I remember a place where I felt free, where there were no barriers or frontiers. Only the horizon, dressed as the Mediterranean or adorned with mountains, contained my movements. And the only clock that mattered was the sun, the beginning and end of the days of a rural society, always faithful to the laws of nature. Trust was a shared value, and peace a full and lasting state.

    In that place, every evening I went to contemplate the sea and only its sound was the protagonist of my ears. The motorbike rides, flooded with the scent of orange blossom, were a regular occurrence. In the course of the minutes, multiple musicians of all kinds offered a unique spectacle, in which the crackling of an engine from the 70s was joined by the song of cicadas and crickets, while palm trees and bushes completed the show with a dance under the breeze.

    Everything was natural, calm, wild, sincere, graceful… until one day the rhythm changed, values were inverted, trust disappeared even from families, peace was replaced by violence, and everything that had been respected until then was abandoned. Then came greed, then came the speculation of my landscape, the speculation even of those stones on which I used to sit every afternoon to contemplate the sea. The bulldozers arrived and began to evict every orange tree, every olive tree, every hedgehog, shrinking the vast orchard to an infertile land, wrapped in reinforced concrete and decorated with leafless trees.

    The substantives building, urbanisation and planning heralded progress and prosperity. Translated into an infinite number of flat blocks arranged like dominoes, they would rise higher and higher so as not to miss the only spectacle we had left: the horizon dressed as the Mediterranean.

 

    Despite this, the waves are still washing ashore, families are ageing, and the newcomers did not yet know this story.  

 

 

                                                                             xxx. September 2013.