designer one season earlier. You walk past a shop window and you say ‘what a nice colour’ but the script for this choice was already written and planned in the last season, what you will think of a nice colour was decided and scripted earlier.

Along with corporatisation of media, there is corporatisation of literature as well.

There was two things that we need to talk about. One is language and the other is knowledge.
 

When I finished God of Small Things, I will tell this anecdote, I was on a review programme on the BBC and there were these two other persons, two British historians, on the programme with me. I hadn’t really spent much time in the west before, so I was there listening to these two men, and I couldn’t speak much because these two men were literally justifying the British Empire and I was like…even the right wing in India does not do that and they were justifying colonialism. I felt like I was a Martian come from outer space listening to them and they were saying that British culture was the defining culture of the world, Shakespeare and all. I was new to these things, I hadn’t had much interaction in such debates and they had accents.. so I didn’t know how to deal with it and I didn’t say anything. And then one of them said about me that because your book is written in English that is also a tribute to the British empire. So I said look that is like telling to children of raped parents that they are a tribute to the brutality of their fathers.

When I was growing up, I grew up where we speak Malyalam but I was forced to speak English by my own mother. I had to write ‘I will speak in English, I will speak in English..” a thousand times if I was caught speaking Malyalam by my mother. She said that this is the language that is going to get you where ever you are going to get.

So I said to that person, look it is not my tragedy is not that I hate English, I love the language but I am going to use it against you where ever I can .. and this person was almost crying, he said that he had said it as a compliment. I said that that is the trouble, you crushed a whole civilisation and did not even hear the crunch, did not hear the sound of its breaking.

Language … like in India we have 18 languages and 3000 dialects. For a persons like me,.. my father is a Bengali and my mother is from south, from east Malyalam. I was born in Assam and I speak Assamese. I studied in Tamilnadu and I speak Tamil. My first husband was from Goa and I learned to speak some Konkani, and now Punjabi and so on. So what is my language? What do we mean when we are talking about language of the empires. If I write in Hindi, it will be language of the upper castes, the language of Aryans who came and conquered the indigenous people who were there. So the way I look at it is to to see what do I say in that language. What do you say in it, how do you use the language. After all a writer should not be used by the language,.. uses language. If we are talking about empires and oppression then we can go back a long way and I don’t think that we can get to the end of that journey.

The other thing I want to talk about briefly is knowledge. Today the major form of capitalism is knowledge, accumulation of knowledge is capitalism. It is what the World Bank trades in. It employs the maximum number of people to do the manipulation of knowledge, that is its real talent. Accumulation of knowledge is capitalism and it is used to oppress people.

A few years ago I had been talking about globalisation of dissent, I was talking of globalisation of resistance… I was writing with facts, figures, equipped with every kind of argument. I thought that arguments, arguing well and pushing them in a manhole (??) arguing about gender, about globalisation .. but now I have also listened to the ground, I have travelled, I have travelled to those places where resistance is taking place and I have started to feel exactly the opposite. I feel that we have been burdened by so much information that we have weakened people by all the knowledge that we want to accumulate. If we look at a resistance movement in India that had all the knowledge, that had all the arguments, that had the support all kinds of international NGOs and movements, that had the publicity and notice two things – persons are saying that I don’t want your arguments, I don’t want your publicity and media, I don’t want to go to international conferences and making projects.. I am just going to stop you from coming in here, I will die before I let you inside this space.. and some of them were able to defeat them .. I am not saying that people should go back to being local and insulated once again, but what I feel that accumulation of knowledge that ends up in NGOs and Social Forums .. every institution that we have created has been taken over by them. We need to think about being guerrilla fighters on the subject of knowledge. We need to know that even knowledge can detract.

I certainly feel that as a writer of fiction who has started to write non fiction – though some critics say that my non fiction is also fiction, but that’s another things – but I feel that I don’t need to put it all right, to argue it right, to prove the case. I feel that can also become a prison and there are other ways of fighting. Thank you.”

This transcript is from my ipod, but I was not sitting very close to the loudspeaker and there were sounds of other people sitting around me and lot of applause in between, so I missed bits and pieces of her speech. As you can see, she did talk about being too obsessed with facts, figures and all the possible arguments to prove her point and that she has decided that this way of writing can be a prison as well. I look forward to reading something more concise and less tedious from her.

There was another shorter speech from her as an answer to some questions, that I still need to transcribe. In this speech she mentioned that she was "not writing non fiction right now", that can be interpreted to mean that she is writing fiction. That is certainly another good news.

In terms of her arguments about the language, I agree that in the language issue, it is perhaps more important what you say than the language you say it in. If she spoke in Kannada or Malyalam, probably I will not even know about her. Yet, there is another dimension of English versus other languages debates that is linked to power-hierarchy. English is the language of people whose voices are heard, who are articulate, and who have the power. If Ms. Roy was not speaking in English, no one would have invited her to speak. It is true that a rare Mahashweta Devi can sometimes get invited to speak in an international meeting but compared to writers writing in English, persons like Mahashweata Devi are virtually unknown not just outside India, but even to majority of persons in India itself.

After reading her writings, I had somehow the expectation of very precise way of speaking, and I was a little surprised by her hesitancy, by her search for words, by parts that were obviously heavy with emotions. But it was a wonderful experience. And listening to all the applause to her words, made me swell my chest with "she is a fellow-indian" kind of pride that made me feel a little ashamed.

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(Edited & updated in 2013)

Word worlds

I had planned this weekend three months ago, when I had first heard about programme of "Internazionale" conference in Ferrara. Internazionale is a strange magazine from Italian standards. Most Italian newspapers and magazines are very introverted, in the sense, their main focus is on gazing at their own belly buttons.

 

 

At the most they look towards USA and to a lesser degree towards, some of the European neighbours. Rest of the world does not exist except as a stereotype or in times of disasters. Internazionale publishes only translated articles from around the world, and not just from English language magazines and these days, it is the only magazine that I now try to read regularly, except for Hans (in Hindi).

They had announced this weekend of round-tables, meetings and debates with many of the well known journalists and writers that appear regularly in the pages of the magazine. I had made elaborate plans that started with daily train journeys to Ferrara and listening to the worlds of some of the authors that I like to read, from morning till late evenings.

Let me start by the last discussion of yesterday evening that is still relatively fresh in mind.

The theme of the discussion was the space between narrative and reporting of what is happening around the writers when they write. The question posed was, is your fiction all immagination even if you are surrounded by bombs, injustice, poverty and all those other things that ask for denouncement? The participants were Arundhati Roy from India, Efraim Medina Reys from Colombia, Elif Shafak from Turkey and Laila Lalami from Morocco. It was moderated by a too verbose Goffredo Fofi (picture below).

After reading many of her writings, I had imagined Arundhati Roy as a person, but the real Arundhati was very different from that imagination. I am sure that if I transcribe her speech (which I can, since I recorded her speech on my Ipod, but right now I can't as I have too many other things to do) it would sound like all other speeches, full of anguish and poetry. Yet, listening to her was different because it also had rawness of emotions and occasional groping for the words, that is missing from her written articles.

Among other things she spoke about the meaning of writing in English for her. She also spoke briefly about Kashmir and Maoists and Narmada river in India. Some bits of her speech, like talking of Indian military in Kashmir as an occupation force, made me a little uncomfortable, even if I agree that stories of what is happening in Kashmir have not been sufficiently told in India. However, I have been to a huge number of countries, and I do not believe in the so-called "freedom struggles" of violent repressive groups powered by their ideologies, such as Maoists, islamists and stalinists. She seemed very coherent but also naive about them. Her contention that knowledge/information, too much of it, may be stopping us from facing the issues, was intriguing, but then many of the issues that she touched upon require a lot more depth and understanding. (I have transcribed her speech in a separate blog-post which you can read).

 
Elif Shafak spoke about her moving from a country to another, about her roots up in the air and about the need to write to escape from the boring reality of every day life.

 

Laila Lalami told about the straight-jacket of being seen as a "Muslim women writer" and stereotypes about what non-western writers can write. Arundhati called it co-operated moderate Muslim, but I don't think that she has ever been forced to live in a conservative islamist society.

Yesterday I also watched a documentary "Lest we forget" of Jason da Silva, about stories of Asians and Arabs in the aftermath of 9/11 in USA. Plain clothes men banging at the door, taking away the "suspicious looking Muslim who has been reported by a neighbour", wives and children in anxiety not knowing what is happening to their husbands and fathers, persons being deported after months of prisons without any news to their families, the film was like hammer blows about all those lives that are seen just as numbers or news-stories as long as they happen to others and that we justify so easily in terms of terrorism, law and order, security and nationhood.

 

The story of Berny from India, with a Canadian passport, held in Chicago airport because they felt that her passport was false and sending her back to India after cutting & cancelling her passport, was scary since it touched on the very roots of our own sense of security. Right now, we may feel "oh, it is something that affects those Muslims, I am a Hindu so this does not affect me..". I think that once the prejudice and racial things starts, it touches everyone and every thing.

Day before yesterday there were interesting discussions about Chavez and Lula, the two faces of the left in Latin America, discussing them were Mino Carta/Brazil, Cristina Marcano/Venezuela and Ugo Pipitone/Mexico. It reminded me of the time when Lula was still a union leader and I had met him in Cruzeiro do Sul in north-west of Brazil.

 

I also liked the discussions about blogs, internet and censorship in China by Pierre Haski and the Chinese dissident student leader, Cai Chongguo. And the discussions by the European correspondents of newspapers living in Rome about Italy and italians.

Today is the third and the last day of this initiative and there are some nice speakers planned for the day, but I am too tired to go. I guess that I am too old to stand for hours in queues, get pushed around with huge crowds and then listen to long debates, standing up... I will like to, but my body aches.

So I will wait for the next issue of Internazionale to read it all. It will be less fun but much more comfortable!

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 (Updated in 2013)

Body paints: Hiding the body?

Why did man decide to invent clothes? Did ancient man have a sense of shame about the human body so that certain parts were supposed to be hidden behind clothes? Probably not. Man had evolved in nature full of animals, birds, roaming around without any clothes, except for those given by the nature - the body hair of different animals that covered the body, changed colours according to the seasons.

Probably early humans evloving in the hot tropical climate of Africa, did not even need lot of body hair and thus clothes were probably invented much later, when Homo Sapiens moved towards colder climates in the north?

Another reason could be that the genitals are delicate parts of the body and evolution of human beings from being four-legged creatures like other animals to the upright walking two legged creatures, further exposed to these delicate body parts to possible injury. Thus human beings had to look for something to cover and protect these parts.

Whatever the reason, today clothes are considered necessary for human life, and when ever new tribal groups are discovered, they are taught about the need to cover themselves. Apart from the stray nudists who may rebel against this imposition of the society, we all tend to accept to cover ourselves to varying degrees. Most cultures allow men to wear lesser clothes than women.

Artists have always tried to critically look at the social costumes and question them through their art. One such artist who questions the need for wearing clothes is Joanne Gair. Gair has become famous for her body painting, where she paints the clothes over nude bodies, giving the illusion that the person is wearing clothes. Here is sample of the art by Joanne Gair.

About 10 or 15 years ago, an Indian actress, Pooja Bhatt, had also posed for a magazine cover wearing just body art and that had raised a scandal. I personally admire such persons who dare to provoke the society into questioning the seemingly unbreakable and rigid social costumes.

Here some of my pictures of body paints from the cultural events (mainly the Par Tot summer festival parade and the GLBTI pride parades) in Bologna (Italy) - (Note: images have been updated in 2013):

Did you like my collection of body-paint images? I hope that you will be inspired by these images and then use your imagination to come with new variations in body paint to give shape to your desires.

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