Description of a person

A German homeless in Verona
Homeless individuals are often drawn as inhuman beings living on the road, at the borderline of civil society, with nothing to do all day long. This idea can bedemolished by an example of a homeless man, Alexander, who lives in a public place, called “Giardino Pradaval”, in Verona, Italy.
This man looks filthy, as regards his skin and his clothes, because of theimpossibility to have a real house, and consequentially, to take a shower. His white t-shirt has been patched as many times as the people passing by him have wondered why he lives as an homeless.Moreover, his body is very thin and gaunt due to dehydration and undernourishment. He is barefooted.
His face looks disfigured by a burn or patch of a skin cancer. None of these scars are old. Police whosee him might think about drug battles or problems with the benches on which he could sleep. The first impression leads to a German man, not only for his blue eyes and long, blond hair usually wornloose, but also for his pronunciation of some words, especially when he thanks people for their help.
He frequently stations himself next to the main door of the church near “his” garden, where he begsfor cash but he doesn’t accept only money, as many homeless people do. He also accepts food or drinks. A poster that says, “Please help me, coins may not be important for you but for me they are”,lies across his knees.
Sometimes he is available for odd jobs, such as helping the owner of the food kiosk in the Pradaval garden to keep the pavement clean of the trash that tourists and residentsleave.
As regards his personality, he looks like a nice and polite man, a person worth observing or even knowing personally because of his good manners and his willingness to help clean to try to earnsome money and some respectability, in a word, dignity.
He is always in the garden, but occasionally, he moves to other place: Bra’s square, the very center of the city, where the Arena attracts...