After 191 consecutive texts, I’ve earned the right to pull a cheap trick and write one titled Mondoli, where I share with you twenty years of reflections around Mondoli, a made-up word.
Or is it made-up?
Close enough
Last week I was walking around Paris 1eme Arrondissement when I and saw this, a miniature street on the northernmost corner of the Jardin des Tuileries.
I took a picture, and Vivi told me:
Almost!
It turns out the street was named after the Battle of Mondovi, a skirmish between the French army of Napoleon Bonaparte and the army of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont led by Michelangelo Alessandro Colli-Marchi. Napoleon won, btw.
There’s a mid painting that describes the battle:
The battle has this name because it took place outside the Italian town of Mondovi in the Piedmont area. There’s also a Mondovi in Wisconsin, a thirty-minute drive south from Eau Claire.
I know, Mondovi is not quite Mondoli.
So, is nothing named Mondoli apart from this blog? Not exactly!
Exactly the same
In 2009 I published this post in the original Mondoli blog, basically a picture I took from Google Earth showing an inhabited place in Central African Republic… that seems to have disappeared from the world in 2025.
While thinking about this post, I spent a couple of minutes looking for other uses of Mondoli around the world.
According to both Perplexity and ChatGPT, there are only two Mondolis in the world:
One. This kind of cool café in Chengdu, Sichuan, China:
Two. The Substack newsletter you’re reading right now, a continuation of the first Mondoli blog hosted in blogger.com from 2005 to 2012.
And what is Mondoli?
Here’s a text I wrote about that first blog in 2009 where I tried to explain why I maintained Mondoli alive:
mondoli. n. A place where the inner universe of a Mexican living in the city of San Pedro, NL, unfolds. It generally refers to the blog of the same name, compiled by said author over several years and later abandoned due to a lack of professionalism and an overload of excuses, mental blocks, and self-imposed barriers.
In Regiomontano mythology, the mondoli blog—or simply mondoli—is said to eventually resume with the same consistency and magnanimity as in the past, for it is known that mondoli is an organism with a life of its own, and as such, it goes through cycles of active life and absolute hibernation, languishing for months like a sad existentialist in a deep slumber.
That’s why everyone knows mondoli will one day rise again, stronger than ever.
In mondoli, the average reader finds an endless, uninterrupted narration of the inner universe that is created by and also creates the writer.
Everything in mondoli smells like its administrator. And through his own words and ideas, any reader of thirty or forty posts might say, “If I were to sit down and talk with him, I could probably guess his answers—or at least his expressions, or even predict his laughs or his jokes.”
Because the Mexican we’re talking about knows very well that blogging is something dangerous, and perhaps even a violation of his own right to privacy and self-respect.
But by doing it freely and boldly, he accepts the consequences—and the goodwill of the generous and thoughtful reader, who has no intention of harming the creator of mondoli, not even the slightest desire to offend the administrator and writer.
That’s why the creator of mondoli could not care less if some random guy stumbles into the blog and dives into the depths of the posts left behind—because he knows that even if the answers to the knots in the writer’s mind seem to be there, mondoli himself is built and expresses his inner dynamism in a much richer and more complex way in real life than this text suggests.
Through mondoli, we access the most vivid—yet also thoroughly incomplete—showcase the creator has built in his short but ever-changing life. (Because how awful it would be to communicate so perfectly that one might lose oneself and float away in the concavity of servile existence.)
The definition of mondoli would need to be far more extensive to even give the average reader a glimpse of the administrator’s soul in his quest for selfhood—not just as a mere Platonic and cave-like reflection that any cyberspace wanderer might sketch after reading thirty or forty entries of this blog we have—and he has—named mondoli.
So, according to me sixteen years ago, Mondoli is where I paint self-portraits, a place to let my train(s) of thought run free. I’ve also used the word as a synonym for me, like in this post.
Where is Mondoli going? Is it going to take me somewhere? I’m not sure.
I’m not sure I’ll continue writing here after this year ends. The burden of doing it is big and the outcome is mixed. The expected value is high but many days I neither deliver nor have fun doing it.
Still, something tells me that Mondoli will be around for whatever time I have left.
Let’s see what happens!
#day192