Giacomo Gian-Giacomo’s boots were beautiful. Black leather polished boots. So polished they seemed newly painted. A tamer’s boots. Giacomo Gian-Giacomo had always wanted to become a tamer. A tamer of wild beasts. Since he was a child. But there weren’t wild beasts where he lived. Not even a cat. Instead, there were lots of flies. Of all sorts: housewives, vagabonds, horseflies, early-rising and nocturnal flies, sugar-eaters, pooh-eaters, silent, solitary, insolent and buzzing flies, troublemakers. Blowflies and midges, too. So Giacomo Gian-Giacomo became a fly tamer. A fly tamer must have great qualities. A twenty-twenty vision, for instance. Otherwise, how could he teach a gnat of Isabella grape to perform a triple somersault with one twist? And he must have a good memory too: flies are very touchy, you have to remember their name, one by one, and be careful not to mistake one for the other. Giacomo Gian-Giacomo called the first fly he trained by the name of Clara. His aunt’s name. And she actually looked like his aunt. Clara could zig-zag and vertically fly, fly on her back and dive better that anyone else. But above all, she was good at math. She could do sums, subtractions and multiplications. She had some problems with divisions, especially if they involved decimals. But, well, who hasn’t? After Clara, it was the turn of Romilda, then Pucci, Piera, Filomena, Dada, Gina and Carla. In Giacomo Gian-Giacomo’s team there was also a blowfly, a true scoundrel. He was green and his name was Tiberio. He was incredibly strong, and he could drag a sledge with 32 flies one on top of the other in the form of a pyramid all by himself. Unfortunately all the flies fell in love with him and, since flies in love only think about love, things at work went terribly wrong. Therefore, Giacomo Gian-Giacomo reluctantly had to replace the blowfly act with a team of chinese midges so brave that they would perform triple somersaults. One day, the monkeys stole the cookies box where Giacomo Gian-Giacomo kept his flies. The monkeys, hungry and curious by nature, opened the box hoping to pig out on cookies. But all they found was a handful of flies. Giacomo Gian-Giacomo’s heart was broken. For a long time he just kept on thinking about his beloved flies and couldn’t stop crying. He cried and cried until he ran out of tears. One day, it had just stopped raining when a fly perched on his left hand and started rubbing its legs. Giacomo Gian-Giacomo looked at it and smiled with tenderness. It was his first smile in a long time. In that moment a bright rainbow opened up in the sky like a silk fan.